Korean Job Discussion Forums

[keetrainchild]

I am basically wondering which Desktop Environments/Window Managers here use. My focus is on *nix, but to gain a sense of proportion, I've included Windows and Mac OS.

A long time has passed since I was first introduced to *nix, and in that time, I have encountered many graphical environments. Most Linux users know of the main two: KDE and Gnome. From what I've read, KDE is more popular, but it seems to me that Gnome is the default, at least in most of the distributions that I've tried. There are also some less common ones such as XFCE and LxDE, along with a whole host of others. As with many things, one can find a reasonable description and list of DE's on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_environment

When I first saw a Linux GUI, it was very minimalist. My first impress was that it was just several command lines in windows strewn about the desktop. Most people, of course, tend to go further than this, preferring to start a more featureful sort of Xsession. Currently, I use Gnome on my desktop computer and Fluxbox on my ultra high-speed laptop (PIII-600, 128MB RAM, 40GB GD). I've also used KDE 3.5 and 4.1.3, XFCE4, Openbox, LXDE and probably a few others.

The new KDE 4 looks quite polished and sleek, whereas the new Gnome 2.24 seems like a very incremental update, though it does have some interesting features and improvements 'under the hood'. XFCE4 is a sort of full-featured DE for people who don't have quite powerful enough systems to use Gnome or KDE. Even more minimalistic users will tend to use Fluxbox or Openbox. There is a wonderful simplicity to Fluxbox; its settings are easily altered through text files. If you want to edit a menu, just edit the menu file. Openbox is similar, though I find it in some ways a bit more awkward to configure than Fluxbox.

By the way, Windows and Aqua also qualify as Desktop Environments Technically, Fluxbox, Openbox, and others don't quite qualify; they are considered mere Window Managers because their fuction is to draw windows on the screen, not to provide full-featured suites of applications. I would quite possibly use Fluxbox on my desktop computer, but Avant Window Navigator (my preferred launcher/dock) doesn't quite work properly with it, so I use Gnome. On my laptop, I use fbpanel, a minimal taskbar.

So, what do you use, and why?