I still like the lighter weight WMs over either Gnome or KDE, though I understand their "out of the box" appeal. I used to use Openbox when I was running Gentoo back in the day and it was amazing. When I switched to Ubuntu it came with Gnome, and since I was already a lazy Linux user by then (which is why I left Gentoo in the first place), I left it at that. I ran Xubuntu and I absolutely loved how fast Xfce ran, but there were just enough little loose ends to make me switch back to Ubuntu after a couple weeks. I have a friend that did some amazing things with fvwm, but it seems like a lot of tweaking before you get it right. I ran KDE3 for a little while too, but I though it was too much like windows and it wasn't responsive enough for me.

I really hope KDE4 finds its bearing in 4.2 or some later release. The ideas behind it are pretty revolutionary, just too bad it was so poorly implemented. I had planned to try it out, but then I read so much bad press I figured I'd wait for a bit. One of these days I get back to Openbox/Fluxbox though, I swear it!

-Joe

Craig White wrote: 
On Sun, 2009-01-25 at 09:54 -0700, James Finstrom wrote:
  
I would say kde4 was the vista of kde. To many changes and to much
flair pushed on people with no real classic mode. I got kde4 working
90% the way I wanted but there were still some things that I would
look cross eyed at.

    
----
I believe that the saying goes...if you want to make an omelet, you have
to break some eggs

They had to move from QT3 to QT4 at some point. This definitely broke a
lot of code and they decided that KDE 4 had to be a complete re-write
from top to bottom. They decided to re-write the rules of a Desktop and
everything including the desktop itself is a Plasmoid.

I suspect that most of the negativity comes from two things...

- expectations and most of them are the habits acquired from years of
using GUI based systems and dropping files on the desktop. This is only
supported in a very crude way.

- early, often release...the only way to get bugs fixed is to get people
using it. KDE developers decided that the only way forward was to
concentrate solely on new development and abandoned the KDE-3 codebase
because updating it would severely drain their resources. This left
packagers on the various distro's with the choice of going with the new
KDE-4 or hanging on with KDE-3 with no new development.

Clearly the concept of release early and often is a mainstay of Linux in
general so yes, there is growing pain and it would have been smarter of
Linus not to turn it into a popularity contest because if anyone should
understand the concept of release early and often, it should be Linus.

Craig

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