begin Matthew Johnson's quote: | Not to mention Gnome ripping off OS X with that dock. What does | amaze me is some newbies trying to act like old hands by using | Gnome, when in my experience the experienced people use KDE (or | some other window manager). well, look. kde has taken a lot of stuff from the ui design of windows. this makes some sense in that it's something that users who are new to linux will not find intimidating -- they might be a little more puzzled with, say, afterstep. so it's not really fair to accuse anybody of copying, because it's pretty universally done (unless you want to talk, say, the current enlightenment cvs tree). and it was rms who a few months ago remarked that looking to windows for a ui design was not something the gnomes should be doing, when the mac did a number of things far more elegantly. agree or not, it's a valid point of view. there are a lot of people who use kde, but there are also a lot of experienced people who use gnome -- for instance, those who have hardwired the emacs key bindings into their dna, which can be brought happily to gnome but not kde (yet; 3.1 is supposed to be far more configurable in this regard); also, those who made their decision for political reasons a long time ago. certainly, kde would not be as good as it is were there not gnome breathing down its neck. and gnome development would be different, and slower, were there no kde. competition is good. rehashing a battle that was all the rage two years ago, though, is probably just spinning the wheels. and in that there *are* people who have gnome, evolution, etc., running well on their machines, a problem getting it all to work properly on any one machine, group of machines, or with any particular distribution suggests that the problem might not necessarily be with gnome itself. my view is that a good part of it is due to everybody's disparate crackpot schemes for updating binaries, be it YOU, red hat network, or red carpet. such systems simply *must* make some assumptions that may or may not be accurate, but that are almost certainly not accurate if the user has tinkered at all with his installation. this is entirely separate from the issue of the quality of the applications or desktops being installed. -- dep http://www.linuxandmain.com -- outside the box, barely within the envelope, and no animated paperclip anywhere.