On 04/24/2011 08:02 AM, Mike Coday wrote:
I imagine that this is hard to answer and quite subject to personal taste, but how about as a recommendation to folks who are new to linus and opensuse (like me)?
I am struggling a bit with the Gnome interface and I really would like to stay with linux this time, so is KDE easier to manage for the user trying to get away from Microsoft?
Hi Mike, I've been leading people to KDE for years and it's generally worked out. I progressed naturally into KDE myself from Sun Solaris and CDE when I started using SuSE 5.3. I've even set folks up with KDE 4.x without issue. Windows people seem to be comfortable with the "activities" way of doing things. Windows 7 resembles KDE 4.x in a number of ways. In my environment, signal processing and computational science, I can configure KDE in ways that I don't think I can in Gnome. Here are the big points: Multiple desktops (20), each with their own wallpaper. This is important when a researcher is processing signals from multiple sources and each source requires multiple windows and output screens. They can dance among the desktops and keep a sense of where they are with the unique wallpapers. Easily remapping of the caps lock key to an additional control key. (Kerrigan, Richie and God placed the control key to the left of the "A" key! Who were those IBM engineers to think they could remap control to caps-lock on the IBM AT keyboard?) Window placement behavior. I prefer "Focus Follows Mouse" and being able to type in a window without it being raised to the top. This allows you to overlap multiple windows just the way you want and to read from the one on top while entering into a sliver of one on the bottom. Focus raising windows and not being able to turn it off is probably the biggest sin of Microsoft Windows, IMHO. Granted you may be able to configure Gnone to do some of these things, but I tried a couple of times and couldn't find the magic. I know that Gnome won't do the 20-desktops with unique wallpapers thing by design. One of my very smart friends doesn't like either Gnome or KDE. Too much cruft. He uses FVWM-2 and Emacs. That's what the UNIX paradigm is all about: choice! Regards, Lew -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org