I've been working with 9.0 since the day it was released, trying to get
comfortable with it, but it has just never come together for me. I
wanted either a totally-GTK2 environment, or no GTK2 at all. If you
haven't noticed, SuSE's Gnome environment leaves something to be
desired, so I wind up running Evolution and Galeon under KDE. On the
other hand, I don't like how GTK2 apps behave under KDE. To get them to
look right, you need to run gnome-settings-deamon, and then it messes
with the KDE fonts. Bleh. I'm sure this will all get sorted someday, but
I'm tired of waiting. I tried James' ULB modifications, and that's great, but it only went so
far. For instance, I was still stuck with the Xscreensaver password bug.
So I went back to Ximian's Desktop 2.0 to see how it stacked up to 9.0
and 9.0 with ULB. Unfortunately, this required downgrading to 8.2.
However, I was ready to do that to get rid of GTK2 altogether. In the process of trying out XD2 on a spare laptop, I was reinstalling
my main machine with Windows XP. (Work. You know. Old Exchange servers
and non-Linux database app that I admin. Again, bleh. But I like the new
Outlook preview pane in Office 2K3... Anyway.) After I got it installed,
I noticed how much faster it drew the windows than SuSE 9.0. (I've got a
dual Athlon 1800+ with a GeForce4 4600 Ti, but it really shouldn't
matter because I'm comparing 2 OS's on the exact same hardware.) It was
light-years faster. Now, I knew that 9.0 had lost some speed over 8.2,
but I didn't realize that the Linux situation had gotten so far behind.
(And, yes, I am running the latest nVidia drivers under Windows AND
Linux.) When I got reinstalled with 8.2 and XD2 at home, though, I was amazed at
how much faster it is than 9.0. It feels almost as fast as Windows.
Here, I've got a dual 1200 with the same video card. The bottom line is
that XD2 is a much snappier Gnome environment than 9.0's. And the best
part? They've apparently fixed all the bugs I was being annoyed with.
Like the xscreensaver password bug. And you get the integration with
OOo. (I especially like the XD file dialog boxes. The standard Gnome
really, really needs this.) Anyway, anyway. I heartily recommend this now. I had given up on it for
various reasons, but it's solid stuff now. It's hard to install if you
try to mirror their site and do it like the old XD1 used to be, but
looks to be everything I came to expect from XD1 running on RH 7.3. Now
I'm even more excited about what Novell / Ximian / SuSE can do. No, I'm
not being paid. I'm just another raving fanboy. Regards all,
dk