I believe a lot of people are thinking of the GNOME/KDE situation in terms of which DE is easier to use, or more attractive, stable, installable, compatable, etc. If you are thinking in those terms, then you are missing the reason I am - and I suspect Mantel is - so upset about the appearant decision on the part of Novell to force SuSE to stop funding the KDE. The KDE is a community. It's a development team scattered all over the world. Sometimes the only common language the people working on a component speak well is C++. My contributions to the KDE are rather small, and mostly consist of bug reports and a few personality conflict resolutions. But those minor contributions represent thousands of hours of reading source code, playing with software, building from CVS/SVN, reading existing bug reports to find out if what I'm reporting is a known issue, learning C++, etc. I have never met a single KDE developer face-to-face, but I have been corresponding with them for years. I consider them to be my friends. Taking an axe to that community isn't just about messing with an outstanding software project, it's about hurting my friends. Steven