Recently, as I was setting up my new workstation, I was torn between the KDE vs GNOME desktop environment. Sure, I’ve used other WM’s over the years. I’ve always been a big fan of Window Maker, and although I’ve dabbled with XFCE and LXDE over the years, I always preferred the desktop environments.

I think back to when Gnome was still an infant and KDE 2 was by far the best Desktop Environment of the day (circa 1999 – 2002). No matter how many times in recent years I’ve tried to install KDE, and embrace it, something always shy’s me away. I’ve always been attracted to some of KDE’s application integration, such as  Kmail, Akkregator, and Konqueror.   Sure, the latest KDE 4.3.2 has some really nice features and built in effects… but, For the life of me, I can’t get Audio to work correctly. This has always been a recurring theme with KDE over the years… for some reason the sound system queues the sounds and causes delays on sound events. There comes a point when you just dont want to spend any more hours trying to troubleshoot and twak.

In comes Gnome 2.28.  I’ve been using Gnome steadily over the past 4 years, and have never had a major issue with it. This go round, my only complaint is with the GDM Login Manager. Somewhere along the line, GDM has been rewritten and many of the tweakable settings such as Themeable login greeter are missing, but easily fixed by installing and switching to “SLIM” login manager ‘pacman -S slim’ .

Well, goodbye KDE. Try you again around 5.x when you look less like Aero