The Linux Desktop: We've Arrived

This article is mostly right: we HAVE arrived. There's several different, very functional and attractive desktops out there in Linux-land for you to choose from, and they cater to totally different users, so you have choices.

The problem is that two of them are completely dumbed-down for tablet-type devices or newbies, and the mainstream distros refuse to abandon them even though the users are up in arms. The other problem is that the users refuse to check out the third primary desktop environment, which doesn't have this dumbing-down problem at all. It's called KDE.

Download a copy of Kubuntu, SUSE, or Linux Mint KDE Edition, and try it out before you whine any more about having features removed, or giant icons suitable for a touchscreen, or lack of support for dual displays, or lack of configurability.

> The other problem is that the users refuse to check out the third primary desktop environment...

Oh, I understand XFCE has been getting a lot of new users over the past few years. :)

>>>>>Oh, I understand XFCE has been getting a lot of new users over the past few years. :)

--And as soon as PCLinuxOS delivers its XFCE version, I am going to give this a so serious try, that my KDE4 desktop will get worried about its future :-)

Which will be.........in the next few days, as I am told it's on its way as we speak.

Quoting:Oh, I understand XFCE has been getting a lot of new users over the past few years. :)

Must have been a misunderstanding. :)

I would be wiling to bet that the release of Unity has done more to bring users to Xfce than anything else. The above quoted statement is probably more accurate by crossing out the word "years" and replacing it with "months". HeliOS is looking hard at Xfce just to hedge our bets. If the Mint team can deliver for their users as they have done in the past, Gnome 3 on Mint will look and act almost exactly like Gnome 2.32.

Again, we'll implement Xfce if all else fails.

What does XFCE offer that LXDE doesn't? I've used both over the last couple years and LXDE always seemed to be the more obvious choice of the two because it used less system resources.

~Jeff

> What does XFCE offer that LXDE doesn't?

XFCE gives you the option to load the Gnome and/or KDE services on startup, which makes it more compatible with Gnome or KDE, at the cost of being almost as resource intensive as either Gnome or KDE. It was, from what I've heard, both more feature rich and more stable than LXDE. The last time I checked as over a year ago though, and LXDE may have improved quite a bit since then.