Perhaps I’m just being petty, but I’ve never liked Gnome. Maybe it’s the initial Mac-like layout or maybe it’s that hideous foot that befouls every corner of every widget and application built for it. (In case you hadn’t noticed, I despise the Gnome Desktop foot logo.) Then again, perhaps it’s the fact that Gnome doesn’t have any schemes as visually appealing as the Active Heart or Thin Keramic (or is it Keramic Thin?) from KDE 3.X That being said, I had always noticed that KDE had been a fairly large drain on resources compared to Gnome, but figured that was just the price you paid for visual beauty.

Being the KDE-phile that I am, I just had to install KDE 4 once it became available with my distribution of choice. (PCLinuxOS in case you’re wondering.) Part of my reason for waiting for it to come out on the distro rather than geeking out and installing it from source or trying to force external RPM’s into my system was two-fold. First, I’m lazy and didn’t want to do all that work. I was perfectly happy with the current version of KDE 3.5. Second, and more important, I knew if I waited until it came out on the distro, and even had a few version updates, that it would be stable with my version of Linux. I had tried doing something like that before and screwed up my system to the point of having to wipe and rebuild, not something I was looking forward to.

My first download of KDE 4 was actually version 4.3.1. I expected that it would have a slightly larger impact on system resources, but I didn’t really expect it to be significant. (Keep in mind I was running KDE 3.5 with Compiz Fusion turned on.) I downloaded it on my laptop first and visually, it kept up with the preloaded version of Vista nicely. The only downside I had was that my favorite button schemes were no longer compatible, and in their place were ugly flat Gnome-like buttons. I checked multiple schemes, and all looked like bad GTK or GTK+ themes. (Come on people? Where’s the visual interest of KDE that set it apart from the other desktops?) Oh well, what was done was done. I could live with it, and the rendering was better than KDE 3.5 with Compiz Fusion. I decided it was time for the real test. I downloaded it to my desktop machine. It’s a little older than my laptop, not as much memory, and not quite as fast, and it showed.

At first I didn’t notice any difference in quality of performance, but then I realized that none of the composting effects were occurring. Sure enough, when I opened up the settings, they had all defaulted to off. So I turned them on, and left them at the basic set-up, which is very Vista-like in behavior. I tried to change desktops. You would have thought I asked my machine to calculate Pi to one-million decimal places. Bringing up the system menu took as long as bringing up GIMP usually takes. If I can’t have all the nifty effects, I might as well go back to KDE 3.5 with Compiz Fusion.

As a result of my recent disappointment with the newer version of KDE, namely due to it’s apparent drain on system resources, but also because of the lack of appealing styles, I began to investigate alternate desktops. I narrowed it down to three. Fluxbox, LXDE, and XFCE. While FluxBox might not be a bad choice if it’s your only option that will run on your system, I wouldn’t recommend it. Likewise, while at first glance, LXDE seems to be KDE light made with GTK instead of QT, it also seems to be lacking in some customization features. Despite my initial reaction to XFCE being a Gnome-clone, it has proven to be the most outstanding of the three, and in many ways, superior to Gnome, if for no other reason, I personally find it far easier to find all of the configuration options in XFCE than I do in Gnome, plus, I don’t have to look at that stupid foot.