i'd have to disagree with some of what you said... i began my Linux experience with Mandrake 10.0 and KDE and onto Mandriva 2006 with KDE... on my 256MB laptop things used to run really slow... when Dapper came out I switched to Ubuntu and GNOME... my computer worked slightly faster but the more stuff i kept piling on it the slower it ran... it is probably my fault for not keeping the services in check... I went thru the Dapper>Edgy and Edgy>Feisty upgrades (not reinstalls) and things broke and got even slower...linuxviolin wrote:I have Mint with Gnome and, after having stopped using it, I have also another distrib in dual boot with KDE. More I use KDE more I like it!
Btw Qt is better than Gtk+... And Gnome got contaminated with Mono
Some things written here are extremely debatable…:roll:
Xfce? Not for me, thanks. It is not even able to have transparent icon labels... Having opaque labels reminds me of Win95! And it is became slower, e.g the slower speed of Xfce 4.4 versus 4.2.3.2 or "compare 4.3.99.2 to 4.2.3.2 on a modest platform (Celeron/850, 256 MB RAM), and you will notice the difference: 4.2.3.2 feels as fast as WindowMaker, for instance, where 4.3.99.2 feels more like GNOME!" (http://www.beranger.org/index.php?page=3k&article=2051)
Finally, when Mint XFCE Beta came I decided to hose my laptop and I dont think I'll ever go back! boot times are something like half of what it used to be with Ubuntu, applications launch much much faster. and about the desktop icons... I like a clean desktop only with conky on it so I dont even notice the opaque icons... XFCE edition looks just as sweet... the only thing it is probably missing is a Mintified menu but this is only the first release... so I hope it is in the pipelines...
As for the speed of previous versions of XFCE... i dont know because I have only just started using XFCE. what I can tell you is that XFCE is definitely faster than GNOME in my experience.
here are some screenshots of my XFCE desktop. keep in mind: no beryl or compiz here... i only have a SiS graphic card with shared system memory... and check out the RAM usage at startup... 34% of (256-32)MB RAM... you do the math
http://img168.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mint1na8.png
http://img521.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mint2uo2.png
http://img410.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mint3ul9.png
p.s. no violins were meant to be hurt in the writing of this post...