Express Your Opinion: Linux Desktops

It's kinda scary when my opinion mirrors yours to the T. From my perspective GNOME is far and away the best desktop environment but I've recently come around to xfce on my umpc. Not as robust as GNOME but perfect for the low spec machine that runs it. Aside from some wonderful KDE apps (namely akregator, amarok, knetworkmanager) KDE just doesn't do it for me on the desktop. QT would be my only reason to try KDE again.

Lately I've been noticing that when I log in, there is a wait of 10 seconds or so while Gnome figures out whether it wants to present my desktop to me or not. I'm thinking it might be time to try one of the quicker, lighter options like IceWM or XFCE.

Virgil: It could be that your system is taking extra time looking for the internet or something. Is it a laptop normally hooked via wireless?

It's scary that brandocom and I live in parallel Linux worlds. I use Gnome on my main computer, but was having serious lag with the Synergy software KM manager on my old junky laptop. I switched it to XFCE, and it's like a new machine. I'm also pretty impressed with how nice XFCE looks, for being such a resource skinflint.

Permanent wired connection with a static IP. Oh, and did I mention that it's gigabit?

I use Gnome for a variety of (legacy) technical reasons. Back in the 1.2 days when I first started using it, Gnome was quite lightweight. And I liked off the bat the Gtkmm C++ wrappers (or Gtk-- as the package used to be know as) which are STL friendly.

Of course, KDE has a C++ API as well (since this is the language it is written in) but I never liked it that much, and I abhorred the MOC (meta-object compiler) thing in Qt (although I am not sure that is still required nowadays).

Gnome for sure. KDE is fine too but I think every single Linux desktop and the few servers I have with the GUI on use gnome.