I’ve used KDE for the length of my Linux use. It’s been the most comfortable desktop environment for someone like me who needed to be weaned off of Windows but I’m now considering switching to Gnome. I may begin trying out Gnome in various distributions and posting about the benefits/compromises that I see in it.

One thing I’ve noticed already is that cursor focus seems to be much faster in Gnome than KDE. I’ve written about problems with Firefox response speed a couple of times and upon only cursory (heh) overview it seems as though the cursor and response time problems are greatly mitigated with the Gnome desktop environment.

My friend Sam uses Fedora Core as his primary operating system and has become something of an expert at using and configuring it.

He’s written a short explanation of something really neat to do with Gnome-terminal to launch console programs.

I think the prevalence of console-only (CLI) programs in Linux was one of the things that nearly scared me off at first, but now I’ve come to very much appreciate them. Using Lynx I sometimes don’t even start my X server and just stay in Gentoo’s console mode after boot. Of course, it helps that Gentoo provides you with four virtual desktops of consoles even when you’re not running X.