Re: [Hampshire] Decisions, decisions... KDE3, KDE4 or Gnome?

> Simplicity was not really what I was after. Stability was and also
> something that my D400 could reasonably manage with its 512MB RAM and
> it's 1.4GHz Pentium M processor.

When this th4read started, I'd never touched KDE4. I've now got it running
on an Athlon XP 1800+ in 512MB of RAM. A little higher spec than your
machine, but not a lot...

> For now it seems KDE4 lacks the stability and may need a little more
> CPU power or RAM or, probably, even both. Not sure if this is
> something to do with the way the Kubuntu guys configured it or if I
> needed to spend more time setting it up.

Well, my setup is running OK. It's not great - but it clearly shows
potential.

Stability is pretty good - Adept has fallen over a number of times, but
the rest seems fairly solid. Some of the apps don't work without a little
magic (i.e. you have to run them from CLI first to find out why they
fail), but I've got most of it doing something eventually.

It's *very* memory-hungry, so the 512MB is an issue - but generally seems
to cope with swapping quite well as long as I don't do anything too silly
(it got very upset when I ran a second login...).

The biggest problem I've got is that Xorg takes up ~50% of the CPU
whenever anything updates the screen - so ripoff runs very slowly, and
amarok makes it get quite hot :-(

> The thing that initially put me off Gnome was the toolbars but,
> despite comments I have heard about Gnome not being very configurable,
> I have been able to reconfigure just how I wanted it.

As with so many things, criticisms are so often based on how things were
*cough* years ago. Gnome is a good desktop - although I think I'll abandon
it if any more mono sneaks in.

KDE4? I'm looking forward to future releases. Kubuntu 8.10 is very
appealing, but isn't enough to tempt me away from RH-based distros just
yet...

Vic.