[ale] RANT re. KDE

[Scott Denlinger]

<rant>
Well, that was fun. Today I purged KDE 4.3 from my Debian testing/unstable box.
The last straw was trying in vain to turn the screensaver off, which had
somehow gotten turned on after an upgrade. I have an LCD monitor--I don't need
a screensaver. I indulged KDE patiently as I upgraded from 3.5 to 4.1, through
4.3. I watched as apps took more and more time to open, until 15-20 secnds for a
simple xterminal to open was finally too much. OK, maybe it's because I only [!]
have 756 MB of RAM in my system. Then the akonadi server promised me amazing
riches as it patiently kept givimg me error messages about migrating data for
KDE apps which I didn't even use, but needed to be there because of some dubious
dependency. Then there's Kicker/KDM--which now thinks I need three click
opportunities to tell it to shut down. If I didn't want to shut my system down,
I wouldn't have clicked the "Shutdown" icon. I know, I know, I could have taken
the time to pore through the documentation to customize the environment, but
it's amazing to me how far the user interface experience has strayed into
annoyance-land since 3.5. I didn't ask for a more Windows-like experience as I
upgraded from 3.5, but that's what the KDE developers have given me. But no
more. KDE is gone. Ultimately, if I had spent enough time with the
documentation, I could have tightened KDE up and perhaps even ended up with
performance improvements, but it seemed so much more exasperating to do that in
4.3 than it did in 3.5.

</rant>

I'm not really trying to start a flame war about desktop environments, even
though that's where this may lead people. I hope not. But I am interested in
peoples' experiences with alternative desktop environments. I installed Xfce
after all the KDE cruft was gone. And so far, I'm really impressed. Compared to
KDE, apps seem to snap open. I like the fact that I don't have to deal with the
bloat of apps that I never used, but which were somehow deemed to be essential
to a desktop environment.

Are there other lightweight desktop environments out there that people really
like? I'm curious to hear about them.