Back in the early '90's, when 4 or 8 MEGAbytes of memory was common, this was a viable alternative. You had SVGAlib for graphical stuff without the bloat.

That's a code word for AmigaOS or what?

NetworkManager works fine in KDE4 these days.

^^ I didn't say that!

Yeah...luckily, GNOME hasn't ripped out any of the features I actually care about, yet. The only thing that really bothered me is the new window switching mechanism, but it turns out that it's a bit faster for me now that I've gotten used to it.

I do like the design of KDE. The environment feels very cozy, if you know what I mean. For some reason, though, I can't use it as fast. It takes me longer to start programs, switch windows, configure the desktop, etc. I just don't seem to be compatible with that environment.

Turn of the compositor? Isn't that the program that's letting me have multiple windows up at once? Or am I confusing it with the term "composting window manager"?

You can. NetworkManager is nice and all, but you can just as well drive ifconfig / ifup / ifdown and wpa-supplicant directly from the command line. Using a certain desktop environment just because of the networking is silly. In debian (and I assume Ubuntu can do the same), it's a matter of putting the right stuff in /etc/network/interfaces, and running ifup to bring the interface up (and ifdown to bring it down, duh).

That part wasn't actually serious, although I do prefer keyboard-driven textual interfaces for a most things. If it weren't for naturally graphical applications, web browsing, and the fact that I can have several xterms alongside each other, I would seriously consider it though.

I've never tried BeOS, but I hear nothing but good things about it. Most likely, the reason for being snappier was that, unlike Linux, it never tried to be multi-user, and it was designed as a graphical OS from scratch (unlike both GNU/Linux, which was and still is primarily a textual OS with some graphics bolted onto it, as well as Windows, which even today has some MS-DOS heritage to drag around). Back then, this stuff mattered a lot.

I dont mean to confuse Luiji99, but ifconfig is an outdated tool, it works well, is recognised by a lot of people but ifconfig is being phased out: http://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/610751

Get familiar with the ip command http://www.tutorialspoint.com/unix_commands/ip.htm

Makes sense, reminds me of the time when a big group of co-workers and I were filling online forms (win7, firefox/exploiter), most people were guiding around the form using the mouse, I was using tab to switch between fields and didnt once lift my hands off the keyboard, while they were navigating with mouse, I had it completed many minutes ahead of them. If you know your way around by keyboard shorcuts you're bound to be many times faster than somebody who navigates by mouse, even for GUI stuff. I use a good mix of console and gui stuff on my linux desktop.

For the URL bar, I had gotten used to CTRL+L (for searching, CTRL+K as I don't search from the URL bar). If I use keyboard shortcuts or the mouse depends on if my hand is already on the mouse and I need to move my hand to the keyboard to enter the shortcut (which means it would be the same amount of time either way), or if I haven't learned the keyboard shortcut yet for the action I want to do (because the program doesn't expose it to me)

Media PC? I'm not quite sure what you mean by that...a PC intended primarily for the purposes of media and nothing productive?

It's a disgrace that Canonical, Ltd. replaced GNOME 2 with Unity. If they wanted to "modernize" their desktop environment, GNOME 3 functions much better -- much more responsive and less bug prone.

Ack, now I must list all my grievances against Unity:

• It takes exceedingly long to start an application. WHY???

• Sometimes when I pin an application to it, it gets an extra entry when I start the program, then fails to start when I use the icon instead of the application searcher. WHY???

• It freezes. WHYYYY???

No offense to Unity users. If you like that environment, go ahead and use it. For me, it's inferior, but if you are more productive in it then I commend your choice.

It enforces one process per app? The program I was talking about was the Terminal! Why didn't they fix the terminal if they're going to do something like that? Why is that even enforced?

I forgot that Unity came first...my bad. I get the order of things mixed up, which is why I tend to avoid speculating who stole what from who. (Did KDE come up with the idea to expand windows when you drag it to the sides first or did Windows?)

Yeah, it's sort of bad that GNOME keeps extracting features. So far they haven't touched anything I care about, though, so I'm in the green (for now). If I have to switch again I'll probably just write a little task bar of my own based on Haiku's lovely design and plaster it onto OpenBox.

Perhaps its one master process per application, and Unity recognizes child processes as they were. In such a case, Chromium would run fine.

As far as I can tell Unity is not too configurable. Pretty much everything's where it'll stay. I don't recall whether or not it supports themes, though...

Now I'm curious about our general experience in the search for DEs. I've used these:

• GNOME 2

• GNOME 3

• KDE 4

• XFCE

• LXDE

• Enlightenment

• Unity

I've also used a few window managers without associated desktop environments, like Awesome and OpenBox. Back when GNOME let me choose which window manager to use, I used OpenBox there, too.