Well, now- what a turn-around! lol. I kind of saw this as a friendly challenge, so I installed the KDE package onto Ubuntu. Surprisingly, I like it. Don't know yet if I'll stick with it or not as my default DE, but so far, I've not had too much trouble finding my way around, and it is noticeably faster than Gnome on my system. I've used KDE before with Knoppix... I see now that the problems I had were with Knoppix, not KDE.

Cheers

Nice one I think that perhaps a lot of the hostility between the fans of each DE may boil down to nothing more than previous (from long past) attempts at using the DE's. I think I fall into this category. I tried out Gnome a long, long time ago. Possibly in one of its very early iterations. Back then I was not anywhere near as knowledgeable as I am now (which still isn't much... ) regarding Linux. I was greatly prejudiced and seduced by the my supposed knowledge of MS Windows/DOS. Hence, I disliked Gnome simply because it was so different to the MS layout. On the other hand KDE had this 'cosmetic' familiarity to it that appealed to me. It didn't actually register at the time that KDE was like chalk and cheese compared to MS Windows DE; it looked familiar so that did it for me. The years went by and I didn't really want to give Gnome a chance. Until now... I've got to be honest and say that right at this moment I'm not sure which DE I do actually prefer. I hope I don't get to champion one over the other as they are both excellent user interfaces.

Of course, the other great prejudice against KDE stems from the historical closed nature of Troll Tech. Even though that has long gone with regards KDE it does still sadly linger

Catch one for me I've only ever fished for trout the once. I won a day's fly fishing tuition in the Welsh hills here in the UK. Wonderful day and yes, I caught a nice 'little' rainbow. It tasted wonderful :-) Now I tend to concentrate on carp and perch (bass like fish here in the UK).

You honestly believe that?
Distrowatch marks each distro by hits to its page on distro per day, thats why if a new version of a distro is released, it usually gets in the top ten for a week. Distrowatch doesn't mark distros on popularity

YES..............

Then you really don't understand how distrowatch works

I know I do, or used to, although I try not to be 'hostile' about it. The best part about Linux is that you have choices, starting with the distros, which is much better than Microsoft's "one-size-fits-all" mentality. Personally, flame wars over purported "best" DEs, media players, office suites, etc seem totally nonsensical to me... what suits my needs might not work at all for someone else, and vice-versa.

Ditto that! While I do like KDE better, Gnome won't be removed.

Cheers

Exactly. Do the math- at 2519 hits-per-day for the entire year of '07 equals 919,435. If that number reverberated popularity or number of downloads/orders, considering it's for just one distro in one year alone, nearly the entire world population would be using Linux, by now.

Nice dream, but nowhere near reality. The HPD number on DistroWatch only denotes how many people have clicked the link to check stats, reviews, etc.

Cheers

Hm. That's interesting. What kind of hardware issues? I do have a few hardware issues with my notebook on Kubuntu, too. Are you suggesting that you have less issues with Ubuntu? Maybe I should give that a try.

--hasi.

What kind of hardware issues are you having? The only one for which you asked for help was Keep running in the background and filling your hard drive...

Lots of people have problems with different Linux distros on their PCs, and that's why LQ exists. You present your problem, we try to help fix it.

Cheers

Thanks very much for asking, dragonslayer48dx

Some hardware issues I have, are:
1) Sometimes, the notebook (Dell Latitude D620) would not wake up out of standby. I went through several forums for this particular computer. I followed some of the suggestions there, added some commands to the resume scripts. It got better, but still it does not wake up, say, 30% of the time.
The problem is that it is not the same every time. Sometimes, the computer goes into a weird state, where the LED is on, but no display, not even the HD is running. In other cases, the computer comes up (screensaver visible), but does not give me the unlock window. I have to go in standby once more and wake it up, then the logon window will show up (unless this is then one of the times the computer dies on resume, as described above).

2) Sometimes, when I close the lid and reopen it, the display just does not switch on.

3) Sometimes, the touch pad goes into weird modes, where I can't use it normally. The pointer moves very slowly, clicks are induced very easily, and the scroll gestures stop working. There seem to be different of those weird modes. In one of them the lower set of mouse buttons does not work, but the upper one does (the D620 has a "nipple mouse" and a touch pad, and each of them has its own mouse buttons). Sometimes tapping the touch pad quite hard many times does bring it back into a normal mode.

All these issues are quite annoying (especially if you carry your laptop around a lot and switch it on and off often), but no "showstoppers". A reboot fixes things. And, all these things are quite unpredictable and seem to be hard to hunt down.
What do you think?

Yup... I'm still a gnome user... but there are some simple things that XFCE handles more intelligently... like: windows snap out of fullscreen mode on resize, the text and icons on the desktop never overlay... I'm hoping that the gnome team will learn

Curious to see the election effect evident in these results - eg. if a majority is attained by 1/3 of the vote (approx) then it was likely a "two-horse" race - especially in a close finish.

1/4 => 3-horse
1/5 => 4-horse
etc

1/2 to 2/3 though can occur in a 2-horse event, where one horse stumbles.

Anything over 2/3rds to win suggest "no real competition". In popularity contests, this is mostly due to familiarity: there are many database apps - but the most famous one, the one that's been in the news lately, gets the landslide.

So, in the DTE race, we see the winner with a bit under 1/3 of the vote, implies a two-horse race... and sure enough, though there are many DTEs, two candidates attract the majority of the attention. OTOH - we also notice that the majority of voters did not like either of the main runners. (The secret to being popular in-office is to try to be an acceptable second-choice for all those who voted against you. If your office/school adopted a dte based on this vote, how many would be able to live with this?)

The minority runners, the ones who split the last portion of the vote, are actually the mast interesting. They can represent future trends on the part of the big boys.

None of the winners got an insignificant vote. The race with the widest distribution of votes was for games... suggesting that there are a lot of strong candidates in this field, and personal preference plays a very strong role: no objective measure of goodness exists here.
(Possibly, only a half-dozen nominees ended up on the ballot though?)

This is all just from the results... perusing the actual breakdown will add more specific insights.

... associated with sleep states.

I've found sleep and hibernate spotty in windows too. I think you need to start a thread on this (or post a link if you already have). There are a number of things that can be tried for the issues you have mentioned.