Switching to Gnome
I'm giving Gnome a try. I switched from Gnome to KDE around Mandrake 7.0, which is a long time ago. I always preferred how everything was working well together in KDE; with dcop to automate tasks and Konqueror's web-shortcuts, I had a very efficient desktop. Then came KDE 4.
KDE 4.0 lacked so many features that I switched back to KDE 3 instantly. KDE 4.1 had essentially most of that I needed but it was still kind of buggy and slow, but KDE 4.2 promised to fix all of that.
I don't know if it's KDE or Ubuntu who screwed up but Kubuntu 9.04 is simply unusable. It's way too slow for my EEE 1000HE and, the new KNetwork manager won't recall passwords and won't even tell you what access point it's trying to connect to when it prompts you out of nowhere for a new key. KDed randomly crash, I can't type a full path when I save-as in both Konqueror and KMail and worst of all, all applications are fill with garbage when you flip them with alt-tab.
Oh, and Amarok 2 sucks. Ok, that last one is easy to fix but I'm switching anyway.
I want to try something new and I want a fresh view of the other
desktop environment. First contact is not smooth so far. As an
example, gnome-terminal and metacity have many
keyboard shortcuts that clash with Emacs basic navigation. Emacs come
with bindings for a lot of shortcuts so it's expected that the
desktop will clash on some obscure functionality that is not used too
often, like kill-sexp, but clashing on forward-word is sure
to break my pace. Jean helped me get started. Let's see how it
goes.