[GTALUG] Desktop swap

[Evan Leibovitch]

Hi all.

For about the mid-nineties to the late aughts, I was a heavy-duty KDE fan.
The integration and customization was what I needed, it was good looking
and functional.

Then it started getting more bloated and slower, seemingly outpacing the
increases in CPU speed and decreases in RAM cost. Or maybe it was just the
Kubuntu implementation. But I found that it wasn't working for me. So I
experimented for a while. Yech.

I found GNOME to be something of soap opera that required a whole set of
sub-choices (GNOME 2? GNOME 3? Mate? Unity? WTF?). My first GNOME
experiences (with the default position of icons moved from the sensible
bottom to the left) seemed more like an exercise in social engineering (ie,
what the devs wanted dumb users to do) rather than any real attempt to make
my computer less intrusive in the path to doing Real Stuff.

And then I discovered Linux Mint and its wonderful little Cinnamon desktop.
Yeah I know it's gtk based and has big chunks of GNOME in it, but its
look-and-feel seems less ... disruptive. It's served me well for much of
this decade.

But I still miss KDE. So I've been having another look. I've been reading
that prefer the Linux Mint version over Kubuntu, and that it's still big
but now much speedier.

I know it's technically possible to have both KDE and Cinnamon physically
installed on my Mint desktop. But I've also been reading that the two
systems are so different in default ways of doing things that switching
between them is an invitation for grief that will bork things. Most of the
forum stuff I've read says that it's much cleaner to do a reinstall.

Has anyone else here played with systems that can casually switch between
KDE/Qt and GNOME/gtk? Is anyone here using current KDE?

Thanks!

- Evan
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