All have their positives and negatives. I prefer fast, highly configurable, simple and clean, therefore I use IceWM.

As Dan says, everyone has their favorate. The two most popular, and with the most applications are probably Gnome and KDE. Recently KDE seems to be developing very quickly and taking over the default on a lot of distros. My personal choice is KDE,and I suggest that you start with that, but, please try some of the other flavors. You may find that, like Dan, you prefer something with a different look and feel.

currently i am using gnome, just cause it came as default with fedora...well i might try some others, installing desktops easy? oh and when i installed fedora, some of the apps were desktop specific, if i was to switch to icevm(can't see the post for the exact name) would they still work?
Daum

jimf43, I thought KDE was ugly and awkward as sin in Mdk 8.2, but they sure have come a long way. I always prefered Gnome over KDE of the big two, but since I switched to RH 9 I've noticed a big improvement in KDE. I now prefer it over Gnome and agree it is probably the most user friendly DE for a new user.

I agree with Dapper Dan KDE rocks for me.

I agree mostly with everyone...I'm currently using Fedora and I started using Gnome as default of course, but then I remember when I was using Mandrake's KDE that you can have multiple backgrounds in diferent desktops (each desktop having its own background), so I tried to do that with Gnome I couldn't find that future...then I tried under Fedora's KDE and customized it again to have multiple backgrounds in each desktop, plus it seems to be more user-friendly and graphical.

Quote:currently i am using gnome, just cause it came as default with fedora...well i might try some others, installing desktops easy? oh and when i installed fedora, some of the apps were desktop specific, if i was to switch to icevm(can't see the post for the exact name) would they still work?

I would hold off on IceWM for Fedora. I tried for three days to get it working satisfactorily on my mom's box and never could get it set up right. When I got it installed, apt-get kept recognizing it as a broken package and the only fix for it was to uninstall it. After I installed it with the latest RPM, I starting having problems. I tried to uninstall the rpm, and it said it wasn't installed. When I tried to reinstall it, said it WAS installed! I tried the tarball, and when I did ./configure, it checked and said it couldn't continue because I didn't have X windows!! The fonts on the menu didn't look right and nothing I tried would correct it. I finally gave up and just ran the Gnome DE. This is not good since IceWM is now my old friendly and familiar DE. I guess I could upgrade my RH9 box to Fedora and fight it for a while and maybe or maybe not getting it working, but I'm not real exited about that prospect. Maybe it's time to have a hard look at Gentoo which DOES have IceWM in their portage tree.

i agree about gnome and kde being good, i've found that kde is the easiest to use, but i quite like icewm
but everyone has their personal preference

i like how i see many people have the transparent windows in terminal and such...is that via icevm or is it just a theme i can get most likely for gnome too?
Daum

rxvt, gnome-terminal, eterm, aterm, konsole and some others give directions on how to run transparently. At the command line, type in your terminal choice folowed by --help and it should tell you. With aterm and rxvt, the command would include the -tr option for transparency. Here's the command I use for aterm.
 
aterm -tr -bg black -fg gray -sh 100% -tint white -ls

I use GNOME. I can't stand KDE and KDE apps. I used to have a small KDE (just arts, kdebase and kdelibs) installed because one of my other packages pulled it in as a dependency (and for compatibility with other KDE apps) but I've since come to my senses and not only set my USE flags to specifically disable KDE related stuff I've masked the core KDE packages so no KDE apss ever get installed.

i'm messing around with all the - commands in gnome-terminal but not having luck yet...
Daum

I just upgraded to Fedora last night. This time, a completely different story as pertaining to IceWM. Everything is working almost perfectly this time. I must have installed the wrong version or something last time. I sure do miss Galeon though. I can't understand why it wasn't included with Fedora!

aye it is nice....when you wanna work on figuring out the gnome-terminal with me beam me a email so we don't have to spam the boards=p
Daum

What is there to work out with gnome-terminal? You click on it, it comes up, and you type commands. Is it not working for you?

He wants the terminal transparent.
Regards,
Steve

That's easy, go into Edit -> Current Profile -> Effects, there's an option to make the terminal background transparent there.

as per the instructions from --help,
 
multi-gnome-terminal --transparent
 
Does not return a transparent terminal for me either.

i did that but then it almost always either completetly freezes the comp or it makes it go extremely slow....should i change my start up in it, not sure on what i want to have running and what not to...anyone have a link to what i do and do not want to always have running?
Daum

A simple suggestion: I know there are a lot of folks out there who prefer Gnome over KDE, but I have had translucent menus and terminal (Konsole) almost as soon as I booted for the first time. I had to go into Konsole and configure it for translucency, but I have had no problems of any sort since i did. Perhaps I am a bit clueless here. Is there some other type of terminal that you are attempting to change other than the one that gives you a command line (bash) screen? ;(