...spam sends you.

Every user has a choice not to update.

There is only one food item that has ever aroused me: cinnamon. Many of my male friends feel the same way about that spice. Perhaps it's the abundance of cinnamon in most pumpkin pie that's the culprit?

I seem to keep having this conversation. :D

I often find it difficult to describe my love for KDE. I've used GNOME, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, Xfce and even CDE for a time. KDE will suck on your RAM more than the others will, most likely, but on a modern PC the only time I would need a GUI and all of my RAM for my PC to be responsive is if I were running VMs configured in a cluster on it. KDE is a pleasant environment that allows you, more than any other environment, to configure your workspace precisely to how you want to do business with your PC.

On a typical day on my PC I'm running: Firefox, Konqueror (for google searches, via krunner), Yakuake (always in memory, drop-down console), Eclipse, Kate, Dolphin (often on multiple desktops), Kopete (IM client), Konversation (IRC client), GIMP, OpenOffice/Kword (depending on what I'm doing), Amarok (music rules), VLC, Kontact (groupware software, mostly for KMail), etc., etc.

I have a 3.2Ghz processor and 4GB or RAM which I don't even fully use (32 bit Ubuntu, I suck at making the big leap) and some kind of Nvidia card that plays WoW well (and I run that via Wine with -opengl) that allows me to have crazy desktop effects that run as smoothly as the first time I ran WindowMaker on my P133.

Times are changing, the desktop is on Linux now too. I don't think it will ever be for everybody but Linux has the best UI configuration capability, in my opinion, over any other PC interface I've ever used; here's the kicker, it's because of KDE for me. GNOME has always kind of had ups and downs with respect to philosophy regarding applications and how the UI is laid out for each. All KDE apps, unless the author took the pain to build it piece by piece themselves, are pretty much uniform in presentation and usage. GNOME can't claim that and everything else is pretty much just a window manager.

Robustness is not bad if you feel you actually need it. Stick with what works for you, KDE works for me. Open source is about options, too.

From the out of the box distribution of KDE 4 to 3 hours after installation, this is how I configure it for my exact preferences.. http://imagebin.ca/view/xWPU0ck.html

You can turn off all the desktop effects and still have a more configurable desktop than GNOME.  If you're having issues running the plasma desktop you should ditch your P133.

I would much prefer to have a plain-jane installation and customize it myself than install whatever the boys over at Novell try to push on me.

Buy a book on how to draw a flow chart and see if you can describe each step of a process using that knowledge.  Once you're capable of handling the flow of logic through a diagram you'll be better off learning the flow of logic through a program (as, aside from syntax, it's the same idea.)  After that learn what "types" exist, such as integers, floats, boolean, characters and strings.  If you can hold all of this, thus far, in your head and make peace with what it all means then find a language that's easy for someone to pick up on, like PHP, which basically lets you write a program from the first statement typed.

Programming is something I honestly feel should be a fundamental skill for everyone; I think the reason why most people don't learn to do it is that they've convinced themselves they won't understand it.  Have confidence that you'll get it and practice.  Remember that good programming is learned over years and not days or weeks.  Try not to get frustrated, the WWW has more than enough information available for anyone to learn.

KDE has never been impressive during it's initial releases of new major versions, and I admit that as a KDE user.  However, overall, once you reach a stable KDE version I find that KDE is miles better than GNOME.  I've tried, many times, to get into GNOME to see what others find special about it and all I ever find is that it's still the same old GNOME.  The only single benefit I credit to GNOME over KDE is speed; however, on a modern PC the only noticeable speed increase in GNOME over KDE is startup time.

If you haven't yet, download Kubuntu 10.04 and patch up to the latest version of KDE.  Once you see how the plasma desktop can be configured I'm confident that you'll begin to reconsider.

I find it's more stable actually, and runs better in Linux than in WindowsXP.

"C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\wow.exe" -opengl

No config file, btw.