Re:KDE and Gnome (Score 1)

Agree; and I'm one of the 1% you are referring to. Although I started using ratpoison 4 years ago because my computer was too slow to run KDE or Gnome, I'm still using it for my beefy desktop and my two laptops. TFA talks about muscle memory, but he's referring to *clicking* on some corner for god's sake! Muscle memory means keyboard shortcuts, and ratpoison (and window managers in the same vein like Ion) are completely keyboard-oriented. Whenever I'm forced to use a non-ratpoison machine, I find myself crippled by the convoluted gestures to perform simple tasks. Ratpoison does not have a "Desktop", no desktop background, no icons to click, nothing. It just shows your apps in fullscreen windows. I find that this suits me perfectly: I use a tabbed browser (firefox), a tabbed terminal (mrxvt), a tabbed IM client (pidgin), amarok, and occassionally open a few other apps. I have them all bound to my numpad giving me 1-key switch to an app (e.g., 1 for firefox, 2 for amarok, etc.). Plus, ratpoison handles 2 LCDs beautifully. It has just about everything that KDE or Gnome does (e.g., shortcut to display time, execute commands, etc.) Moreover, you can write scripts in your favorite language to make the currently executing window manager do stuff, like dcop for KDE. Better still, the codebase is *really* small, and it's quite easy to add some functionality if you want to. All in all, my 2 cents: WMs like Ratpoison and Ion are the extreme in "cutting to the chase". If you want to look at photos of your florida beach or family, or if you a nice-looking desktop with hundreds of applets showing you things you can see with top or netstat or df, sure, use KDE or Gnome (btw, you can set backgrounds in ratpoison too, but that's not the point). But if you talk about muscle memory or personalization, you should not gloss over these keyboard-oriented window managers.