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"Also, just noticed that enlightenment quietly released an update to the 0.16 series."

uh... that was over a month ago, on November 5th. It was a good little bugfix release, though.

You have to wonder why SCO bothers putting such crap on their website.

There are a few sites, like say the Enlightenment web site that I visit regularly for updates, waiting for the news of the fabled E-17 release. And yeah I visit the MySQL site for the same sort of reason - waiting for News on version 5 with stored procedures.

But for Christ's sake, who in their right mind visits the SCO site for some light reading and news? Who? Not me. Not you. Maybe some Microsoft employees?

But seriously, why do they bother? Perhaps poor Darl is just taking the opportunity to get some stuff off his chest after all the flaming, death threats, and other such niceties that come with the job at SCO.

http://www.enlightenment.org/pages/shots/g8.jpg Proof Expose like features have been done in E16 for over 3 years.

I'd go and participate in E17. Enlightenment as a wm rocks, but E17 looks like it's got all of the desktop goodies + the fine wm.

Judging by the amount of time they're spending, they could probably use the help.

The last cool thing I saw on the X desktop was the work done by rasterman on Enlightenment. I have been using this WM for many years now in Sunos/Solaris and Linux environments. It's not really ready for prime time (I'm using rev 16.5), but it's really pretty. Using Eterm and now gnome-terminal, you get transparent xterms, and that to me is really cool.

With a nice background and the ripple/waves effect turned on... you get the feeling you are looking at waves and that your monitor is a real "window" to some nice parklike setting, and that those "nfs: server not responding" messages really are not so important after all.

IMHO, the gnome/KDE desktop realy need the ability to customize the window decorations, and support the ripple/wave effect that were pioneered in Enlightenment. But until then, I'll use enlightenment.

Check here for all the latest enlightenment news.

Thu Sep 18 - benr - The Big News Update

After months of restraint heres the big update as to where E is and is going. Enlightenment DR17, the window manager currently in e17 CVS, is dead. As was mentioned in the State of E address awhile back the current WM code needs a complete rewrite, and thus the current code is nothing but a test platform. There is currently no publicly avalible WM code for DR17, but the initial CVS commit will be coming in the next month or two.

Many lessons were learned from the WM code that currently exists in CVS, namely that even in CVS we stretched the limits of what Ebits could do. This prompted Raster several months ago to scrap it and start work on Edje. Edje is essentially Ebits2 in concept, but is drastically different from the original Ebits implementation. Edje uses EET instead of EDB which Ebits uses, and truely does what Ebits hoped to do: abstract completely an applications interface from its codebase. Edje theming doesn't just put a new image in place of the default. It actually can completely change the feel of the user interface, rather than just its appearance. On top of this Edje supports animation! This means that DR17 will not be just another static looking window manager, it will have smooth animations and effects -- from simple fades and bounces to window borders that consist of swirling colors.

Also, at the time the State of E address was released, there was uncertainty about Etox: would it be merged into Evas or just silently die? I'm happy to report RbdPngn has been working hard on the library, and now it has solidified its place among the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries permanantly. Among Etox's more interesting abilities is automatic wrapping of text, properly handling of newlines in text strings when displayed, and koolest of all, reacting to obstacles!

In other news, on the EVAS front, EVAS now has a GL backend! This is in addition to the existing Software/X11 backend, DirectFB, Plain FB and Qtopia backends.

Note that due to the retirement of Ebits all apps based on it are being retired as well, notably Etcher, Ebony and the Ebg library. Equivelents for Edje will probably emerge in the future but there is no current firm commitment right now. There are plans for an Etcher equivalent for Edje but we don't know what the final form of it will be and when it might pop up.

At this point in time Imlib2, EVAS, Edb, EET, Ecore, and Edje are effectively complete. Updates and new features are still being added to Ecore and Edje, but no major changes particularly to the API are intended. This is good news for the many of you who have wanted to jump in and play with the EFL but were scared off by warnings of impending rewrites. Most of the libs are documented using Doxygen at least partially. Documentation is now under way to ensure there are plenty of resources for an eventual release. Tutorial writers and code-building example authors are encouraged.

We're happy to report significant progress toward an eventual release. Anyone who has ever written a GUI application will find the EFL a real treat so please take a look. Expect changes to this website over the next week reflecting the new addition of Edje and updates to various component pages detailing the features mentioned above.

People are trying, see Fresco and E17's Evas

People are trying, see Fresco and E17's Evas

H. Seldon himself could not have come up with a better way** to improve Linux GUIs than the rivalry (mostly friendly) among the various approaches to Linux GUIs. (And though there are other Free Software desktops, I'm going to ignore them for part of this comment ;))

KDE's approach looks a lot like Windows, is very well integrated down to having a "burn data cd" (with k3b) option in a menu reachable with a mouse click on any file. Neat. (I'm typing on a KDE desktop right now, appreciating how much more I like KDE now than I did a few years ago.) (Knoppix comes with KDE, this machine's installation was from the Knoppix HDD install script ... )

GNOME is IMO slightly slicker graphically, and -- in ways that are not easy to pin down -- a little more user friendly. No accounting for taste (and I certainly have questionable taste), but I happen to like a lot of GNOME apps more than their KDE equivalents ... mostly a "so what?" since most apps I use don't care one way or the other ;)

The Seldonmost part of the KDE/GNOME "battle" (in which actual developers mostly get along well, share beers in pubs when they're not coding) is that their [conspiratorially arranged?] back-and-forth wrt feature lists and ease of use distracts people from, for instance:

- enlightenment
- blackbox (old) / fluxbox / etc.
- icewm
- and windowmaker / afterstep

The point being, KDE and GNOME may be the most complete / comprehensive approaches to Free Software desktops, but they're far from alone. Fluxbox and Afterstep in particular I like for defaulting to extremely clean desktops, making apps easy to get to through menus available with a mouseclick from anywhere. We're not all in the same gang, because we're not in gangs, gong long a gong a gong a long long fee phi pho fee phum.

Whenever people talk about "standardizing" as if this was an obvious good thing, I wonder if they feel the way to end illiteracy is to settle on one accepted book as The Standard, and making sure people know *that* book. Architecture, too, would be a lot less confusing if we didn't have all these different *types* of housing or approaches to engineering large buildings -- let's just settle on the right one, dammit!

Having only one choice in a given context might make sense -- but it depends on the context.The owner of Amalgamated Consolidated Products, Inc.* is free to declare that Windows 3.1 is the only acceptable desktop standard for his company's employees while they're at work: Fine. Dumb, or maybe it's smart for that company, but fine. Likewise, if NASA decides its billions in tax dollars would contribute the most to the commonwealth if some of them went to creating a standard GNOME-based desktop and ignoring KDE, well, that might make sense in that context.

When I hear lots of 1st-person plural handwringing about how "we" ought to adopt a standard *anything* though, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I get a little defensive. 1st person plural is always annoying when someone seems to be speaking on my behalf but without my consent or agreement. What if I *like* the standard you don't? Think Low-flush toilets as a mandated standard. Think building codes that make inexpensive legal housing a legislated near-impossibility. Building codes, of course, are standards imposed for the good of all, and if you don't like it, you can stick it your ear, fill out this form in triplicate, and wait for the county inspector, who is currently on extended leave in Botswana. Citizen.

To the extent that actual programmers voluntarily combine their efforts, it's nice to see some convergence, even a lot of it. But there's no g

My God! This is ugly! Oh My Lord, please, give me Enlightenment or give me death!

what on earth are you talking about??? how in any way shape or form is shlashdot the biggest advocate of linux? how is linux window's main competition? for one thing, linux still has a smaller desktop usage percentage than apple. secondly, in the server market -- doesn't BSD have the upperhand? and third of all, slashdot has microsoft advertisements in their pages. this is not he future of my desktop. this is nopt he future of ANY desktop. thsi is the furture of crappy proprietary software that it mostly used for controlling the user's experience. if i want a different/better desktop i already got mine

While I struggle to cope with my KDE and my Gnome day in and day out I hold out hope that maybe today will be the day that I see E17 released un to the world...

Rasterman has been hard at work on EVAS, adding this functionality (and many others equally as useful) to his pet project, which is the core of Enlightenment.

This is why Enlightenment 0.17 is taking so fscking long to come out, and this is why the E topic was added to this.

That's hardly nothing compared to Enlightenment desktop shell project's bandwidth usage since it changed it's look now! For those of you interested in it, check it out here!.

"Microsoft will take some considerable encouragement at the number of sites that have switched from Linux," NetCraft said in the report.

But the server arena isn't really the one to watch how Microsoft reacts to Linux, said Cherry.

"People are underestimating Linux on the desktop," he said. "They think it's all about the servers, and how Microsoft responds there. They're going to be surprised at how quickly Linux's threat will be an issue on the desktop. Linux will get to be 'just good enough' for the desktop faster than people think."

Maybe that will make Microsoft bump Linux to the top of its risk list.

This is what I've been saying since I first saw screenshots of Enlightenment back in 1998. The moment I, sitting in Front of Windows95 and some ancient Explorer, saw
this, I knew M$ would lose in the end. Software wins by widespread use. Widespread use is achieved by public awareness. And, believe me, public awareness is *not* achieved on servers, no matter how much the difference is. Public awareness is achieved on the Desktop. That's the bottom line.
Having seen previews of KDE 3.2 at the LinuxTag I conclude: Not only has GNU + Linux gained momentum but it is close to reaching critical mass.

Innovations for windows are created by other companies and Linux hackers seem to concentrate on making the innovations for windows work in Linux.

I'd love to see something NEW in Linux, like Apple's newly revealed Exposé but it never shows up. I'm probably hoping for Enlightenment to prove me wrong.

Ciryon

I also disagree that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. However, if your basis for "ready for the desktop" is a "consistent" UI then please, leave me out. I want consistancy like I want the clap.

Linux's many UI's could easily be described as overwhelming, and are definely inconsistant with each other. But I consider at least 3 UI's superior to OS X's Aqua. They are (in order or superiority); Enlightenment, gnome, and kde.

I would also like to discuss, not to flame, the claim that OS X is "smooth". I have used OS X. I have a G4 running 10.2 on my desk as I type this. I respect the OS and the steps Apple has taken to solidify it's OS offering. I would say OS X is a usable operating system, and that it's options and use are definetly simple. Not intuitive, but simple. I would next say that the interface is attractive. However, XP was attractive for the first month I had it. Now it's old, boring, bland. At least in XP I can change the color of my windows (blah). How can I do this in OS X? Can it even be done? I've seen at least 50 different OS X users, many of whom are "zealots" for Apple. None of these OS X desktops have looked any different, except for the backgrounds and the order of the icons. Oh, and the hard drive icon, thrill.

In summary, OS X is slick and beautiful, but I need variety. My desktop now is enlightenment, and with a middle click and a selection of a menu item, looks exactly like the OS X desktop. I'm sick of it. I want a new one. I am completely blown away that no graphics designer wants to overhaul his desktop's look and feel. I'm good friends with several graphic artists all of whom are mac zealots. None of them have the foggiest idea how to change my desktop. None of them have anything to constructive to say about the useability of the OS X desktop.

Linux will absorb OS X users on the desktop. But, and more importantly, Linux will take over the desktop from Microsoft. It will take a few years. But Redmond knows it, and they're scared, and they're showing it.

Except that your model does not permit for the exchange of their information prior to the full payment for their design. As a consumer you are not permitted to know anything about their design, until they have been sufficiently compensated. You haven't shown that this model is superior.

The information as a service model is better for consumers and it is proven. Check Linux vs Windows

1. Demonstrate that "Linux vs Windows" is an example of the aforementioned scenario.
2. Show that if "Linux vs Windows" is an example, that any and/or all results are applicable to all assets in an information economy.
3. As you imply for your statement to be considered a response to the aforementioned claim for proof, and imply that such proof is existent, demonstrate a proof of the economic superiority of the aforementioned model of distribution.

Linux has advanced this quickly

Linux has been in development for almost twelve years, and many parts of its userland even longer. because information has been shared between competiting companies, Redhat, Suse, and others.

Companies that also have proprietary sources of revenue.

You didn't mention some of the other names, though, that have contributed code, money, or expansive technical information like Intel, IBM, Compaq, HP, CMI, and more. Companies that have no qualms with, or outright desire to make a commodity of operating systems, or the software market altogether. Companies that rely extensively on intellectual property protections for their own sources of income. Do you see Intel or IBM calling for the removal of intellectual property protections, citing a better economic result as their motivation? Do you even see RedHat doing that?

Redhat is profiting

I really hope you can do better than this, although I would be entirely interested in an explanation as to why you believe that this is evidence demonstrating the benefits of removing intellectual property protection.

And while I think your childish obsession with comparing Windows and Linux as a means of determining the success of such a model is more than a little cliche and incredibly useless, you can always take a look at how big a failure Microsoft is in comparison to RedHat. If you could even relate RedHat to your ideology, which is rather suspect at the least, you would probably do better to find a better example.

and other companies are trying to profit

Would that be more like MandrakeSoft, or more like VA Linux Systems/VA Software?

programmers are paid to produce code, not to sell it.

The number of programmers responsible for selling, rather than producing code, is anecdotally small. Intellectual property protections are most often used in either scenario.

This does benefit the user because we get better software

Do we? This certainly seems subjective to me. It hardly matters, however. It also doesn't lend any support to your ideology.

the wheel isnt constantly reinvented

The is constantly reinvented, on this planet where is your

I am also a user of FVWM, but I have heard of Enlightenment which is now calling itself a "desktop shell". I don't know much more than that but it sounds like something that would interest you. It is definitely very configurable and pretty.

Just like Enlightnment E17? Or like Transluxent? Or just as DirectFB (yeah, I know it's not OpenGL, but who cares?:).

So who is "innovative" now?

So far this is the best way I've found to speed up KDE.

If the above link does not work for you, try this one.

see subject includes some other libs as well

the link

I do agree that E17 development has seemed pretty "if you're not one of the core developers, you shouldn't be touching it," but it's moving away from that. The post linked to in this story is a good example of an increasing openness and attention to at least some documentation. A lot of documentation has appeared on enlightenment.org in the past month or two as well; the relatively new build notes are particularly useful when trying to build from CVS.

If you want a working window manager, stick to e16; e17 isn't really being actively worked on as a window manager yet, and doesn't have many features. The work is on a lot of useful backend stuff; the joke is that once the backend is done, the window manager will be five lines of code. Take a look at the components though. Many of them are in a very good state, and the E folk are to be commended for their excellent modular development -- many of these components are already being used by other projects (imlib2 in particular), and many of the others either are or soon will be in shape to be used in other projects too.

Of course perhaps I'm a bit biased, since E16 is still my favorite window manager (a better way to view/edit remembered window/app attributes being my only real feature request), but I think the E17 team is doing a good job contributing to the overall Free Software codebase. And though it's a bit frustrating that E17 is taking so long, reading through the components is impressive -- everything is being engineered carefully. While many window managers hack things in, everything in E -- from the theming engine to the window decorations -- is carefully designed with a clean interface. Should be impressive when it's done.

My only main worry about E17 is that it seems to be going desktop-environment-ish, a la GNOME/KDE, which I really can't stand. Hopefully we'll be able to turn all that off.

I still find the enlightenment window manager suits my needs best. very fast and configurable, it allows for a wide variety of different methods of operation and interaction.

I'm looking forward to the eventual release(?!) of E17, although it seems like it's been an awful long time since the last version came out. E17 should prove 'interesting' in the least, as Rasterman has apparently decided to bring us a 'desktop shell' instead of sticking to 'just' a window manager.

I don't run GNOME. E is Enlightenment, remember? And right now I'm using Openbox.

My girlfriend uses GNOME, though, while I wean her off the Virtual Teat.

I think he misunderstood what the topic is.

FYI (if you don't know), this topic is for the window manager enlightenment ( here) not about enlightening you about something.
Although, we should have an Enlightmenment (non-WM) one.

1) Why does everything have to be compiled into the kernel. What? Can the kernel not map shared objects into its memory space? And if it can't, why not?

2) Why don't they establish only standard APIs that device drivers have to implement

(seperate of the kernel and not built into some stupid x-windowing system or something irrelevant to what it does example: sound drivers for KDE)

insert appropriate printer standard, etc.

and make the stupid x-windowing system just another interface that runs on top of OpenGL, jeez

3) The everything is a file mechanism is really getting outdated. Why are there not object oriented shells yet?

4) Why do we still use program based architectures? Programs are way too linear. We need objects and an object handling mechanism (like javascript or something similar to it, like a Delphi UI or something) not programs.

you could chain them together and do all sorts of neat tricks, that you could never dream of with standard file based shells/programs

Lets see: vi, emacs, joe (joe??? what the hell man), yast, lilo, initrd, sh, etc., etc.. Come on guys name your programs something intelligible, and leave the credits in the fscking readme file.

At least if dos had something it had convenient keywords (copy, rename, delete, deltree, EDIT).

6) Why did anybody think it would be a good idea to integrate the inetd with the x-windowing system (xinetd).

7) This one is for the distros: quit using the damn graphical installers.

And don't say, "One word, man" or "info" those systems are pretty fucked up as it is.

9) Standardize the damn locations, follow the LSB biatches

This may sound contradictory to the above, but... abolish the Unix file system layout. I can't stress enough how a simple object persistence/serialization mechanism would be way better than a file system any day.

Hmm... now that I think of it, if the GUI reserved all alphanumeric keys for commands, and responded to any button press with a mini "command window", it'd take the non-overhead advantage of the CLI...

I wonder how I (a non-coder) could go about getting something like that done...


No need, E already has done it. EFM, which was out as a stand alone program for a while did just this. You simply started typing and a mini window appeared. You could type in bash scripts ("for i in ...") or simple mv, cp commands, and it did The Right Thing. Combine this with a nice GUI to do file manipulation with when you did need a GUI to do things, and it was the shit.

Sadly, it went away not long after to be integrated into E17, which is still being worked on :\ Hopefully EFM will re-appear soon, along with E17.

If you dig around you might be able to find some .debs or archives of EFM.

Recently Gnome suddenly started refusing to start up. Have you tried Enlightenment? You can install it (like anything else) in your home directory, without root access, by conifurging it with something like --prefix=/home/dozer/enlightenment and adding the executable to your .xinitrc or .xsession file. Luckily with Linux you have an alternative to using mem-heavy UI's like KDE and GNOME, while still getting the benefits from having their libraries installed. (You can still run programs that require Gnome, without running the Gnome environment). As a side note, you probably could have used Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill the X server and edit those files on the console rather than using a M$ machine to do it ;) No decent text editor. gedit stinks. Download NEdit. You get syntax highlighting, line numbers, and a whole bunch of other nifty stuff without feeling "bloated" while using it. It even comes precompiled for most platforms ;) Motif apps. Mathematica and Matlab are big, slow ... The rest of the world agrees. Write a letter to Wolfram. =P No word processor. ...Can't copy and paste pictures. Sounds like it's time to take an hour and learn LaTeX. Afterwords, you'll never want to use a word processor or paste pictures again. Additionally, your term papers and reports will be written faster and look more professional. An added benefit comes when you consider that most science journals would require you to submit a paper in LaTeX, so it's better to learn *now* than *later* after you've written your 100+ page thesis in M$ Word and have to transfer all of it.

They don't, unless you consider this or this to be like Windows 98. The only similarity I see is that it has windows, menus, buttons, images and text. (If it didn't, it wouldn't be much of a window manager would it?)

KDE and GNOME can look like windows if you want, but they don't have to. By default those two resemble it, but that's because that look is most familiar to people and in general its a decent design.

We will never have unified desktop for as long as we have The Enlightenment . E17 will rock this fucking planet seriously!

The window manager Enlightenment looks pretty sci-fi, and is very configurable. This is a screenshot of the current CVS version of E.

The window manager Enlightenment looks pretty sci-fi, and is very configurable. This is a screenshot of the current CVS version of E.

Movie destops also have an excessive amount of animation. Trust me, you'd hate any desktop that worked that way -- it'd run like absolute molasses.

Kinda like Mac OS X, eh? Yeah, yeah, it's getting better, but it's still pretty slow compared to other operating systems with less flash.

The user experience I've had that most closely resembles a movie desktop is application built using Flash, like you find on web sites and enhanced CDs. These apps try to emulate the look and feel of movie desktops.

Interestingly, most of those movie GUIs are built using Macromedia Director (or similar), so building the same thing out of Flash makes sense. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those movie web sites actually took most of the code directly from the mock-up made for the movie itself. It shouldn't be difficult to do.

Personally, I like usability with a bit of flash. Something like Window Maker, while very useable (it should be, since it's based on NeXT), is rather boring. Enlightenment, while flashy, isn't that useable in my opinion. In that vein, I'm pretty happy with Windows XP. It's themeable (link is down at the moment, but according to the notice it should be back up in a half an hour -- I doubt that, but check back in a day or two), so I can get my eye candy, but it's also very useable. Say what you will, Microsoft has spent a small fortune on useability testing, and most of what they've done works well. Brush it off as familiarity if you will, but there are concrete examples of Windows useability getting better (small example: the Start button now has infinite borders, just like the Apple menu in Mac OS -- throw the mouse down to the lower left and click, you'll get the start menu).

Rasterman, the main developer of The Enlightenment is already porting EVAS, the gfx engine of E17 to run on Zaurus LINUX. Here are some pics.

So I guess I'll have to settle for some Quake, or Quake2, or Quake3, or Wolfenstein, or Kingpin, or Soldier of Fortune, or Rune, or Alpha Centauri, or Heavy Metal FAKK2, or Railroad Tycoon, or Tuxracer, or Hexen II, or Hexen, or Doom, or any of the scores of other lesser games I have installed. I guess I could play Unreal Gold, or Fallout, or Fallout2, or Warcraft II using Wine if I felt like it too.

Reboot just to play Serious Sam, nah. Its too much of a hassle, and I just get mad every time I see that damn Windows boot screen. I've probably wasted a month of my life staring at that stupid thing over the years. Screw that.

how could you not like it? Instead of having to open 5 different windows of Mozilla I have just one and easy access to each (I use E and don't have the option of a taskbar or icons).

If you're using Enlightenment, then you can use the Icon Box as a taskbar analogue... it can store your 'iconified' (minimized) windows, even allowing you to have a 'snapshot' picture to represent it! I stretch my iconbox along the bottom of my screen, so It's just like a taskbar.

I also, however, find tabbed browsing to be a gift from the gods. Even in E. No more giant jumbles of open browser windows! The jumble is now quite moderate, and it's all in one easy-to-access window.

Needless to say when Linus dropped the bomb, I slurped up a 0.97 Debian system via ftp and started toying with it. Compared to MS-DOS and Windows 3.0, Debian Linux and XFree86 was such a stupendous improvement that any power user literally drooled over its potential...

C.A. 2002 now a new bunch of jerk-wads like yourself with more money than sense wants to support these criminals? Microsoft makes the U.S. Government ( the most notoriously corrupt government in the history of the world ) look like a bunch of wanna-bees. Don't get me wrong here, I like my corrupt government, but I don't want Microsoft to _become_ the government, which it is working very dilligently and insidiously to do.

Windows looks like a PIECE OF CRAP compared to Debian with Enlightenment 16, "Hand of God" theme, and Gnome with "Graphite" theme. The only time I ever boot to Windows is to play Serious Sam . So don't call me "kiddie" and go pay your tribute to Bill "Mammon" Gates, you foolish spendthrift and enemy of freedom. You are buying your way into slavery, fool.

Wheres the friggin' Tequila... arghhh!

Whatever. :) As to the Sakharov thing, my point there was that just submitting a title with someone's name isn't a good title at all. What's the story about? Why should I read it? They probably wouldn't let a story through with just the title "Linus Torvalds," either. Gotta give out more info in the title. Also, I'm not sure if you're aware of it, but Enlightenment is a Window Manager for X, hence the topic . . .

-Peter

-Peter

Let's string him up for failing to mention the other very important wm that runs with Gnome.

Sure. Just about any UNIX desktop environment is as flexible as LiteStep. Roll your own...don't feel like you just need to use KDE or GNOME or something like that. I've got a rather nice desktop with sawfish, the sawfish pager, all status information being shown via gkrellm, and programs launched via the keyboard using xbindkeys. No GNOME or KDE flavoring necessary.

AfterStep is probably the closest in functionality to LiteStep, but I personally prefer Enlightenment if you're looking for flash, Sawfish if you're looking for functionality, and Black Box if you're looking for speed.

Steps in roll-your-own:

Choose a base desktop environment (keep in mind that you can just mix and match bits of them...I used to use the GNOME panel without the rest of GNOME, and a roommate uses GNOME apps with the KDE environment):
None
GNOME
KDE
ROX
foXdesktop
Perltop
Equinox
XFce
Once you've chosen a desktop environment (or the lack of one), and possibly removed the parts of it that you don't like (with GNOME, I wholeheartedly suggest trying it without Nautilus, possibly without anything but the panel), then you get to choose a dock. Your current desktop may or may not include a dock/panel/wharf.

If it doesn't, icedock provides an environment-independent wharf for the afterstep-style wharf system -- swallowing apps.
gkrellm (seems to be currently down) makes for a nice status-monitor style dock.
Or you can make your own impromptu dock...I've built them before by starting xload and xlock with proper geometry arguments to stack them on top of each other, and having sawfish make the windows sticky and slap 'em at the edge of the screen.
Now a window manager. There are so many of these that I'm not going to list them all. I'll mention a few notables:
sawfish is a fairly fast, *extremely* flexible (everything's written in lisp, much like emacs) window manager that uses gtk. Currently GNOME's default. I love this thing, but it doesn't come with a pager, so you either need to use a base desktop environment with a pager or use spager.
enlightenment is, at least until the next major release, still a window manager and not a desktop environment. Lots of emphasis on eye candy.
ion, a novel window manager that's designed to be managed entirely with the keyboard and never overlap windows.
blackbox is what I'd suggest if you needed a fast environment that still looked nice.

Most WMs support launching programs with given key combinations. I'd advise against this. The excellent XBindKeys is window-manager independent, quite capable, allows you to kill off your window manager and still use keys to start programs, etc. Plus, there's a nice benefit to using a different program than your window manager to launch programs. If you never launch external programs with your WM, you can renice -10 `pidof sawfish` or whatever your window manager is. Making your window manager (and X) meaner with respect to CPU scheduling makes for a much more snappy environment when edge flipping or the like. Sure, it might take a sec for the mozilla windows in the background to finish redrawing when I flip to a new desktop, but in the meantime I can do my work without waiting around for them.

The reason you don't want to make your WM meaner if you use it to launch programs is that then all the programs will also be equally mean.

Decide on the Big Four applications of any X desktop. Text editor, web browser, file manager, and terminal emulator.

Text editor:
I can't possibly cover this holy war here. My personal preference is xemacs, which is a bit of a learning curve for new users from Windows, but well worth it in power in the long run. You may want something that meshes more with the rest of your chosen desktop environment.

Web browser:
Just because KDE uses Konqueror and GNOME uses galeon by default is no reason to stick with those. Of course, you also can use either Konq without KDE or galeon without GNOME. You're rolling your own environment!
mozilla is now (after years of work) a good web browser. Big, still slow and still RAM-hungry, but usably so.
dillo Lightweight, very fast, pretty stable, very screen-space efficient...I can't say enough good things about dillo. If you use dillo as your primary browser, be aware of the fact that it has fewer features than the large browsers, that it doesn't currently (without a patch) support SSL, that it uses a UNIXish config-file preferences interface, and that it doesn't lay out nested tables or wrap text around images the same way Mozilla does. I keep Mozilla around as a backup browser, but dillo is so freakishly fast that it's hard to want to use anything else.
There are a few other browsers, but Konqueror, Mozilla, and dillo are (IMHO) the big GUI players on Linux. Amaya is a specialty browser, Opera (thanks to its MDI interface) doesn't seem to have caught on much in the Linux world, and Navigator 4.x is definitely on its way out the door.

File manager:
You may choose to simply use a command-line shell and the standard file utilities (cp, rm, ls) to do your file management -- I do, and I've tried hard to give other things a chance. But if you prefer to use a specalized GUI tool:
Konqueror can be used, even if you aren't using KDE (you do, of course, need the KDE libraries installed). Faster than gecko (the engine in mozilla and galeon) and almost as standards compliant, Konqueror has a lot of fans.
GMC is no longer being developed, but it's a reasonable lightweight interface.
Nautilus, the current official GNOME file manager is big, slow, RAM-hungry, and pretty. Not sure how well Nautilus works outside of GNOME (given that Konqueror can work outside of KDE, I would expect this capability of Nautilus).
ROX filer is a very fast little gtk file manager.
There are a lot of file managers out there, so I won't list them all, especially as I'm happy with just bash and the POSIX tools.

Terminal emulator:
GNOME and KDE both come with terminal emulators -- gnome-terminal and Konsole. I'm not very impressed with either -- they're both very slow and aren't available apart from their associated desktop environment. Konsole supports tabbed terminals, which some people may like. Both of them are fairly easy to configure, and are suitable for newbies to work with.
Multi Gnome Terminal extends gnome-terminal significantly with Konsole-style tabs and a set of other features. If you like gnome-terminal, you should probably consider using this instead.
Eterm is a RAM-heavy terminal emulator that was designed to look nice. For all the tinting and blending it can do, reasonably fast.
Aterm seems to be basically a less featureful, less memory-hungry Eterm-like terminal.
xterm is the reasonably fast not-so-pretty fairly RAM-hungry terminal that's used all over the world.
rxvt is easily my favorite terminal emulator. rxvt uses less RAM than anything else out there, and is incredibly fast. You can compile in only the features you want to use (which can, of course, also be disabled at runtime). Background images are supported, but emphasis is not much on eye candy. Very configurable. The biggest drawback is that configuration is through traditional UNIX methods, which may scare away some -- X resources, command line options, compile-time options.

Whatever you do, choose a set of software that you like, and remember -- your desktop environment is based on Linux, which means it should composed of exactly the parts that you like most. Have fun!

I have to agree, that's one thing that's turned me off about KDE, the gradients feel weird, and that alpha blending can really look bad. Gnome's no spring chicken either, but I must say nautilus impresses me. For the record, I'm a Window Maker man myself, it is simplicity itself. Run a little Gnome panel, and I'm set. Though I'm very excited about Enlightenment 17

http://www.enlightenment.org/pages/imlib2.html

Methinks Rasterman and the Enlightenment team may not have had this in mind, but if they did, it'll work.

That previous post about the VM being important is spot on too.

There is one thing I've always wanted to know! What exactly is preventing Linux from becoming an excellent desktop OS? What is the reason why that can not happen? Did anyone say "this is not going to make it" when M$ released Windows 3.1? That exactly is my point - Linux desktop development has not stopped here. Recent versions of KDE and Gnome are a solid proof of that. We should also not forget the Enlightenment project. Greatly improved Enlightenment E17 will be released in near future. I bet some people will not believe their eyes when they get to see it.

Seriously, different project have different goals. kde whats to be the easiest to use for beginers. If you look at some of the posts from people about kde's usability, most have the theme "it works like this in windows, why is it different in kde". They are desiging for people who want this.

If you are looking for neat, new ideas try enlightenment, or 3dwm. Something for everyone...

Not specific to the screenshot, but the print dialog is EXACTLY THE SAME AS WINDOWS'.

Surprise, they do the same thing, besides this Print dialog has some functions that the windows one doesn't (like hiding the lower half, filtering printers and doing HTML-Settings ('though I don't know what to find there)). Btw, which windows printing dialog do you mean? I know that there is a default, but I just tried 3 programs: Mozilla 0.9.9, Notepad and Word 2000. And each of them had a different printing dialog)

The taskbar system is EXACTLY THE SAME AS WINDOWS'.

Just 'cause the one who did the screenshot likes it that way. The default looks different and you get much more functionality.

Even the HELP SYSTEM is EXACTLY THE SAME AS WINDOWS'.

You mean "exactly the same" as in "using HTML to store & display linked documents"? Wow, quite invoative from Microsoft. Beside, again windows is not consistent (Word doesn't use the default-windows help system), whereas KDE is.

The background *is* the default Mac OS X background.

Granted, but this is definitely not the default in any distribution

You're going to tell me that the round, bubbly blue title bars (whose construction are directly lifted from Windows'), were not directly inspired by the latest OS's from Apple and Microsoft?

Yes, I am. Creative use of the SHAPE-Extension for windows decorations have been around much longer than OS X and Windows XP. Take a look at Blue Steel, and theme that came default with Enlighenment 0.16 (which according to Freshmeat came out October 1999, long before anyone thought about Windows 2000). It has a shaped (i.e. not strictly rectangular) title bar.

When is Linux going to stop aiming to be JUST LIKE WINDOWS! and do something "innovative" in the GUI area?

As soon as you do some work in this direction. This is Open Source after all.

Oh, that's right. THEY WON'T, simply because all those open source programmers are PROGRAMMERS and know nothing about UI design!

I doub that the one who did Keramik is a programmer. Even if he is, he is also a great artist.

There's a REASON you won't find any UI features in KDE that haven't already appeared in Windows or Mac OS. Microsoft and Apple pay people who deserve the money BIG BUCKS to design UI's and perform focus groups.

You do now that both Microsoft and Apple also have programms that perform very poorly in usability tests? Take a look at the Interface Hall of Shame. There are quite some MS-products in there (and even Apples Quicktime). Sometimes they even make a bad UI for political reasons, which you most probably won't find in open source projects.

Hm ... so much work for a Troll, but I think it's worth it.