I use FC2/GNOME on a P3-450, 262Mb RAM (PC100), and although it is not fast, it is quite usable. I always have at least Evolution, Firefox, Pan, text editor, XMMS, and a shell or two open with no swappage that I notice. This is with an ancient nVidia RivaTNT2(32Mb) video card, and a 1Gb swap partition. I've been a Red Hat user since 5.0, although IIRC, my FC2 was a fresh install over my existing FC1.
I've noticed that themes can make a big difference, but with default BlueCurve and a few others (Digital-Cream, munja-remix) it's not bad.
I like the idea. I've just spent the last week trying to get a wireless PCMCIA card working, finally assembling enough documentation to understand exactly what chipset it has, what source is available, what packaging is not available (a non-developer's laptop), and the likelyhood of the distribution ever supporting it. (Binary wrapping, etc.)
I often use Red Hat's compatibility list to find stuff that is known to work, but it would also be useful to have a list of stuff I'm wasting my time over.
MS might want to rethink handing back all its cash to investors if this is how they're going to do business from now on...
But isn't this the only option they really have? This is what competition is all about!
Everyone knows Microsoft has been cleaning up because they are a monopoly. (Whether a good or bad monopoly is another subject.) With competition, everything changes. To keep up you have to make an offer to the market with some efficiency, service, feature, innovation or quality that no one else can provide.
But on the desktop, Microsoft is now being pinched from above (Apple) and below (Linux). Granted these competitors are not yet worthy to take the whole pie but I'm sure Redmond is beginning to understand that they are fighting a two front war. And their ability to attack one competitive front only exposes a weakness to the other. The article suggests to me that this reaction is against the bottom: Linux is simply cheaper, Microsoft has to respond with significantly better pricing to make the sale. (Maybe Longhorn is an effort to compete more with Apple by offering a competing design level or media friendly platform?)
Having been around a while, I find this all very facinating because I can see how fast the tables turn in this industry. What they once did to others is now being done unto them.:) The best part is that the market can now feign to either side and Microsoft has to respond. They can negotiate against price point or from design/usability.
During such an innovative time (historically speaking) many disruptions occur. It's nearly impossible to keep any ship afloat for more than a generation. As Microsoft enters its second one, I feel certain we'll see more of this type of behavior as they struggle to keep momentum. Sit back and watch the show!
I'm not an active open source community person (just a user) . . . but I have to wonder if the open source community attracts the kind of people typically needed to create excellent interfaces.
It doesn't. I'm an architect and I regularly observe UIs that have no sense to them whatsoever. Open Source acts usually as a meritocracy and I've never found a coder who was willing to redesign his entire application because the UI sucked. It's not a chicken and egg problem (as other posts around seem to indicate) since the UI always comes last.
I once considered starting a project that designed application interfaces for tasks that were needed in hopes that some coder would come along behind and actually write them. (I had a great idea for a clock that doubled as a date/location/world time zone applet.) But we have no influence. UI is considered like the body molding tacked on to American cars half way through a model's life to re-energize sales. It's never considered as an integral part of the design the way someone Porsche does.
Can't say I consider myself so bright any more now that I'm older, but I suggest you try a field that has a lot of width, like architecture.
That was my experience. I was lucky to get six years to complete undergrad (thanks Mom and Dad!) so I could do the four year commitment to architecture school while still taking quite a few religion, business, art and history courses. Never failed a class and graduated with nearly 200 hours. Best thing that could have happened, even though I didn't realize it at the time. (I transferred too late in my freshman year and couldn't get into Arch school until my junior year.)
And now, even though I've been in this career for a while, I still enjoy it. Architecture has a lot of different opportunities. You can develop into a designer, focusing on the art and philosophy. Or you can explore the technical side becoming a specialist in specifications, construction administration, or some particular design focus such as laboratory planning. Other opportunities include project, financial and office management, marketing and graphics, or CAD, computer and technical support. Really, there's something for everyone.
The trick is to not focus too soon. Most professions (medicine, law, accounting, architecture) have a range of skill areas. Even computer science, as specific as it is, has opportunities in marketing, usability, testing, graphics, business and project management, sales, internal technical support, and human resources--not just programming.
The downside of not focusing early is that you'll always be behind the savant who did. But if you know yourself not to be that way (as you do) don't even try to compete. I always think its funny when the working end of the screwdriver types (in my profession the designers) lament that everyone else goes home on time and has more of a life. They miss that it's a team effort, and they need the rest of us as much as we need them. (Besides the fact that such focus can sometimes lead to massive mis-direction and inefficiency. Although I will grant that it takes that type and effort to yield the once-in-a-lifetime genius work of architecture. Once. Among dozens of failures and misses.)
So be sure to shop around and keep yourself learning broadly. Force yourself to learn things you don't want to know. And remember, even though you might be known as your office's CliffClavin, it only takes one time for that single obscure bit of knowledge or experience to land your firm a mega contract and bump you up the ladder five rungs.
CUPS isn't bad, I agree. (Browser control makes a lot of sense, too.) But I still find many apps do not support it without customization (Vim) and many other apps (GIMP, SodiPodi, Inkscape) are unable to print reliably, if at all.
Pro/Engineer Wildfire is for product manufacturing, not building construction, GIS, land survey and planning, font creation, etc. I was talking about CAD the equivalent of MicroStation or AutoCAD. And I do know what I'm talking about.
My family uses Fedora Core 2 at home as the sole OS. Here's a list of broken things that would keep me from convincing my work (Architectural firm) to use it:
Broken printing. I always feel lucky when printing Just Works. Using it with image viewers and file manager thumbnail collections seem a distant fantacy.
No CMYK support. (Yeah, it's related to printing, but there aren't apps that can even managing it for authoring, let alone output.)
Poor/non-existant GL support. (Even possible given proprietary hardware?)
No serious 3D CAD application. This is a huge industry hanging out in Windows before it can adopt Linux. IMO, PythonCAD is the best Free CAD software effort at the moment, but it is hardly Alpha and at least five years away from serious CAD work.
Slow GUI. Linux still feels slower than Windows, regardless if the processor work is twice as efficient.
Flakey sound support. Like printing, I'm always pleasently surprised when my sound works across applications and levels seem balanced.
That's the big item list for me. If all these ever get solved, the Windows platform will either be down for the count or headed there.
I have the exact same hardware as in the article (450 MHz PIII, and Diamond Viper V770 (TNT2 chipset)) and a fresh install of Fedora Core 2 worked the first time.
Of course we have to wait on Nvidia before we get GL, but I've been able to use this exact hardware on every version of Red Hat since 5.1. (I had to do some manual config tweaking up to about 7.0, but it's been automatically configured since then.)
Don't you just love how Windows' in-securities are spun as "evil forces"?
And don't you also love how Microsoft's solutions always point the responsibility finger elsewhere. They always try to paint themselves as the good guy, having to clean up after the mayhem someone else initiated. "Here's our progress on taking steps to combat the evil in the world."
One of these days, business is going to wake up to this shell game and start holding the software manufacturer to blame for the general design problems of their products. Then you'll start seeing a general shift to another platform, maybe starting in the back office, file and printer serving, firewalls, etc. The desktop will be last.
Wait a sec, perhaps that explains the new firewall corporate bought for our branch to replace our old Win2K one... Linux.
Have you ever used an Apple? Take a look at Photoshop on OSX. There is only ever a single menu, and it is always positioned at the top of the desktop. It changes to the focused app's menu bar, which means that the desktop is nearly MDI, and not the SDI of Microsoft Office and GIMP. (And at least a key combination in both Apple and MSOffice drop a menu of the other windows. In GIMP, keys can't reach to another window in the app's same session.)
Mac has never implemented the sort of SDI that Windows or GNOME has. This comment pretty clearly expresses how Apple's basic windowing interface cleverly skirts around the major SDI issues in GIMP.
This whole GIMP interface debate could be solved with the addition of just a few tiny options. The day usability is actually designed rather than filtered out of political discussions and developer whim is the day GIMP quadruples its user base and becomes a practical alternative on Windows.
Couldn't agree more on either point: GIMP needs MDI, and it needs a single package installer on Windows.
I wish there was some way to evaluate *the graphics experience level* of the multi-window crowd. Perhaps its more comprehendable for a newbie, but for those of us who need a powerful graphic app professionally, multiple top level windows is a joke. If I have three dozen graphic files open and I need to cross reference email(MDI), web browser(MDI), and a text editor (MDI), all related to some web site I'm developing, why is it that only the graphic program is allowed to spew windows all across the desktop? We certainly don't tolerate this behavior in other applications.
Wow, I'm a soon-to-be licensed architect in RTP... love to know more, can you mail me off line? (Firm, CAD software, desktop environment, etc.)
I'm right now struggling to decide if I should release a whole set of AutoCAD tools under the GPL. I'd rather help a project like PythonCAD, but it is still a long way from being usable. I hate to assist proprietary CAD makers, but can't figure out a way to migrate off yet. Sounds like you've found a way.
Just as figure ice skater retract their arms closer to their axis of rotation to go faster, and spread them out to slow down, won't this have the same effect on the earth's rotation? If so, it should then be measurable, proving or disproving the claim.
Pentium-era computer? I once tried to load Windows 95 on a Pentium 90 and it took five minutes just to boot up. Once it did, it was too slow to be usable. (This was back when the machine was less than a year old, it was the latest in consumer technology.)
If we're going to contemplate the memory and processing required by GNOME and the computer resources available to the poverty stricken, we at least need to consider the possibility that *no* usable desktop may be available. GNOME may not be as light as a window manager environment, but it is as good or competitive with any other multi-tasking desktop environment and application collection that is widely distributed, let alone one that supports internationalization, accessibility, and is Free.
And who is going to blow more money on RAM to upgrade a machine that is still slower than a cheaper, newer-technology box? (I didn't say new, just newer.)
Uh, first of all, I was in high school before IBM's first PC. I'm not some flippant high schooler who doesn't understand the concept of value and investment... and neither, hopefully, are my kids.
Second, half the PC100 RAM in my machine came from my company who was going to throw it away! I'm not proposing you go out and buy a new machine to use GNOME. Just the opposite!
Lastly, poverty is not caused by making wise use of current resources, which is exactly what I'm talking about. There's no insistance that one use GNOME with a brand new machine, or even a two year old one. (Elsewhere, I've already stated that my machine if 5 years old, beyond the lifetime for a typical business class machine.)
To say that GNOME is memory intensive is a huge overstatment considering the typical spec sold today. You won't run it with 64Mb, but 128 does just fine. I think that's entirely reasonable, even for someone without a lot of financial resources.
Are you saying the machine he's going to run it on was free? RAM is 5% the cost of a machine. You pay more for a video card.
I'll re-iterate my point: I use Linux as my sole OS on a 5 year old consumer quality machine. It does great, and with the improvements in the 2.6 kernal I hear about, I probably won't need to upgrade my hardware for several more years.
Heh, the theme you linked to prove your point was only uploaded today. Downloads per day at art.gnome.org is calculated over a very recent period. (Like maybe even 24 hours.) So popularity is nowhere close to indicating the most number of downloads.
GNOME users are not some homogeneous group. (Are the other desktop's users?) We come from Mac9, MacX, Win95, WinXP, KDE, Solaris, the command line, and others. So to define your "one interface" is perhaps not as simple as you seem to think it is.
Half of the real question about the quality of a desktop environment is how well it works for someone who has never used a computer before. (The other half being for someone who has.)
[GNOME and KDE] don't feel much faster than Windows XP
Have to disagree with you there. I use GNOME on a P3-450Mhz at home, and it feels almost as fast as the WinXP I use on a P4-2600Mhz at work; nearly five times the machine!
As you say, RAM does matter (I have 262Mb on the home machine) but memory is cheap. What's the big deal?
Note that desktop environment usability should not be judged on its similarity to another. If you've only ever used Windows, and you like the Windows interface, and you judge everything against Windows, KDE may seem more appealing. But that doesn't mean KDE (or GNOME) is better.
For many of us, the Windows interface is not ideal. I might also question the quality of the SuSE GNOME environment, too, since they have long been a KDE based desktop (confession: I've never tried it). Try a GNOME-centric distribution (like Fedora) and try GNOME, you might find it more appealing.
Finally, GNOME's widgets can all be themed, did you only use the default? art.gnome.org hosts tons of widget, window and icon themes with which I could nearly convince you your environment was any number of other OSs.
That's interesting, you've learned a spatial (perhaps more efficient) organization from a logical one. Architects fight about this all the time: Do we build the logic into our environment and learn from it or do we learn to see new logic in an existing environment and re-shape to fit?
Are your bookmarks alphabetized? I work with people who let Windows (beyond 95) stash program icons as they're installed. It drives me crazy because they're not alphabetized and every user's system is different. But to each user, they don't seem to even notice (!) because they have a reacting attitude toward their environment, not a shaping one.
I believe when monitor resolutions significantly increase (300dpi+) we'll begin to be able to incorporate textures, lighting and other subtle gestures to further help us detect position within a virtual environment. I imagine if your resolution changed, your navigation system would be ruined. This is probably similar to a child stashing valuable things around the house--each item is landmarked by other objects. If the relationship proportions, scale or orientation change too much, the mind's picture of the whole is destroyed. I'm the same way; I've lately been trying to make myself less resolution-dependant by organizing things in lists. In Windows this is via a "favorite icons" list in the root of the Start Menu and in GNOME by placing icons across a narrow top menu bar. If my resolution changes, the relationship of all the icons to each other doesn't change. But this is still only a single level of organization.
Imagine a system where texture indicated frequency of use (wear), color indicated app v. action v. information (doc), sound indicated public functions (chat, mail) v. private (writing, genealogy app), spacing of icons could indicate a relatively independant app (large buffer around my drawing program) while a grouping might indicate a suite (calendar, todo, memos, notes). To a programmer, this is *huge* complexity. But to a user, it's natural; we already organize our non-virtual lives this way.
Of course, compressing life into (currently) two dimensions is an enormous abbreviation already, but I've seen many a painting that reached beyond the canvas it sat on.
Slashdot Mirror
I use FC2/GNOME on a P3-450, 262Mb RAM (PC100), and although it is not fast, it is quite usable. I always have at least Evolution, Firefox, Pan, text editor, XMMS, and a shell or two open with no swappage that I notice. This is with an ancient nVidia RivaTNT2(32Mb) video card, and a 1Gb swap partition. I've been a Red Hat user since 5.0, although IIRC, my FC2 was a fresh install over my existing FC1.
I've noticed that themes can make a big difference, but with default BlueCurve and a few others (Digital-Cream, munja-remix) it's not bad.
Heh, nice reply. Speaking as a 37 year old, I almost tripped over my walker I was laughing so hard.
I like the idea. I've just spent the last week trying to get a wireless PCMCIA card working, finally assembling enough documentation to understand exactly what chipset it has, what source is available, what packaging is not available (a non-developer's laptop), and the likelyhood of the distribution ever supporting it. (Binary wrapping, etc.)
I often use Red Hat's compatibility list to find stuff that is known to work, but it would also be useful to have a list of stuff I'm wasting my time over.
But isn't this the only option they really have? This is what competition is all about!
Everyone knows Microsoft has been cleaning up because they are a monopoly. (Whether a good or bad monopoly is another subject.) With competition, everything changes. To keep up you have to make an offer to the market with some efficiency, service, feature, innovation or quality that no one else can provide.
But on the desktop, Microsoft is now being pinched from above (Apple) and below (Linux). Granted these competitors are not yet worthy to take the whole pie but I'm sure Redmond is beginning to understand that they are fighting a two front war. And their ability to attack one competitive front only exposes a weakness to the other. The article suggests to me that this reaction is against the bottom: Linux is simply cheaper, Microsoft has to respond with significantly better pricing to make the sale. (Maybe Longhorn is an effort to compete more with Apple by offering a competing design level or media friendly platform?)
Having been around a while, I find this all very facinating because I can see how fast the tables turn in this industry. What they once did to others is now being done unto them. :) The best part is that the market can now feign to either side and Microsoft has to respond. They can negotiate against price point or from design/usability.
During such an innovative time (historically speaking) many disruptions occur. It's nearly impossible to keep any ship afloat for more than a generation. As Microsoft enters its second one, I feel certain we'll see more of this type of behavior as they struggle to keep momentum. Sit back and watch the show!
It doesn't. I'm an architect and I regularly observe UIs that have no sense to them whatsoever. Open Source acts usually as a meritocracy and I've never found a coder who was willing to redesign his entire application because the UI sucked. It's not a chicken and egg problem (as other posts around seem to indicate) since the UI always comes last.
I once considered starting a project that designed application interfaces for tasks that were needed in hopes that some coder would come along behind and actually write them. (I had a great idea for a clock that doubled as a date/location/world time zone applet.) But we have no influence. UI is considered like the body molding tacked on to American cars half way through a model's life to re-energize sales. It's never considered as an integral part of the design the way someone Porsche does.
Can't say I consider myself so bright any more now that I'm older, but I suggest you try a field that has a lot of width, like architecture.
That was my experience. I was lucky to get six years to complete undergrad (thanks Mom and Dad!) so I could do the four year commitment to architecture school while still taking quite a few religion, business, art and history courses. Never failed a class and graduated with nearly 200 hours. Best thing that could have happened, even though I didn't realize it at the time. (I transferred too late in my freshman year and couldn't get into Arch school until my junior year.)
And now, even though I've been in this career for a while, I still enjoy it. Architecture has a lot of different opportunities. You can develop into a designer, focusing on the art and philosophy. Or you can explore the technical side becoming a specialist in specifications, construction administration, or some particular design focus such as laboratory planning. Other opportunities include project, financial and office management, marketing and graphics, or CAD, computer and technical support. Really, there's something for everyone.
The trick is to not focus too soon. Most professions (medicine, law, accounting, architecture) have a range of skill areas. Even computer science, as specific as it is, has opportunities in marketing, usability, testing, graphics, business and project management, sales, internal technical support, and human resources--not just programming.
The downside of not focusing early is that you'll always be behind the savant who did. But if you know yourself not to be that way (as you do) don't even try to compete. I always think its funny when the working end of the screwdriver types (in my profession the designers) lament that everyone else goes home on time and has more of a life. They miss that it's a team effort, and they need the rest of us as much as we need them. (Besides the fact that such focus can sometimes lead to massive mis-direction and inefficiency. Although I will grant that it takes that type and effort to yield the once-in-a-lifetime genius work of architecture. Once. Among dozens of failures and misses.)
So be sure to shop around and keep yourself learning broadly. Force yourself to learn things you don't want to know. And remember, even though you might be known as your office's Cliff Clavin, it only takes one time for that single obscure bit of knowledge or experience to land your firm a mega contract and bump you up the ladder five rungs.
CUPS isn't bad, I agree. (Browser control makes a lot of sense, too.) But I still find many apps do not support it without customization (Vim) and many other apps (GIMP, SodiPodi, Inkscape) are unable to print reliably, if at all.
Pro/Engineer Wildfire is for product manufacturing, not building construction, GIS, land survey and planning, font creation, etc. I was talking about CAD the equivalent of MicroStation or AutoCAD. And I do know what I'm talking about.
My family uses Fedora Core 2 at home as the sole OS. Here's a list of broken things that would keep me from convincing my work (Architectural firm) to use it:
That's the big item list for me. If all these ever get solved, the Windows platform will either be down for the count or headed there.
I have the exact same hardware as in the article (450 MHz PIII, and Diamond Viper V770 (TNT2 chipset)) and a fresh install of Fedora Core 2 worked the first time.
Of course we have to wait on Nvidia before we get GL, but I've been able to use this exact hardware on every version of Red Hat since 5.1. (I had to do some manual config tweaking up to about 7.0, but it's been automatically configured since then.)
Fedora Core 2 hasn't even be released yet. NTFS support will be released in RPM format within 24 hours of it's official release.
Patience grasshopper.
Thanks for the concise update.
Can't believe no one else even offered. Oh wait, this *is* SlashDot...
Don't you just love how Windows' in-securities are spun as "evil forces"?
And don't you also love how Microsoft's solutions always point the responsibility finger elsewhere. They always try to paint themselves as the good guy, having to clean up after the mayhem someone else initiated. "Here's our progress on taking steps to combat the evil in the world."
One of these days, business is going to wake up to this shell game and start holding the software manufacturer to blame for the general design problems of their products. Then you'll start seeing a general shift to another platform, maybe starting in the back office, file and printer serving, firewalls, etc. The desktop will be last.
Wait a sec, perhaps that explains the new firewall corporate bought for our branch to replace our old Win2K one... Linux.
Have you ever used an Apple? Take a look at Photoshop on OSX. There is only ever a single menu, and it is always positioned at the top of the desktop. It changes to the focused app's menu bar, which means that the desktop is nearly MDI, and not the SDI of Microsoft Office and GIMP. (And at least a key combination in both Apple and MSOffice drop a menu of the other windows. In GIMP, keys can't reach to another window in the app's same session.)
Mac has never implemented the sort of SDI that Windows or GNOME has. This comment pretty clearly expresses how Apple's basic windowing interface cleverly skirts around the major SDI issues in GIMP.
This whole GIMP interface debate could be solved with the addition of just a few tiny options. The day usability is actually designed rather than filtered out of political discussions and developer whim is the day GIMP quadruples its user base and becomes a practical alternative on Windows.
Couldn't agree more on either point: GIMP needs MDI, and it needs a single package installer on Windows.
I wish there was some way to evaluate *the graphics experience level* of the multi-window crowd. Perhaps its more comprehendable for a newbie, but for those of us who need a powerful graphic app professionally, multiple top level windows is a joke. If I have three dozen graphic files open and I need to cross reference email(MDI), web browser(MDI), and a text editor (MDI), all related to some web site I'm developing, why is it that only the graphic program is allowed to spew windows all across the desktop? We certainly don't tolerate this behavior in other applications.
Thanks to their confusing graphics, I see Red Hat's name misspelled as one word "RedHat" all the time. And it *still* googles at 3,440,000!
Wow, I'm a soon-to-be licensed architect in RTP... love to know more, can you mail me off line? (Firm, CAD software, desktop environment, etc.)
I'm right now struggling to decide if I should release a whole set of AutoCAD tools under the GPL. I'd rather help a project like PythonCAD, but it is still a long way from being usable. I hate to assist proprietary CAD makers, but can't figure out a way to migrate off yet. Sounds like you've found a way.
Will this make days longer?
Just as figure ice skater retract their arms closer to their axis of rotation to go faster, and spread them out to slow down, won't this have the same effect on the earth's rotation? If so, it should then be measurable, proving or disproving the claim.
Pentium-era computer? I once tried to load Windows 95 on a Pentium 90 and it took five minutes just to boot up. Once it did, it was too slow to be usable. (This was back when the machine was less than a year old, it was the latest in consumer technology.)
If we're going to contemplate the memory and processing required by GNOME and the computer resources available to the poverty stricken, we at least need to consider the possibility that *no* usable desktop may be available. GNOME may not be as light as a window manager environment, but it is as good or competitive with any other multi-tasking desktop environment and application collection that is widely distributed, let alone one that supports internationalization, accessibility, and is Free.
And who is going to blow more money on RAM to upgrade a machine that is still slower than a cheaper, newer-technology box? (I didn't say new, just newer.)
Uh, first of all, I was in high school before IBM's first PC. I'm not some flippant high schooler who doesn't understand the concept of value and investment... and neither, hopefully, are my kids.
Second, half the PC100 RAM in my machine came from my company who was going to throw it away! I'm not proposing you go out and buy a new machine to use GNOME. Just the opposite!
Lastly, poverty is not caused by making wise use of current resources, which is exactly what I'm talking about. There's no insistance that one use GNOME with a brand new machine, or even a two year old one. (Elsewhere, I've already stated that my machine if 5 years old, beyond the lifetime for a typical business class machine.)
To say that GNOME is memory intensive is a huge overstatment considering the typical spec sold today. You won't run it with 64Mb, but 128 does just fine. I think that's entirely reasonable, even for someone without a lot of financial resources.
Are you saying the machine he's going to run it on was free? RAM is 5% the cost of a machine. You pay more for a video card.
I'll re-iterate my point: I use Linux as my sole OS on a 5 year old consumer quality machine. It does great, and with the improvements in the 2.6 kernal I hear about, I probably won't need to upgrade my hardware for several more years.
Heh, the theme you linked to prove your point was only uploaded today. Downloads per day at art.gnome.org is calculated over a very recent period. (Like maybe even 24 hours.) So popularity is nowhere close to indicating the most number of downloads.
GNOME users are not some homogeneous group. (Are the other desktop's users?) We come from Mac9, MacX, Win95, WinXP, KDE, Solaris, the command line, and others. So to define your "one interface" is perhaps not as simple as you seem to think it is.
Half of the real question about the quality of a desktop environment is how well it works for someone who has never used a computer before. (The other half being for someone who has.)
Have to disagree with you there. I use GNOME on a P3-450Mhz at home, and it feels almost as fast as the WinXP I use on a P4-2600Mhz at work; nearly five times the machine!
As you say, RAM does matter (I have 262Mb on the home machine) but memory is cheap. What's the big deal?
Note that desktop environment usability should not be judged on its similarity to another. If you've only ever used Windows, and you like the Windows interface, and you judge everything against Windows, KDE may seem more appealing. But that doesn't mean KDE (or GNOME) is better.
For many of us, the Windows interface is not ideal. I might also question the quality of the SuSE GNOME environment, too, since they have long been a KDE based desktop (confession: I've never tried it). Try a GNOME-centric distribution (like Fedora) and try GNOME, you might find it more appealing.
Finally, GNOME's widgets can all be themed, did you only use the default? art.gnome.org hosts tons of widget, window and icon themes with which I could nearly convince you your environment was any number of other OSs.
That's interesting, you've learned a spatial (perhaps more efficient) organization from a logical one. Architects fight about this all the time: Do we build the logic into our environment and learn from it or do we learn to see new logic in an existing environment and re-shape to fit?
Are your bookmarks alphabetized? I work with people who let Windows (beyond 95) stash program icons as they're installed. It drives me crazy because they're not alphabetized and every user's system is different. But to each user, they don't seem to even notice (!) because they have a reacting attitude toward their environment, not a shaping one.
I believe when monitor resolutions significantly increase (300dpi+) we'll begin to be able to incorporate textures, lighting and other subtle gestures to further help us detect position within a virtual environment. I imagine if your resolution changed, your navigation system would be ruined. This is probably similar to a child stashing valuable things around the house--each item is landmarked by other objects. If the relationship proportions, scale or orientation change too much, the mind's picture of the whole is destroyed. I'm the same way; I've lately been trying to make myself less resolution-dependant by organizing things in lists. In Windows this is via a "favorite icons" list in the root of the Start Menu and in GNOME by placing icons across a narrow top menu bar. If my resolution changes, the relationship of all the icons to each other doesn't change. But this is still only a single level of organization.
Imagine a system where texture indicated frequency of use (wear), color indicated app v. action v. information (doc), sound indicated public functions (chat, mail) v. private (writing, genealogy app), spacing of icons could indicate a relatively independant app (large buffer around my drawing program) while a grouping might indicate a suite (calendar, todo, memos, notes). To a programmer, this is *huge* complexity. But to a user, it's natural; we already organize our non-virtual lives this way.
Of course, compressing life into (currently) two dimensions is an enormous abbreviation already, but I've seen many a painting that reached beyond the canvas it sat on.