Perhaps the KDE/GNOME stoush can be seen as a manifestation of the clash between the European and American cultures? KDE (whose developers are primarily German and Northern European) is a model of Teutonic efficiency and/or European dirigisme, providing a central framework and set of interchangeable components conforming to a strict standard. Meanwhile, GNOME takes more of a laissez-faire libertarian approach, relying on the glory of the free market of ideas and enlightened self-interest (if someone wants a better file dialog, they'll write one; if we end up with a dozen different file dialogs, that's more choice in the marketplace of ideas, and the good ones will get adopted; it's ugly but it works without central planning). Does that make any sort of sense?
(Incidentally, I don't use either system. My desktop is a bunch of xterms launched from a WindowMaker menu, with the odd KDE or GNOME app running by itself. Though KDE does seem to be a lot more coherent these days.)
I kind of switch between them periodically; KDE when I want something fast, efficient and "together"; GNOME when I want some eyecandy. I'm sorry so say, however, that I feel like can only make a real 'dash for the desktop' when one dies - and I believe GNOME is the one that will die. Many home-used oriented distribution (RedHat, Mandrake, Lycoris) are now pretty much based on KDE, with GNOME only offered as an option.
Go WindowMaker! I use that, along with mutt for mail and slrn for newsgroups. I also use the odd GNOME app., like GnomeICU and galeon. GNOME tends to have this habit of starting up about fifty pointless (as far as I can tell) extra background processes so I try to avoid it. I used to use fvwm2 but after moving from Slackware Linux to FreeBSD I decided to give WindowMaker another try, and I am highly impressed. I haven't used many GNUstep apps., but the WM widget toolkit is so much faster and smoother than gtk.
fvwm, on the other hand, is taking it a bit far, IMHO. It's ugly, both visually (it's like a bad knockoff of Motif, and evidence that, once upon a time, UNIX geeks had no visual design skills whatsoever) and in design (it's basically twm covered in layers of crufty hacks and scar tissue).
Once upon a time, fvwm was the best window manager (nobody, it seems, knew how to write a window manager from scratch, so everybody just wrote hacks of twm, and fvwm was the most baroquely elaborate one of those). Thankfully those days have passed.
Bah! twm is the one true window manager.
fvwm isn't ugly. I still use the red-on-blue colour scheme from the original fvwm and every time I see it I remember the heady feeling I got when I got X under Slackware working the first time, years and years ago, and realised I was free of Windows and OS/2 forever... KDE is never going to do that for me, no matter how much eye-candy they have.
As the article points out though, it's not so much about window managers as "toolkits" - the fact that KDE gives you a decent, modern, file-open dialogue box, while GNOME (and other straight X apps) still give you a nearly useless dialogue where you need to click through directories half a dozen times to get where you need to be. Sure KDE's file-open box is a Windows rip off, but it's ripped off an aspect of Windows that is _good_.
fvwm looks ugly to me, but then I've seen screenshots where it's almost as beautiful as WindowMaker can get. I just don't know how to customise it appropriately :-)
WM is easier to use than fvwm, it's (usually) prettier, and it's a hell of a lot more efficient than both GNOME and KDE.
Erm, IMHO.
A lot of fvwm's ugliness is below the surface; its codebase is riddled with crud from years of hacking. It's sort of like Perl only it doesn't do anything redeemingly nifty. :-)
FWIW, before I adopted WindowMaker, I used olvwm. I still think that the OPEN LOOK UI was one of the most aesthetically pleasing things on UNIX. (In fact, it looked like they actually went to the trouble of hiring a qualified visual designer for it, rather than just subscribing to the "when in doubt, add chunky bevels because they look cool" school of UI design.)
The only thing Gnome has going for it is its work in accessibility. I agree with the US/Europe gnome or Kde parallel. I've thought it too. I don't see Gnome going away or folding into Kde anytime soon though, regardless of the fact that KDE always seems to be two steps ahead. And since people are chiming in with their W.M.s of choice - Go Fluxbox! :^)
Prolly a little late to beep in on this conversation, but... ;)
KDE is more than just a window manager, as the guy wrote in his article. You can make it look (and almost act) like your favourite window manager, if you really want (yes, the panel can be made miniscule, the pager made to look like an fvwm one, etc).
The _key_ to KDE is the infrastructure. The KIOslaves, KParts, the enhanced widgets and dialogs like the file dialog. Just focusing on the window manager is missing the whole goddamn point.
How well does KDE interact with WindowMaker/your favourite non-KDE window manager?
Now that I'm actually using KDE under OS X (or rather, the kicker, kmail, konsole and konqueror :) I have to say it plays extremely well with "your favourite non-KDE window manager" - in this case, quartz-wm. There's quirks, but nothing too annoying (well, I'd like to be able to alt-tab through windows, but the quartz wm doesn't seem capable, and that's not a KDE problem ;)
Note: I only run the kicker (which is the panel thingy, btw) as a conveneint access point to the K menu, my bookmarks file, my konsole launching list, kmail and konqueror. The kicker panel is minimal in size and sits in the bottom left of the screen. The middle still has the OSX panel, into which windows are minimized (seamlessly acting like reg'lar OSX windows).
And I still get to use the kioslaves etc :)
quartz-wm does fuck up some of the window hints. The kicker gets a resize handle (it shouldn't) and file dialogs don't (they should).
[posted using konqueror on OS X :)]
Yes, fvwm2 is more than adequate :)