of course nobody really needs compiz, but everybody loves eyecandy
so the way i see it, i had a few choices
use kde without compiz
use kde with compiz, but use emerald as a window decorator
use GNOME with compiz, with or without emerald
i decided to remove KDE for good, and reinstall opensuse with GNOME
(and i am glad i did, because well… kde sucks)
GNOME is so, so, so much better then kde3
and what about kde4? (well thats just a joke, becuase kde4 is even worst then kde3)
problems with kde4
compiz window decoration problem like mentioned above
cant get the panel or the start menu to have a shadow when using compiz
very few themes availible at the time being
plasma is the stupidest thing i have ever seen in my life (they should have stuck with kicker)
the desktop icons are F%$&* stupid for a few reasons
a. who the hell would ever need to rotate their desktop icons?
b. its a pain in the @$$ to add custom launchers to the dektop
c. when you right click on a file or a document that is on the desktop there are no real usefull options at all
(im talking about like; “extract here” or “open with” or “send to” or “write to disc”)
the keyboard shortcuts dont work for crap
a. no matter what, i cant set a shortcut key for the terminal
b. with amarok the next track, previous track ,play, and stop buttons all had to manually be assigned to my keyboards multimedia keys
c. with the volume manager i had to manually assign the volume up and down, to my keyboadrs multimedia keys
kde3.5 in my opinion is much better then kde4 but it still is not quite equivilat to gnome
(they took way to many steps in the wrong direction with kde4)
problems with kde3.5
the multimedia keys again dont work without manually assigning each one
again i cant set a shortcut key for the terminal
3.i have always heard that kde is much more customizeable (well thats bull$#*% because i can make gnome with compiz look much better than kde ever could and it takes me about 1/4 the time to customize
now ever since switching back to GNOME i have not run into a single problem
1.all my multimedia shortcuts worked right out of the box (as they should)
2.it is very easy to set a shortcut key to open any program, including the terminal
^^ You know, I’ve really been struggling with whether to go with the Gnome version of OpenSuse instead of KDE. I’m about 5 days in, and starting to think that jumping distros (Ubuntu to OpenSUSE) and moving from Gnome to KDE at the same time was a bad idea at my level of experience. Not that I am a Gnome expert, but I’ve been using it for more than a year, whereas my only prior KDE experience was a month or two with KDE 3.5.x.
Based on your post here, I think I’m going to do the same as you did.
I just wanted to share my opinion… not everyone “loves eye candy”. In fact, one of the standard things I do when installing WinXP is to turn off all the extra desktop effects and themes. I like lean, clean and efficient OSs.