KDE 4 has prompted me to try Gnome – and I like what I see. It’s beautiful, clean, and use-oriented. I especially like Nautilus and the system monitor and the terminal program and simple but helpful features like the F10 menu key. It’s inspired software!
But nothing’s perfect. For one thing, Gnome doesn’t seem to be as configurable as KDE. I tried to change the maximize keystroke to Ctrl-Alt-M, to no avail. I’d also like to change F10, since that conflicts with the mc (Midnight Commander) exit key, but I don’t know how to do it.
The black screen at startup has recurred. This time, I wads not able to get out by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F1 and restarting gdm from the root: Ctrl-Alt-F1 had no effect. I had to reboot.
The problem occurred after gnome flashed and then blanked a login screen. I thought the lack of a login might be the cause, so I added another user and used YaST to ask that the login panel be shown. Well, gnome still isn’t giving me a chance to login, but at least the black screen problem has disappeared – for now, at least.