Miguel de Icaza-Making Gnome Fun I'm just in the process of switching back to KDE after trying Gnome on two machine for the last few months. I find neither one quite what I want (but then I don't think OS X or Windows are perfect by any means either). One thing I find puzzling about this blog entry though is: "My feeling is that the Gnome Desktop itself is fairly complete at this point and that is why we have seen people invest less into the actual infrastructure on the desktop and a lot more on getting things right. Am personally very happy with the incremental goodies in Gnome 2.10, it continues to be a pleasant upgrade every time and it is a good direction to polish and improve while some of the fundamental components of the desktop are sorted out." I would think it desirable to sort out the fundamentals sooner rather than later. Isn't one of the objectives of doing good design to get the skeleton in place before you hang the meat on it? Otherwise you are constantly re-implementing the user interface to cope with underlying design changes. Which come to think of it, sounds a lot like what is going on with Linux today. I don't know if the design of KDE is better than that of Gnome at this point or not, and by that I don't just mean eye candy. I actually don't care all that much if the interface "looks" good or not. I like to be able to change icons to soimething that is meaningful to me and that ability to change icons can go a long way toward a pleasant looking interface. What bugs me about KDE is that the preferred KDM desktop manager seems to slow everything down a tad, even agnostic applications such as Mozilla. XDM and GDM by comparison are much snappier. On the other hand, in my recent experience, Gnome doesn't even have file associations working right. I click on a file for which Xine is the one and only associated application and it tells me there is no association. If I right click on the file, and wait for the menu, what I see is that the menu drops down with no association and then a second later Xine shows up at the top of the list (or sometimes elswhere on the list). That's not eye candy, thats functionality, and I'd rather have the slightly slower response of KDE than the unpredictabilty of Gnome at this point. I can't help but thinking that this Mono project is doomed to fail. Any standard largely in the hands of Microsoft is going to be a target moved for their own convenience. Novell does not yet have a track record for supporing Linux, Icaza by comparison has a record of starting projects and getting them developed to the point where they have widespread public attention. Then he moves on to the next thing. Gnome, Evolution, Ximian, Mono, and I can't name a single person that is working on KDE, but there is an organization that seems to stand behind it and not let it stagnate. I'm not sure the same can be said of Gnome or Evolution at this point.