GNOME/Ximiam

I've been using GNOME for a GUI ever since I first installed Linux. It was the screenshots of GNOME and KDE in the manual (the two desktops that came with Redhat Linux 7.1) that made me pick it actually, and I still haven't seen or tried KDE in action. Haven't really been curious about it either, because I like GNOME as it is. The smooth way the panel slides away when you click on the ends makes me happy every time :-) ...

The Ximiam desktop is a more recent experience, but I'm pretty sure I won't be going back to standard GNOME already. The whole desktop, as well as the window manager that comes with it, looks more polished, smoother and nicer. Maybe a little Mac-like for some (the top panel has rounded corners! :-), but I've heard that about BeOS too and it doesn't bother me anyway. Oh yeah, I've set my windows to the BeOS theme as well, yummy!

Setup of Ximiam was nice, but should have been even nicer. No hand-picking of components on one hand, but checking and downloading of required ones on the other. Download and installation worked flawlessly, only thing was the system locked up in the end. So hard that I found no other way out than to reboot (but mind you, I'm no Linux expert yet, not by far). And I think that lockup might be related to something else.

Anyway, apart from the lockup and related adventures (all of which ended well) everything worked perfectly all the time. Initial customizing was smooth and userfriendly, and it was kind of fun to find a discreetly named "Redmond" option for window looks and colour schemes ... I needed (and still need) to do more of customizing though, for example to get all the menu options I want to show (okay, they may have made it less overwhelming, but I still think the average person would have been happy to see just additions to his menu, not replacement and hiding of the old), and of course of Nautilus. Nautilus is Ximiam's window manager, that appearantly uses Mozilla and that can do with some speeding up. Opening my home folder the first time was so slow that I actually opened two windows (which didn't speed things up either). Some configuration fixed the worst slowness, and I can't say anything bad about the features. The news view might become a dangerous distraction ...

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