Nish,

I tried out GNOME a while back, and personally agree with some of the posters as regards the various quirks about GNOME. I even did a debian install using the sarge netinstaller and installed GNOME and enlightenment, but was unable to use enlightenment because I couldn't find out how to modify gdm to show the different window managers like kdm. Next was the lack of scrolling on the desktops, the lack of power options in nautilus, various other things. However, on the whole GNOME is simple enough, that I think it would make a good interface for a newbie who just wants to use the computer rather than tinker with it. KDE is definitely for the power user but it's bloated. I do like and make heavy use of konqueror as the file manager in enlightenment, because of the right-click power user options. Nautilus has a nasty habit of taking over enlightenment's desktop and robs me of it's power user options that I really crave. I'm still trying to work out the quirks in ROX-filer, and it seems that it doesn't automatically update the mime-data info like konqueror does. As you can see, I'm a big fan of enlightenment, and I make no bones about it. It's small, fairly quick, and has the right mix of power user options and eye candy hands down, IMO. But with Linux being all about choices, what works for me doesn't necessarily work for everybody else. If there was a way I could rip out a huge portion of KDE and leave just the necessary parts I want/need, then I would have a small and quick installation that I would like to back up to an ISO.