l also have a single panel, same as yours except mine is at the top because when I close an application my mouse is already at the top of the screen so when I want to open something my mouse is close by, it’s more efficient mouse movement. Also, my eyes tend to drop down more so I really don’t need to get ‘distracted’ by the panel at bottom, again I find it more efficient the way my eyes look at the screen.

Gnome is like wearing a straightjacket, and amarok2, kmail, akgregator, ktorrent, etc are so much better than their gnome counterparts and they keep getting better as the devs are starting to figure out kde4. Also, kde4 is creating better apis, whereas gnome is ugly broken hacks galore.

I installed the 64 bit version last week on my Intel Q6600 Quad Core from Dell. The udev device manager problem was a little annoying. It almost lost me a finger. CD Rom tray opens and then immediately slams shut when you eject a CD in Nautilus. It’s a bug that shipped with the release. Fortunately, upgrading to newer version of udev fixed problem. I had to go to 64 bit on my system with it having 6 GB of RAM. Otherwise I would sacrifice 2 GB because of 32 bit memory addressing limitation.

deviceguru:

Really nice review. I save screen real estate in GNOME by clicking the show hide buttons in the panel properties. Slides everything into the corner and out of the way when I don’t need it. You could always use the Autohide feature too. Personally, I am sticking with GNOME for a while on my desktop. I gave KDE 4.0 a try when it was shipped with openSUSE 11. It was a punishing experience. It would literally crash every 60 seconds. It more like alpha software, rather than a point release. I know 4.1 has improved stability, but I think I will wait a little while for the project to mature before I go back to it.

What I was looking for was a desktop that can allow me to easy manage lots of open windows which I use at job and that was one reason why I left Windows world.

Personally I found that Gnome with dual panel (one on top with menus and few other things, like nets-speed applet, etc and one at bottom with the list of opened windows) is the best approach to my needs. Adding compiz/emerald with “slickness theme” applied, and my desktop workspace was perfect for my needs. Later I removed second panel and replaced with awn, giving me highest usability. I use Fedora and Ubuntu (at second job) at my work places.

I’m still trying to find a KDE similar solution, but no success until now. OpenSuse 11 crashed KDE after online update not starting even X. Mandriva 2009 – well, Mandriva 2009 when clicking “start” button in KDE was crashing entire desktop and throw me at login screen, even if I can launch desired apps via Konsole route (pointless also because from time to time entire desktop was crashing on arbitrary right clicks on different icons/places).

Well, ok, KDE 4.1 looks great, shiny things, Krusader, Amarok, K3b, Kaffeine been my fav. apps (even under Gnome), but is not usable for workflow. I can’t afford an unexpected crash during my workflow to trash half of the work of the day.

I’m still using at work a Mandriva 2008 with KDE 3.5 and I’m satisfied about how perform.

What I don’t like about Ubuntu 8.10 (with ATI closed drivers installed) is that adobe flash plugin performs slower than in 8.04 despite that has been installed from repos, even the sound was with breaks. The Mandriva 2009 counterpart was much much faster (without ATI proprietary drivers installed).

Also I like that Metacity from Gnome offer me better transparent backgrounds compared with Mandriva 2008 KDE 3.51 with compiz (when moving a window along the desktop the window’s background sync have lag).

I don’t know how Gnome was in the past but now Gnome 2.2x seems very good and usable for me.