I love Fluxbox. It's not a desktop manager, just a window manager. Someone mentioned tabbed windows. That's awesome, especially for apps like Evince that don't have tabs. Also it has customizable mouse clicks on desktop and keyboard shortcuts that are easy to configure.

Fluxbox has no useless junk like icons (although you can get an icon manager if you want), it loads really fast, and has some great themes.

The only thing it doesn't have is window shading on mouse scrolling. Once it gets this it will be perfect.

Although the question is about "preferred" desktop manager, it's not clear how many respondents vote after trying out a few of them before deciding a preferred one. Many distros pack a default desktop manager which may be contributing to their widespread use. The "used to" factor may lead to "preferred one" feeling.

I mostly use Fvwm at home and Gnome at work, but I occasionally switch to other systems as the mood strikes. I'm still not very fond of KDE, but it has it's attractions. Mostly I find it too cluttered and intrusive, but some parts are very well done. Fluxbox is excellent. Enlightenment has, despite a checkered past, turned into something pretty solid and reliable. I haven't really played with Xfce much, mostly because it reminds me of CDE, which is a nightmare I prefer to forget, but I can understand the attraction. Windowmaker seems to be a bit stagnant these days, but it's still a good system.

Still, the majority of what I do is either under Fvwm or Gnome. Since the poll forced me to pick one, I went with Fvwm, which I've been using longer, but I do use Gnome just about as often these days.

I have used GNOME, KDE, Xfce, Enlightenment, Fluxbox, and Openbox. I prefer Gnome, but Xfce comes in at a close second. I plan on switching to KDE 4.1 once its available. I really enjoy KDE 4, but its not stable in its current state. I believe that once KDE 4 becomes more mature and stable, this pole might change drastically.

The way "unclutter" keeps destroying carefully
laid-out multi-window configurations (and the
fact that it is hard-coded in the KDE source
code and is *not*configurable*) gets me so upset
from time to time that I run IceWM for a while...

I've been running Ubuntu for a while now and I have another machine running KUbuntu on it and it just seems like my Ubuntu system is so much more customizable and stable. KDE may have a lot of programs and a certain look to it, but overall GNOME is, well nicer looking and much easier (for me) to use.

I'm still using KDE. In fact, I'm still using VectorLinux 5.1.1 (SW10.1). I guess it's simply because it does everything I need it to do, and I haven't really had time to play around with something newer. But I am starting to like XFCE more and more.

Oh ... the line "KDE is far superior to Brasero." should've said k3b is far superior to Brasero. My typo bad.

Strictly speaking for the desktop environment, I prefer Gnome and did switch from KDE 3.5x this past year. KDE was more elegant in a way but I found it much much buggier, slower, more prone to crashes, and less hardware configurable. Particularly with respect to the volume manager. I'd have problems constantly under KDE with properly mounting or unmounting or both regarding most removable media (hard drives, etc.). Also half the time wouldn't recognize a simple audio CD.

I like the simplicity and most of all the reliability of Gnome. Since switching over to it, my drive all work as they're supposed to and I don't need to mount my scanner as root as I did in KDE.

So for desktop environment in general ... Gnome.

Apps/packages ... a totally different story. No matter how many apps they try to get to match the QT based ones, GTK apps are often inferior. Amarok crushes Banshee. KDE is far superior to Brasero. Etc. Etc. I even prefer kFTP grabber over the gtk version. kFlickr for flickr uploading. DigiKam for photo management. k9copy for dvd ripping. I mean, with GTK based apps, you can't even customize the toolbar buttons. That is simply archaic. The only GTK apps I tend to use are really simplistic ones such as the calculator, audio tag tool, and sound converter that don't need much customization. Oh .. and Kaffeine is much more elegant and refined than Totem by far.

Linux users and pundit need to start distinguishing between the desktop environment and also notice a clear break between the QT vs. GTK packages. THAT, to me, is where the real difference lies.

Gnome should stay focused on what it does best. Provide a stable, nice looking, easy to configure, peripheral supporting desktop environment. But ... they oughta also realize that QT based packages/applications themselves are most often more elegant and simply nicer to use. And nicer looking. Compare a toolbar on k3b v Brasero or Kaffeine vs Brasero. No comparison. The GTK ones look absolutely archaic ... horrible even ... compared to there QT cousins.

THAT's what I like Linux and the greater move toward interoperability. I can like one desktop environment while preferring another system based packages.

I just seem to fight with GNOME much more. I have been an Ubuntu user for a year and a half. It took me a great deal of time to get the desk top configured the way I wanted. I recently switched to openSUSE with KDE and I am very impressed with it. In one evening I had the desktop looking the way I wanted and install multimedia support. This was mostly because there was less to do, SUSE came out of the box ready to use. I'm sticking with openSUSE and KDE.

I Use Gnome since I use Ubuntu and I have never regret it for one second. If you want something completely different when you move away from Windows you should consider Gnome. The longer you use it the more you're going to appreciate it. I have used KDE before during the time I loved the ARCH Linux distribution but for me (and yes, taste is personal) Gnome is #1.

It does what needs to be done... what more is there to say....

The fastes Windowmanager i have ever seen yet.

I appreciate KDE for its richly functional applications and interface. I may not take advantage of many of the features of a KDE application when I first start using it, but they're there when I need them. An example is KOrganizer. I thought that the todo list implementation was overkill, but I was very glad that overkill was available when I was tracking all of the work needed to be done to sell my house and arrange a move across the country.

I used GNOME for years, but grew tired of seeing features that I'd come to depend on disappear as new releases came out. Yes, yes - I know there's the HIG. I firmly believe in hiding complexity when it's not needed, but eliminating features wholesale is going too far. There's also the disturbing frequency of crashes I see with GTK applications. That first led me to start using their KDE equivalents.

It's much like the MS thing when people haggle over KDE or Gnome. These two guys dominate the popular Linux desktop by default. Then XFCE is billed as the one to use to rescue PCs from the junk pile. XFCE is actually a pretty sweet desktop that does not get in your way yet has good looks. As a point and click kind of guy I prefer Xfce because it runs even faster on new hardware.

started off in KDE on linux (mandriva) and didn't like it, then I found ubuntu and gnome, days of light followed.

I just love the look and feel of gnome, kde looks so odd with all the stuff squeezed on their bar and I also more like the gtk stuff and all the options and way of organizing, it just works better with my brain :P

I originally preferred GNOME. KDE 1.x, I didn't like. KDE 2.2 showed promise, but I still liked GNOME more back then.

But ever since KDE 3.0, I've found that I prefer that desktop to the GNOME 2.x desktop. It just "feels" more intuitive to me. That's probably because I came from a heavy MS Windows 95/NT background. Also, it just seems easier to tweak things (e. g. mime types, default apps) in KDE vs. GNOME. I've found that migrating MS Windows users is easier with, say, Kubuntu vs. Ubuntu, for those reasons. However, I've found that Mac users do find GNOME easier, so I'll use that desktop for that group of folks.

That said, I'm glad that GNOME came to exist, because it was directly responsible for Troll Tech freeing the Qt source code under the GPL. So, while it's not my preferred desktop anymore, I thank Miguel and Co. for starting the project and RMS for backing it publicly.

--SYG

I've used KDE for nearly 3 years in opensuse. Recently, switched to GNOME in ubuntu and I'm happy it. I changed to GNOME mainly because of its simplicity.

I use Xfce because it is more stable than any other I tried so far. Furthermore, every package I tried to install has worked allright on it.

For me, KDE seems to follow too much the m$ windows trend of a big impressive desktop, plenty of features (that u don't need actually). A bit of a mess.
I also tried Gnome, and also liked it, but wasn't as stable as xfce on my toshiba laptop, which perhaps has some particular configuration issues with debian distros.
--> So, Xfce by now.

It's not been for to long that I use unix-based systems. But as of now, I have migrated all of my internet, office graphics editing etc. needs over to GNU/linux.
I have tried quite some distros, from the classics (FC, SuSE, Debian, Ubuntu) over to some 'not so classic' ones.
Since I'm mainly interested in media creation, with a big focus on audio recording & production, I have also tried some of the specialised ones. I always found KDE nice, feature rich, very good to configure to my needs and then some, but unfortunately it has never ever been completely stable. Regular crashes of konqueror and other things.
Gnome does seem a bit more stable, and while I know that a quite a few extensions are available I always found it somewhat limited for user configuration.
Enlightenment seems to be a class WM, with an awful lot of features, top gui and then some. But it doesn't seem to be that stable yet. Also it can be intimidating for a new user at first to configure, as it follows some other ways/paradigms than Gnome/KDE.
So with XFCE I have found a very good compromise of speed vs feature set, it seems to be really stable and that's all it needs to make me happy.

Raphael ;)

In a straight comparison between Ubuntu and Kubuntu, I prefer Ubuntu. I don't know exactly why, there's nothing bad about Kubuntu at all, I just gravitate back to Ubuntu more often than not. I like the GNOME desktop a lot and there's lots of stuff I can do with it that Windows can't handle. Let's face it, they're both way better than Windows! On the other hand, I have read in many places that Kubuntu is not a properly integrated KDE setup so I'm keeping my mind open on the whole KDE vs GNOME thing until I have tried out KDE on a different distro. I am thinking Open SUSE. I downloaded the 4.3Gb DVD iso today but at the end of all that the md5's didn't match up. Just my luck! Never mind, I will do it again...open SUSE looks too good to miss out on.