Gnome and KDE are great – they give you a beautiful desktop with all the tools and utilities you need. On either system, you’ll find a solid window manager, desktop icons, a panel full of applets, the works. That’s all well and good for your average desktop PC, but what if you need something lighter, faster, or cleaner in appearance?

The vast majority of Windows users in the world have never experienced the advantages that a multiple desktop computer environment provides. That is because most people use Microsoft Windows and that operating system only comes with a single desktop environment*.

Windows hasn't been my desktop environment for about seven years now. I have found I have no need for it, a Linux desktop does everything I need to do very well... Yet Microsoft's recent announcements about "Windows 7", the new version of Windows, find me sitting here feeling I have no choice but to discuss it, or be drowned out as a hopelessly irrelevant columnist.

Desktop environments like KDE and GNOME offer a popular interface to computing. Unfortunately they are also often heavy on resource usage. By contrast, the Equinox Desktop Environment (EDE) is the fastest desktop environment I know of -- but its lack of standards support and a few missing features may be troubling to some users.

For over a decade, KDE has supplied Linux and Unix users with a graphical desktop environment and a suite of useful applications. It has become one of the most popular desktop environments and is the default on many Linux distributions. With the coming of KDE 4, developers promised native KDE applications running on Windows.

This is the Moscow-based outfit’s desktop distribution that uses the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment, a low-resource usage desktop environment that the release announcement states “is guaranteed to work on machines with 256 MB of RAM and will likely work even with less amount of memory.”

Install configure and use LXDE desktop environment in openSUSE. LXDE is a new project aimed to provide a new desktop environment which is lightweight and fast. It’s not designed to be powerful and bloated, but to be usable and slim enough, and keep the resource usage low. Different from other desktop environments, LXDE doesn’t tightly integrate every component.

GNOME has attracted a vibrant community of open source artists who are collaborating to produce aesthetically sophisticated visual styles for the desktop environment. In this article we will look at a selection of some of the best themes for the GNOME environment.

In the beginning, we talked a bit about the holy war that wages onward between KDE and GNOME. Some of you aptly pointed out that there is a third desktop environment out there. It was never our intention to slight this desktop (we actually use it regularly).