I’ve gone from gnome to kde and back again many times. I recently decided to try xfce (on ubuntu hardy) on the recommendation of a coworker. It’s been a month now and I don’t plan on switching back. I’m running on older hardware and both gnome and kde were a bit heavy for it, leading to long load times and slow application switches. Xfce has been really, really fast. I’m really surprised at just how quickly the window manager responds.
I usually have lots of apps open, some of them quite heavy (eclipse). For instance, right now I have the following apps open:
- Eclipse (editing in 6 tabs, 1 tomcat session running)
- 2 Firefox sessions (1 for browsing – 5 tabs, 1 for testing – 2 tabs)
- 8 terminal sessions tabbed across 2 actual window
- 4 instances of prism (work mail, gmail, google reader, google calendar)
- Accurev GUI
Xfce isn’t as flashy as gnome or kde, but it’s so much faster it doesn’t really matter. I’ll be rolling with xfce at work and gnome at home for the time being.