Bah. The dropline guys were doing a better job anyways.
Also I think it was also because he wanted to keep the number of cdroms used by slackware install to be very low.
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The difference between KDE and Gnome is a big one. Much bigger then, say, Windows 2000 vs Windows XP.
Which one you would want to use is a matter of taste. Some people love KDE and despise Gnome. While KDE makes my eyeballs bleed.
KDE aims for eye candy, lots of flashy features, lots of configurability, and extensive functionality. It's primarially programmed in a C++ language and they've developed lots of fancy applications like Amarok, Koffice, and K3b (all of which I like also). They are stable and full featured. KDE is based on QT, which is a graphical toolkit provided by Trolltech. People say that it provides a more familar interface for users used to Windows.
Gnome on the other hand is trying very hard to perfect their UI for maximum usability by streamlining functionality down to what the user actually needs most. Sometimes this has a cost of easy configurability and such, although most of the configurability that anybody wants is hiding underneath the surface. Unfortunately it's not well documented stuff. Gnome is mostly C-centric, but they are beginning to incorporate high-level languages like Python or C# (like MS .net stuff, called mono). Their eyes are looking toward a corporate desktop.
KDE tends to suffer from Not-from-here syndrom. They have KDE-specific games. KDE-specific office suite. They have their own html rendering stuff. Everything written specificly for KDE. This is normally a very bad thing, but with KDE it's pretty ok since their applications tend to be of high quality irregardless and fairly neat. I guess they just like to be interesting.
Gnome aims to for a more of a 'big tent' sort of approach. Aiming to take best of breed applications and then try to shoehorn them into the Gnome environment. They use the ghecko HTML rendering engine from the mozilla project instead of trying to program their own, like kde. Their 'Gnome Office' (which pales in functionality to Koffice) consists of applications from completely different projects.
Both KDE and Gnome provide massive amounts of features and functionality. Gnome bills itself as not only a desktop environment, but a entire programming and developement environment. KDE has Kdevelop. They have art programs, simple office games, audio, multimedia playback, instant messaging, VoIP, etc etc etc. Almost anything and everything people would want or need for general purpose applications.
As long as you stick with either KDE or Gnome apps each environment provides a high level of UI consistancy and uniformity. Going from one Gnome app to another should not be confusing.
Using KDE apps inside Gnome or visa versa ruins it quite a bit though. They are compatable and you won't loose any stability, but when you run apps in another enviroment they bring a lot of their own stuff that you probably won't want. File dialogs won't be consistant anymore. You try to open a browser from one app and it will open konqueror and if you try from another it will try to open up Firefox or Epiphany. Theming won't be consistant across apps without extra work and you will consume much more RAM resources.
So for best performance and usability you should stick with one or the other.. but very few people do that because you'd miss out on the nice apps from the other desktop.
Other then KDE vs Gnome there are a lot of other things. XFCE for instance is gnome-like, but is much more geek-friendly and is faster. You have Icewm which provides a Win95 look and feel. FVWM is a old school minimal window manager. Fluxbox is a big hit with a lot of people. Window Maker is a Gnustep environment for Linux.. Compatable with the OpenStep API specifications which is also extensively used to form the Cocoa stuff for the interface in OS X. Ancient Enlightenment 0.16 series is very cool and still worked on and Enlightenment DR17 has more eyecandy then you can shake a stick at. Very 1337, but very much in development. You can get a idea of what it looks like by looking at the fantasy interfaces in scifi movies. (makes Vista look like win2k) Of course you have the polar opposite with Ratpoison and Ion. (which are so 1337 that it makes Windows 3.11 look like vista)
Most people won't know what they like until they've tried a bunch of different stuff.