[buug] hello

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Karen Hogoboom (khogoboom at gmail.com):

> Geekfactorwise, "I *am* technical!", but, how can I say this, I was raised
 backwards.

Backwards can get you to useful places almost as well as forwards.  ;->

> What drives me to you is that I finally wiped my XP machine and put FreeBSD
> on it and realized I need to understand the history of X better.

Just to be clear, when you say 'understand the history of X better', are
you referring to the X11 graphics system, commonly known as X?  It might
be just me, but I'm not 100% sure I understand what you're driving at,
and so just want to make sure.


> I have been, by my own bad choices, fate and bad breeding, working in
> the Microsoft world for most of my career.  Do I want gnome or kde
> when I don't even want to *emulate* MS on this machine?

Both the GNOME and KDE 'desktop environments' do have a tendency, liked
by some and disliked by others, of borrowing from the aesthetics of
popular proprietary OSes.  However, and I'm sure you anticipated this
answer, what you logically want depends on what's important to you.

Please be aware that you can elect to run no 'desktop environment'
whatsoever, instead sticking to the old-school model of just having a
regular X11 window manager (but not running the X session manager and
'desktop' services characteristic of the four most common desktop
environments: GNOME, KDE, XFCE4, LXDE).

You can compare the typical appearance of various window managers and 
several 'desktop environments' via screenshots and information links at
Matt Chapman's site, http://xwinman.org/  .  Hope that helps!