12.1. Desktop environment
Using GNOME and KDE desktop can make your desktop looks beautiful, but there are many concerns using those desktops
environments in a corporate environment. In the administration sense, it is always good to keep your desktop environment as
much as simple as possible, this will significantly reduce users questions and unknown. There also other factors that affect
system behavior directly.
- Memory consumption
KDE 3.0 is slow compared to KDE 2.2, it is because the memory usage increase quite a lot. The same thing
happened for the GNOME desktop. Using such beautiful desktop environment will cost you probably extra 128MB of memory and 50% of performance
degradation.
- User training
KDE and GNOME desktop environments are so complicate, by default it contains too many application in the menu,
often these applications generate confusion for your user, also too many unused functions and features are quite a big obstacle from letting
users to get familiar with their working environment.
- Bugs
KDE and GNOME have been continue development forever, new features are always added and therefore it is likely to be buggy.
This can also cause big problem too.
Simplifying your desktop environment can reduce your support work, administration load and even eliminate user training.
If you only required let's say 3 applications in your day to day office operations,
it is good to configure only having these 3 icons on the user's desktop environment. This will eliminate almost all user training
to get familiar with the working environment since there is no choice on their desktops. Having just sufficient functions in their
working environment can also reduce the chance of having problems, because users generally like to play around with the menu. Other window
managers such as WindowMaker comes with a nice desktop environment and only use very little memory. Running small window managers will
increase overall system performance and lower your administration cost tremendously.
