what's the difference between GNOME and KDE?

Politics.

and.... is it possible to run both?

If you have all the right libraries installed, you can run a KDE app under Gnome and vice-versa.

If you have all the right libraries installed, you can run a KDE app under Gnome and vice-versa.

Aha! Good to know. But I'll have to play with that later, as I actually plan on using today to work on some long overdue writing projects.

Brought over from Natter, does anyone have any recs for software for converting avi files so that they are viewable on ipods?

eta: Dana says it's been discussed recently, so I will go searching.

And while we're at it, what's the difference between GNOME and KDE?

They are two different desktop environments (one built on the GTK framework, then other on QT if you want to get technical. GTK has a more liberal license that has some advantages for developers and GTK has a windows port but this doesn't really matter unless you make software).

Anyhow I'd say that GNOME puts an emphasis on having a clean interface and probably is a bit more Mac like in general. KDE puts an emphasis on lots of user Konfiguration and inter process Kommunication and probably is a bit more Windows like. So KDE has more integrated applications like the Koffice suite, while GNOME has cleaner designed applications like Evolution, Abiword and Banshee. But like Tom said, you can use KDE applications in GNOME and visa versa. Personally I think GNOME on KDE is a bit smoother than KDE on GNOME due to library load time.

I think it is just a matter of personal preference as to which is best. I've used KDE with SUSE and GNOME with Ubuntu and there are things I like about both of them. I'd say I've acquired a slight preference for GNOME just because the interface is cleaner.

KDE and GNOME are the biggies but there are tons of desktops for Linux. XFCE, Windowmaker, Fluxbox, IceWM, RatPoison, and on and on....

Cringely has an interesting story about Earthlink in his column this week: [link]

A good friend of mine noticed last June a sudden and precipitous decline in his volume of incoming e-mail with the numbers dropping by 80-90 percent. Was he less popular, less interesting than before? Or maybe some Bayesian filter had been imposed by his ISP (Earthlink) to suddenly spare him completely from spam. No such luck.

The trend continued so my friend, who has long been in the networking business, himself, started running experiments. He sent messages from other accounts to his Earthlink address, to his aliased Blackberry address, and to his Gmail account. For every 10 messages sent, 1-2 arrived in his Earthlink mailbox, 1-2 (not necessarily the SAME 1-2) on his Blackberry, and all 10 arrived with Gmail.

Swimming upstream through Earthlink customer support, my buddy finally found a technical contact who freely acknowledged the problem. Since June, he was told, Earthlink's mail system has been so overloaded that some users have been missing up to 90 percent of their incoming e-mail. It isn't bounced back to senders; it just disappears. And Earthlink hasn't mentioned the problem to these affected customers unless they complain. The two groups affected are those who get their mail with an Earthlink-hosted domain and those with aliased e-mail addresses like my friend's Blackberry.

Were they thinking these thousands of affected customers simply wouldn't notice? And what about those customers whose livelihood depends on e-mail communication? There are both ethical and business questions here and Earthlink doesn't look good on either scale. Fortunately the company says it is installing new software and hopes to have the problem resolved before the end of the year. Lucky us.

This sort of ISP dissembling happens more often than many of us might guess as companies play the odds and pray that their faults aren't noticed. These mistakes, by the way, typically aren't actionable thanks to our blindly clicking on those Terms of Service agreements that we never read. In Earthlink's case, if they don't deliver your e-mail, well that's just tough.

Glad I'm not one of their customers anymore.

Yikes! I used to have an Earthlink account so I'd have dialup when traveling, but I never used the e-mail for anything. It was a frelling spam magnet.

Not news to anyone here, but I highly recommend using email services that are *not* your ISP. They're more portable, for starters.

In fact, that's all the reason I need.

I used to have an Earthlink account so I'd have dialup when traveling, but I never used the e-mail for anything.

Yeah, Earthlink's my ISP, but I've never used the email account. Sounds like a good move!

Okay, as I was reading the Ubuntu documentation, it seems that I do not have a disk management utility of any kind, which the documentation tells me I should use under certain circumstances. What should I do to fix that?

I picked the right time to ask this question (thanks Sean!)--if a girl was thinking about ditching Windows on her Dell laptop and installing Ubuntu, what steps would she need to take? Obviously there's the backing up of all her stuff on her computer, and trying to retain all the 20 gigs (gulp) of music and the browser stuff. Does anyone have suggestions from doing it before, or a guide for switching your machines over? Does iTunes have a linux version?