Hello!
I had until yesterday KDE. It was good. But I upgraded it to KDE-4.7 and the performance was outrageously low. KMail uses now a database and connects to Akonadi. I imported ~47,000 old messages in about 9 hours and then lost some old messages because of a misunderstanding. And other past and present "things".
So, I said I should consider the alternative, GNOME. Looks good, but I have some questions:
1) Dialogs have no maximize buttons. I know that for a long time, and GNOME FET users know better. But can I change this in some hidden GNOME settings?
2) Time+date, task bar, system tray, quick launch, can I make them on 2 rows?
3) Main menu button (Computer) - can I make it smaller?
4) Alarm Clock - shows only time, but not date? Or can you suggest other alarm/reminder for a date+time? I used until now KAlarm, good application, but I don't want anything from KDE for the moment.
5) How can I remove the only remaining 2 icons from my desktop? (Home and Trash.)
6) How can I start Terminal maximized?
7) gnome-dictionary-applet in the taskbar - can I make it smaller?
8) fluxbox and xfce - can I install them now and try them, without messing with GNOME?
9) Evolution mail - starts slow, exits slow. I use Claws-mail. Is there a setting of Evolution to make it faster/lightweight? I do not need indexing.
9.5) Claws-mail - how can I make it warn me that I wrote "attached" and "attachment" but forgot to attach any file? (I admit I didn't search this myself, yet.)
10) Should I disable Search and indexing? (Monitor file and directory changes.) What is this? Seems that only few of my home directories are envisaged.
11) Does GNOME reduce luminosity of the desktop background picture at night? (This is interesting :-)