Browsers are Interesting
I'm very impressed by Safari on Mac OS X, and when decided that the KHTML engine that they used was in Konqueror for Linux I decided to give it a try and see if it would replace Phoenix as my browser on Linux. First off, it's always been clear to me that browsers on Linux are going to suffer from a lack of plug-ins and support for the latest Flash, etc. But that's OK... all I really expect out of my Linux browser is to be able to render standard pages and not hassle with Flash or QuickTime, etc. For that, Netscape was a good first attempt but locked up far too often. Mozilla was better, and Phoenix was even better because of it's stripped-down design on the same Mozilla core.
Then Safari gave me really impressive rendering speeds and I decided to try Konqueror - not bad. But I'm running RedHat 7.1 which is not the latest and so I decided to try and upgrade KDE (and therefore Konqueror) to something a bit more current. So I went and got the 7.2 RPMs and updates for KDE and the necessary support packages. Got it all installed and it's not bad at all. The speed is nice - on par with Safari.
I've been a GNOME supporter because of the CORBA infrastructure and I still believe that using CORBA in this way is the way to make the computer more tightly integrated with the network it sits on. If I had to make a new trading system I'd focus on making the system a group of small, inter-working components that all had universal interconnections that flowed through so that systems could be built by simply plugging components together and when necessary stringing together a few different kinds of components to get the desired function. This is nothing new - CORBA has been all about this from the beginning. But making an OS where this level of interconnection is supported at the lowest levels makes it that much easier to build these types of systems.
Anyway... GNOME is nice, and it's OK, but I have to say that KDE is nice as well and while it's not rooted in CORBA, most current systems aren't. While this isn't a real benefit, currently it isn't a serious handicap either. I haven't been asked to write this mythical system, and were I to do it, I'm guessing that one of the restrictions would be that it had to run on Windows and that would leave Linux out of the running right from the jump. But it's important to support The Team, and so I've been running and supporting GNOME since I started using Linux a few years ago.
The latest RedHat (8.0) solves a little of this problem for me as it has a modified version of both that is it's new desktop of choice. Sure, you can get straight GNOME or KDE on 8.0, but the default is strong motivation to leave it just as it is. I haven't used 8.0 yet, and probably won't until we upgrade all the servers at work which isn't planned anytime soon. After all, they work, and upgrading eight servers along with four workstations isn't going to be fast and there should be a compelling reason to do it.
So I'm running Konqueror on top of Ximian GNOME and have to admit that it's pretty nice, and support for the mixture is really nice.