I have just installed linux. Which would you recommend, Gnome or KDE? Thanks in advance.

I am glad someone asks that! I think that the choice beetween those two is one of the things that makes people come back to windows... if there could be only one window manager people would just boot and enjoy... now they get tired of choosing and repartition they drives format and go back to windows. I would say KDE has a much better looking clock and you don't need to double click on icons. Some apps that sound like they were designed for gnome (like g-combust) seems to work under KDE but I don't know if it's because gnome is also installed.

This is totally a personal preference, much like which religion you follow or what political group. Use the window manager that feels best to you. That is one of the great strengths of linux, and one of its weaknesses. The freedom of choice can be confusing to those coming from a windows world. Either one can run all apps designed with the other in mind. The app will just load the appropriate libs its needs. I currently run Fluxbox as my window manager because its lightweight/fast, has right-click for app menu and tabbed windows (similar to tabbed browsing in mozilla). Its everything I need in a WM and all my other apps run just fine but you do give up all the eye candy. The eye candy is what makes people think linux systems/UIs are slow. KDE/Gnome have become very monolithic, dare I say bloated.

I have tried both and am leaning towards KDE. I am sucker for eye candy and love the personalised multiple workspaces.

2 bad no one ever mentions widow maker (hehe) YUK i prefer gnome. kde is just yuky (IMO) blackbox is a nice shell i think kde actually has better overall look N thingys but gnome 2 me just makes me happy

Trip is *so* right. Personally, I firmly believe that both KDE and Gnome are both crap. (Please don't be offended if you're a big KDE or Gnome fan. GUI choice is such a personal issue and this is just my opinion.) They're both written in CORBA (which, quite honestly, is probably no better than Microsoft's Component Object Model. I apologise in advance for offending anyone, but it's the truth.), slow as all hell, etc. I'm a long-time Solaris user and got pretty decent performance from OpenWindows and CDE. Later, when I migrated to Linux, I tried both Gnome and KDE. They were both unbearably sluggish and resource-intensive for my 550MHz AMD K6/2 256MB system (however, in all fairness, I should confess that using BeOS has probably skewed my perception of GUI performance). When I stopped using them and went to just a window manager running atop an X11 server, things improved CONSIDERABLY. These days, I just run fvwm2 on top of XFree86. I get fantastic performance and miss absolutely nothing. I still have KDE and Gnome installed so I can still run all the same KDE and Gnome appls, but I never actually run the desktop environments. Why would I? I can still run all all the same apps whenever I want from just the window manager. Maybe it's just me, but I just can't see the point in bogging down my system with all that unnecessary desktop environment stuff.