Hi,
Allow me to shortly introduce myself, since I'm new to this list. I'm an Austrian sysadmin living in Montpezat (South France). I'm in charge of computers (servers and desktops) in eleven small communities that migrate from Windows to Linux. Institutions like public libraries and town halls get networked, and every Windows installation is replaced by a GNU/Linux system. I had tested various (a dozen or so) distributions, and we finally settled with CentOS (both server and desktop), which we like very much. The current desktop we use is the default GNOME, and XFCE on older hardware.
From time to time, I fiddle with the KDE desktop, and my impression is always the same: 1) it's great! 2) it's cluttered! KDE has a series of really great apps (Konqueror file manager, K3B, KMail, ...), but the problem is: it's not very modular. More often than not, one has to install a whole bunch of useless - and often redundant - apps in order to just have one little app. For example, in order to have the music player JuK, I would have to install kdemultimedia-extras, which gives me a whole lot of other players I will never use.
I know I'm not the first to complain about this state of things, and various distributions have already taken steps to find a solution. Debian has broken up KDE packages, so you can install just the packages you want. Arch Linux has the kdemod project, which is great also. Gentoo does something similar, IIRC. And there's a german Slackware-based distribution called Pocket Linux which does just that: take the cholesterol out of KDE.
So I just thought I would drop a note on the -devel list: to suggest a "KDE Light" project for CentOS. Ideally, I would have a minimal system and X11, and a simple 'yum groupinstall 'KDE Light'' would give me a minimal KDE desktop.
I'm curious to have your opinions about this.
Cheers,
Niki Kovacs