Reading all the reviews and ravings over RedHat 8.0 and all the slashdot flames over the KDE/Gnome unification awakened my curiosity. Today I installed it on my old pentium box.

First impressions: it sure is a lot prettier than most Linuxes. Smooth fonts even in the installer. Nice font selections and colors. I like the new icon theme. The start menu is still crowded, but a major improvement over last time I used Gnome.

But that's where the good stuff ends. Open the browser, and what do I see? Old Mozilla with ugly classic theme and core X fonts. Open the word processor and face an ugly windows-look-a-like UI with blotchy type1 core X fonts.

What good is this unified interface if none of the major applications use it?

Sigh. Oh well, at least it's a step in the right direction...