With Windows and the Macintosh, the desktop is just that—the desktop. Linux is all about choices, and so is X, KDE or GNOME.

One of the cool things is that you can remain indecisive your whole life: You can choose what desktop to load every time you log in. Of course, you don't have to choose that often either; SUSE Linux will load whatever desktop you loaded last time by default (and the initial default, assuming you installed it, is KDE).

When you first install SUSE Linux, YaST will recommend installing just the KDE desktop. You can choose to install GNOME instead, or install both if you have enough disk space.

With very few exceptions, all software designed for one desktop will happily run on the other, and will even show up in the other's Start menu.

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