However, I can say unqualifiedly that after having spent years using the WPS, that both Gnome and KDE suck pretty badly. Not Even As Good As Windows' Explorer.exe, let alone the WPS. OTOH, the apps are miles ahead of the situation in OS/2 land, and so far the underlying system management stuff is working pretty well, and of course has many advantages over Windows, though I do miss OS/2's LVM: compared to it, lvm2 is just not as good nor as easy to use. I also have to wonder why it seems to have trouble picking up the OS/2 LVM stuff, seeing as linux lvm started out as part of the IBM port of stuff from OS/2 to linux, along with JFS and kernel threads. Now, if IBM would open source the WPS (which, as I understand it, is free from other's source code inhibiting a source release) so that it could be ported to this platform under X, linux would be pretty tough to beat.

were not WPS problems, but were PM problems, but after the divorce IBM wasn't putting any resources into that as the benefits would flow to MSFT.

That said, did you ever try the WPS with XWorkplace? The extensions it made to the WPS revealed very clearly the potential of the shell, even more so when one considers that it was coded on a part-time basis by a guy who was also going to law school at the time.

Finally, as a desktop-metaphor type of shell, gnome is not very good at it. There are some basics that it gets right, but overall it's not really that good. For example, as I said earlier, its disk-management tool sucks.

The real benefit is more because of X than Gnome, which is programs that I generally use on warp do a better job because of X's greater capabilities, esp. in the font department.