mmmm. I guess the next thing then, is what are people's views on GNOME / KDE / other one's that i can't remember off the cuff... ?
So Desktop Environments and Window Managers? So let's see...for the DE's we have GNOME, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, E16, and E17. And for the WM's there are far more than I could possibly list but let's just list some of the better known standalone managers: Openbox, Fluxbox, Blackbox, Icewm, Window Maker, flwm, pekwm, Afterstep, jwm, dwm and awesome. Plenty of choice, considering I listed only a fraction.
As for me, I prefer GNOME to KDE generally speaking although I started off with KDE and these days I'd say that I dislike the direction both of them are going in. I prefer "classic" GNOME to the new Gnome Shell and social stuff and KDE 4 is shiny but oddly enough feels like it needs a lot more polish. XFCE's a bit meh and often ruined on Ubuntu-based distros by bringing in too much Gnome stuff while LXDE is still a bit too young, but a nice, very lightweight solution. E16 was definitely good for it's time but these days Enlightenment lovers will be more prone to using E17 in all it's in-development glory. E17 was always too unstable for me and I had lots of problems with it but when it did work for me and I got to customise it a bit...definitely a beautiful setup unlike any other I've used with a very unique taste to how it handles things.
These days I go for a simple, minimal setup using Openbox as my window manager + tint2 to act as my panel, without any loss of functionality thanks to a lot of programs from Gnome, a few light-weight alternatives from XFCE and LXDE and a few QT/KDE apps (like the old 1.4x series of Amarok). My setup has gradually become less and less "user-friendly" but it's not supposed to be friendly to other users as I'm the only one who should be using my account and this setup so as long as I'm happy with it then it's all I need.