It seems clear to me at this point that the desktop is going to have to be KDE, and (in this case, now) KDE4, in particular.
The bottom line is simply this: the KDE widget set has the widgets I want, and it works more consistently than e.g. GNOME.
This blog has been down for days because the gnome-panel has decided to - each time it is launched - go into an infinite loop which hogs something around 100% of the processor cycles, and will not stop until it is killed with a 'pkill -9 gnome-panel'.
Now, I know this problem with GNOME has something to do with the stored configuration, but I have been unable to determine just exactly which aspect of the GNOME configuration is causing the problem.
Furthermore, once I realized that GNOME was not healing itself, and was in fact doing everything in its power to prevent me from using the computer at all, I tried to switch back to KDE. That effort took down the whole X server config, starting with the session login manager - neither kdm nor gdm would work, and gdm wouldn't even start.
After a brief flirtation with wdm, I took the fallback to xdm - which sort of worked, but wouldn't start an X session until I re-installed both GDM and KDM.
Having been through all that, I was so relieved to see the KDE desktop again I haven't changed it since.
Now, in between all this, I have also found that FVWM as installed by OpenSuSE does not come configured - the "out of the box" configuration is simply a black screen (arguably an improvement over the miore-effect tiling that is the X default) with the default, built-in root menu available using the right mouse button on the black desktop. After screwing around with the FVWM config - and since I did not have my archived FVWM configuration immediately available, I tried to switch to a different - I.E. non-FVWM session - which is when I discovered that the session configurations were hosed. Specifically, when I logged in to the FVWM session, something in the session manager config got changed, and there was no non-trivial way to change it back.
The really unfortunate part of all this is that I do not have a "fix" to present here. This is all just a problem description, and fails to even adequately define the problem in reproducible terms.
I will, in the course of getting this desktop environment to a usable state, try to generate some more coherent bug reports and/or workarounds to the problems that keep coming up.
Meanwhile, KDE4 is going to be "it" - I expect it
a) to be simpler to configure for user-friendly day-to-day use
b) to be more robust once configured
c) to provide a widget set tailored for my needs
FVWM is more configurable, and arguably more powerful for detailed, perhaps non-standard, configuration items, but tends to be less intuitive in its default modes, and more tedious to bring into compliance with the Windows-like look and feel which GNOME and KDE have shown to be so popular.
In short, I will provide KDE as a baseline desktop, with customizations purpose-built using FVWM (these will typically be for dedicated accounts).
Finally: I think I like KDE3 better than KDE4. All my transparent widgets from KDE3 have gone opaque in KDE4, and the glassy, glossy radioactive eye-candy from KDE3 is toned way down - at least in the default versions. I have some screenshots of each which I will link here (once I find the URLs) that should highlight some of the differences.
