Since I recently build a desktop environment (Equinox DE) for 68k, I 
thought I'd give it a try.  I'd never heard of it before, nor had I 
tried to use any DE on 68k, so it would be interested to see what kind 
of performance I could get.  I'm on a 40MHz '040, so unless you're 
overclocking, this is about the best we're going to see.

 From running "startx" (with a single aterm and the startede command) to 
the time the desktop was fully rendered was just a bit under two 
minutes.  Obviously Blackbox and IceWM are quicker, but they're only 
window managers.

The look is a very clean Windows95-ish appearance, with a handy 
hierachical file browser built into the "start" (actually labeled with 
an "e" and your login name) menu.  As a result, I had no problem getting 
around to key system components such as control panels and applications, 
due to familiarity.  I've read that there are some themes available, but 
I believe they're just variations on Windows - you can change the look a 
bit, but not the feel.

I've used Gnome and KDE, but I'm no usability expert so I won't try to 
draw any comparisons based on my 5 minutes of usage.  Also, I used those 
others on faster machines, not on 68k.  Since EDE is built on FLTK (fast 
light toolkit - implying that Qt and Gtk are slow and bloated) it might 
be passably fast enough for use on low-end machines.  Probably not as 
low at 68k boxen, though.  With just the one aterm running, menu 
rollover effects couldn't keep up with the mouse.  It wasn't horribly 
laggy, but you definitely noticed.

Nonetheless, I'd say give it a try just for fun.

Tim
-- 
Tim & Alethea
christtrek.org