WindowManagers

When having multiple window managers, having everywhere the same menu makes life much easier. A very large obstacle for the inexperienced users are in my experience those gnome and kde menus. Having multiple menus (the Debian one and an KDE or Gnome menu or both) leads them to always search in the wrong one. And having not the same menu structure as the user next to him is in my experience the easiest way to bring an user in a severe state of confusion.

icewm

icewm is a very good choice to give unexperienced users. It behaves like most of them expect, while being fast and not confusing with unnecessary details. icewm-gnome has also gnome support in it, but also adds the confusing gnome-menus. As of woody it also has a standard theme, that scares most people away from it in my experience. This all gets better with putting the following lines in the /etc/X11/icewm/preferences:

Theme="warp3/default.theme"
ShowGnomeAppsMenu=0
ShowGnomeUserMenu=0
ShowKDEMenu=0
GNOMEFolderIcon=0

Also recommendable is to put the most important programs to /etc/X11/icewm/menu and /etc/X11/icewm/toolbar and to point the users to /usr/share/doc/icewm/html/icewm.html.

KDE

KDE is in my experience best not installed at all. I seems to resist any way to integrate it. (So either a subset of everything else or only KDE should be installed). Sometimes users demand it, even on the slowest computers. (They will not stay long with it normally, though).

I'd be glad if someone could tell be how one could at least get rid of those menus and place an normal Debian menu there. (Or stop it always starting KDE-programs instead of working ones, or if at least anyone could tell me on which package to file a bugreport, that KDE-programs cannot parse nontrivial /etc/printcap).