lots of people forgo the entire desktop enviroments like KDE and GNOME because they provide much more then lots of people use, and they go and just use simple windows managers like Fluxbox. The window managers don't do a whole lot exept provide a application menu or two, sometimes "applets" (little boxes that show you the time or hardware/cpu monitors, etc etc...) and simply the look and feel of the windows. like what happens when you right click or left click or middle click or what the scroll wheel does and what backgrounds you have and what sort of collors borders and buttons are on the windows. etc etc
GNOME and KDE provide those and much more. Each enviroment has associated special libraries (bits of code used over and over again in various programs so the put them in a seperate file to increase performance and reduce disk space) to produce a unified feild, a suite of programs, web browsers, office-type programs, movie players and desktop managers that provide icons and trashes and generally everything you could use in a desktop enviroment and a few things you wouldn't normally think about like sound managers, splash screens, and clipboard servers for copy and pasting between programs. Now this is a lot of stuff. Many people could simply install KDE or GNOME and all the various programs and thats all they use.
However, lots of people don't need or want all that stuff. I personally don't use GNOME or KDE, but I have there libraries and base installs on my computer so that i can use different programs from them. I generally don't have much use for a window'd enviroment, its more so I can veiw webages, play games. Mostly I use just a few programs and do most my stuff from the terminal anyways, so start-up menus are a bit wasted on me.
You can compare KDE's or GNOME's "bloat" to XP. They use up roughly the same amount of resources and need fairly fast computers to run them. If something can't be run well on a sub 500mhz proccessor and 96 megs of RAM it is considured "bloated" by many Linux users. Which is a bit true, their shouldn't realy be a need for a faster computer unless you need the power of it for something else like playing video games or doing calculations, but with a fast machine (>1GHZ+128 megs) you aren't realy gonna notice the difference once it is all loaded up. One of the nice things about linux is that you can have a gazillion programs running in the background, but if they aren't doing anything, they aren't doing anything
They only take up space in memory and not cpu cycles (for the most part) so in Linux you will see a much better response in adding more RAM then upgrading the CPU past 1.5ghz or so.
For noobs (I was once one too, you know, still am in many ways) i usually recommend sticking with a well supported distro Like Redhat, mandrake or SuSE. Many people are happy with those and stay with them, if you know what you are doing they can be customized just as much as any other version of Linux, ultimantly they all are the same. The only really main difference is in the packaging and the attitude of the developers (their personalities make a impact on the OS big time).
I also recommend running KDE, or if you got a big harddrive (>10gig, 20gig if you dual boot) go ahead and install GNOME and KDE.
My reasoning is two fold. First off you don't know what sort of enviroment and setup you can run in Linux. KDE and GNOME each provide a semi-unified way to interact between you and the OS. It just makes things easier.
The second reason is this: As a new user you want to be experimenting and learning alot. You can't be afraid to mess things up, and since a new user is going to lack the resources to fix a major f-up. Linux is not going to protect you like windows is, When you delete files it isn't going to ask if you are sure you want to delete and statements like "are you sure you want to do this, this could destabilise your system" are non-existant.
For example as root you want to delete a program, so you want to type: type "rm -rf ./*" in that programs directory. rm = remove, -rf = recursive(go into directories and remove those, too) and force (don't ask any questions)...
But you accidently type "rm -rl /*", see one "." missing.. What does it do now? Well you just erased the entire operating system in ten keystrokes.
You can't be afraid to make mistakes, with long installs like Gentoo, you are going to be pissed when something bad happens you don't understand and can't recover from (happens to me all the time). After all your 8 hours of installing and configuring just went to s**t. But if you use Redhat and GNOME, pop in the CD and 45 minutes later you are back were you started.
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