And then came KDE4. It looks great, of course. It does right from the beginning. I tried out KDE 4.0. It was buggy, of course. one or two weeks later there was KDE 4.1. It was ok, although plasma crashed sometimes.

Now I’m a happy KDE 4.2.4 user looking forward to KDE 4.3

Pidgin is great but what’s wrong about Kopete? when I found the option to tab conversations automatically, I was completey satisfied.
I prefer Kate over gedit
Arora is still in development and by far not as feature rich as firefox is. But it actually has almost everything I want from a web browser
Kmail is as good as thunderbird and evolution
Amarok 2 is great
I still use Gimp though
and so on…
But who knows, maybe I will be using Gnome again once. They are both great desktops for anyone who preferres to order a whole meal, rather than having to find out how to cook one (not literally of course – I like cooking )

I’m like you. I too used to be a die-hard KDE fan, and if a distro didn’t have KDE, I just plain didn’t consider it. For me, Mandrake (now Mandriva, of course) was my first introduction to Linux, and that was in 2004 (before the debut of Ubuntu), and they’re naturally a KDE-oriented distro. I also had MEPIS and PCLinuxOS installed on my computer at various times as well, and even though I’m no longer a KDE fan, for anyone wanting an excellent KDE-centric distro, I would recommend PCLinuxOS. Besides, last I knew, PCLOS has, very wisely, IMHO, stayed with KDE 3.5.x, at least for the time being.

But, like I said, I became a fan of GNOME and Xfce about a year or so ago, and for the very same reason — KDE4. I heard a lot of bad press about it, but I was still willing to give it a chance. I gave it a spin on a live SuSE CD — and to tell you the truth, I felt absolutely LOST in KDE4. Not to mention, it was buggy indeed!

I then thought “well, OK, let’s give GNOME a try” — and I was instantly hooked! To be honest, I’ve found that GNOME, at least the way Ubuntu does it, anyways, is really a more well thought-out desktop than KDE. Plus, as a themeaholic (is that a word? LOL), I’ve really found that GNOME is WAY more customizable than KDE. Mind you, it doesn’t look like it on the surface, which is probably why it didn’t make a good first impression with me several years ago. But now that I’ve dug deeper, I’m convinced that if you’ve got powerful enough hardware for it, it RULES! (and if you don’t, or if you like to be a speed demon, there’s Xfce, which is kind of a “GNOME, Jr.” of sorts — and yes, I think it’s cool, too!).

And no, like several other people on here, even when I was a KDE fan, I never cared for Kubuntu at all, which is why I never really warmed up to any flavor of Ubuntu at all until KDE4 drove me to GNOME. Yeah, KDE3 is still around, but my thought was, why stay with KDE when the KDE 3.x line is gonna be scrapped?

Therefore, I’m now fully at home with GNOME.

one of the other problems I had is while I was still on KDE3.59 I loved how I could change and add many GUI styles to Gtk apps easily. Whereas, in KDE, it seemed that as time went on “old looks” were broken, had to be compiled, etc. so that on arrival of KDE4, you have oxygen the default setting (oxygen looks crap to me, the developer now dropped it in favor of his new Bespin which looks awesome.) I saw the
oxygen style reminded me of GREY WINDOWS 95 with a touch of something new (vista/mac). But it looked outdated to me.

One of the greatest looks was Baghira in KDE, but that became abandoned, and even when it was working it was always very buggy and slow. So here we have KDE where GUI themes don’t work, they’re hard to write (I could never find the documentation or tutorial to do a KDE style). Whereas I noticed that on my GTK apps I had MULTIPLE mac/osx lookalikes and tons of themes, whereas you went over to KDE4 and there was nothing.

The themes if you compare the number of them, KDE
is lacking. Bespin looks awesome. but the number of choices in Gtk have always been around.

I’m looking forward to the KDE4 apps, however i’m not excited about their Windows start bar (boooring, move along nothing to see here). The Plasma applets I will run those outside of the KDE dekstop.

I’m glad that Linux/BSD/etc gives us the freedom
to set up our systems the way we want. I’m not “DRINKING THE KOOL-AID” on either Gnome of KDE I remain independent and focused on setting up things which suit me best not the way they are forced upon me. The KDE4 taskbar/Start Bar ripped from the womb of Windows XP is not exciting to me (I prefer an icon dock). There’s good things happening in KDE and Gnome, I’m just glad there’s FREEDOM to use both in an agnostic way.

I was a loyal KDE 3.5x user. NOTHING could tare me away from my beloved KDE. If a distro did not have a KDE default install, i didn’t use it. I loved the flexability and usefulness of KDE. Kubuntu was awesome. PCLinuxOS was fantastic…even KDE Fedora was fun.

Then came KDE4. I really tried to like it but it was just to buggy and to unfriendly for me to use. So, i made the full time switch to GNOME and am seriously wondering when GNOME (itlesat for Ubuntu) grew up. Last time i used Gnome i had real problems configuring my system….i guess a lot has changed in 4 years. Gnome has supprised me and I’m now converted to it…

and it’s really nice to have most of my programs I like as the Ubuntu Defaults. Just install K3B (though, suprisingly Gnomebaker isnt half bad) and i’m good to go.

I’d suggest Gnome anytime over KDE4. I’m really hoping i don’t have to say that in the future.

From what I heard before KDE had a lot of applications to offer but it is definitely deficient in a couple areas: mail notification, and note taking apps. Thanks for the review.

KDE4 has something to make gtk apps look native QT:

gtk-qt-engine-kde4

Install and use that, and gtk apps look much better.

I personally use KDE because of all the great KDE apps, compared to Gnome. To each his own.

If your combination of KDE-Gnome applications blow up in smoke, you just try to do it in a different distro. Those who use just KDE apps or Gnome apps are missing on a lot of fun from the other camp.