Well I've been testing KDE 4.5 on Kubuntu (installed on top of Ubuntu) for the last few days via their backport PPA. There's some things I liked and some things I didn't like...
The default font size with KDE on my laptop running at native resolution is ungodly small. For someone with 20/20 vision, that should say something. Likewise, some forum members talked about KDE having insanely large font by default on their machines. -1 for inconsistenecy, but easy to change. I began customizing my desktop. Holy ****... To anybody who thinks you can mod operating systems out there, you have no clue what KDE is capable of. You can customize anything. Literally, anything. And it's all easy to do. It's thoroughly amazing how much eye crack this desktop environment has. I found myself sucked into a customizing trance for hours on end before I finally felt somewhat satisfied with my new pimped out desktop.
That's all well and good, but functionality wise, I often felt KDE fell short. For example, for some reason on my system, it would not allow me to eject any USB devices. Hard drives, flash drives, you name it. It just errored out. I asked on the forums and tried several different things, such as dismounting via removable media launcher as well as Dolphin. Nothing worked. The only way that worked was unmounting via sudo in terminal. Not a suitable solution in my opinion for most people out there. But I didn't hold this entirely against KDE because of the way I installed it, by installing Kubuntu-Desktop within Ubuntu's repository. I have had native Kubuntu installs before even on this laptop that did not exhibit this issue, so it's hard for me to truly hold this against Kubuntu/KDE since I know a native install doesn't exhibit this. Even still, it's certainly not a +1 when you cannot expect consistency when installing the Kubuntu-Desktop package when there's probability for issues. Anyway, I was still continuing to use KDE more, I began to dislike its default font choice a lot. Even when I would change to different font styles, things just felt out of place to me, and didn't feel all that refined in the way the panel text and application text looked to me. From time to time I bounced back over to Gnome, and I began to fall in love with my clean, easy to read, yet still highly tweaked Gnome desktop. I began to really miss what I had previously. Blah - don't get sidetracked... I began spending more time in KDE, forcing myself to use it more. The KWallet manager, by far, ****es me off the most. It reminds me of the insane annoyance of the Vista UAC. Likewise, I turned it off in the same "has to be the first thing I do when I install Vista or I go absolutely ****ing insane" feeling. Once gone, I felt a little better about being able to successfully log on to my wireless network without the need for a password of my password wallet that held my network password. rofl??
KDE's sound is another thing that tends to rage me, at least with Kubuntu. It's funny how Kubuntu w/o pulse audio is far less reliable than Ubuntu w/ pulse audio. Sure, pulse had a few issues with the first launch with Ubuntu, but it came a long way, and is pretty robust at this point in my opinion. Yet what's up with Kubuntu? Why is it that Amarok locks the sound daemon, making it impossible to watch YouTube videos without closing Amarok? Why can I not pause a YouTube video, go to Amarok, listen to a song, and then resume my YouTube video again? No, I have to close YouTube to free the sound daemon, then begin using Amarok. This can be changed if you alter the stack of sound preferences, but I'm sorry - that's just plain unacceptable if you want to be the widest used desktop environment. Oddly, with Kubuntu-Desktop installed on top of Ubuntu, that means Kubuntu is using pulse audio, yet Amarok still exhibited this raging behavior. However, Audacious did not, which is my music player of choice, so I didn't fret over it too much anyway. Even still, with Amarok being a KDE application and it exhibiting issues that non-KDE applications didn't see, it makes you wonder...
My conclusion is pretty simple. KDE is powerful. KDE is by far the most customizable desktop environment out there. You can do things with it I never dreamed of. However, that doesn't mean that Gnome isn't customizable. Gnome in fact is extremely customizable, still far exceeding anything Mac and Windows could dream of in terms of eye crack. But eye candy doesn't weigh in at jack **** if the system isn't reliable and usable otherwise. The quirks I had with KDE left me with something more to be desired. Sure, most of them are just minor preference opinions that may mean nothing to most end users, but when it comes to needing a desktop environment that is customizable, yet usable, all while being reliable, and looking somewhat professional (important for my work laptop) Gnome fits the bill.
To say the least, my hat is off to KDE. They do a fantastic job, and I don't say that comment lightly. But there's some work to be done before I fully convert myself to KDE land. I was thoroughly amazed at how far KDE has come, and had zero stability issues with it. I used to think people were crazy for using KDE 4, but with KDE 4.5, it is completely refined and I wouldn't be surprised at all if somebody out there would prefer it. That's the power of choice for us Linux users. We can make it our own. We can choose our own styles down to the very core. With that being said, it's important not to get caught up in the KDE vs Gnome war, because at the end of the day, we're all using Linux. It's like going to a bar and ordering a dark beer when your buddy is drinking a light beer, something that you don't enjoy. Who cares - you're all out having a good time. But to wrap this up, I'm back with the old faithful desktop environment that has yet to let me down. Good 'ole Gnome.
I ended up leaving KDE though for several reasons. At the time I just felt like Gnome was more well rounded. I like how Nautilus mounts network shares until you unmount them, whereas Dolphin tends to drop the connection immediately when you close it. There were a few other things with KDE that I wasn't a big fan of, like their awful sound setup. You'd think Ubuntu w/ Pulse Audio would be more problematic than Kubuntu w/o Pulse Audio, but it was the exact opposite. I had to load a ton of backend module devices and stack them in a preferred order. It just got old, so I went back to Gnome.
