I was stick to Gnome since I started to use Linux as my home desktop environment. It's clean and simple, but the top reason I chose it as my default DE is it's based on GTK+, a born opensource library compared to QT. In fact, I did attempt to try KDE several times. However, my emotional inertia failed the switches until I saw this post Torvalds: 'Use KDE'. I am not a idol-follower but what he said did make me realize why I attempted to switch. As a heavy Windows user, I am used to a big bundle of all that I need in it, which is what Gnome lacks. Yes, I know I can install I can still install those QT applications with my Gnome but my purism (or laziness) prevents me from doing that.
The post became the final trigger to the switch from a pure Gnome DE to a nearly-pure KDE DE. It was not a easy one in my Gentoo box. It took about 12 hours to download and compile all of the packages. Furthermore, as a Gentoo way of doing things, I need to modify some of the fundamental USE flags that lead to recompiling several huge packages including openoffice ...
Now I am pretty happy with KDE except that
- Localization of KDE seems poorer that Gnome;
- No good-enough Totem alternative found in KDE. Noatun's interface is a bit weird to me. Kaffeine has problems with my locale settings;
- Generating file thumbnails in Konqueror not as complete as in Nautilus;
- I have to keep refreshing the Konqueror browser on web pages. Fortunately, I keep using Firefox.
