After reading the following in a recent lwn.net article:

Due to the very vocal, and largely negative, reaction to the release of KDE 4...

I thought it might be worth chiming in because of how impressed I was when I recently loaded a KDE session on a whim. I've used XFCE (Xubuntu) for over a year, as it ran better than Gnome (Ubuntu) on my old laptop. I recently got a new laptop and a friend indicated he might be interested in adding a Ubuntu partition, so I thought it was worth giving KDE a try.

I can't remember when I last tried KDE, but I remember a bunch of cheesy-looking icons, lots of bouncy cursor stuff, and... well, it's kind of unfair to compare from 4 or 5 years ago on my first setup with Gentoo.

Anyway, when I first loaded KDE, I was nearly floored at how nice it looked - and tastefully so, I thought. A bit Vista-esque, but I don't consider that to be a bad thing. The only problems I've had in the last few days are a plasma widget that periodically crashes plasma and the Network Manager not supporting WPA2 (which my university now uses). Oh, and the "Download New Plasma Widgets" seems to be broken (although the Ubuntu repository has some of them). There's still some bouncy cursor stuff, but it doesn't look nearly as cheesy now.

In one evening, I went from not having considered KDE for a few years to being quite set on using it.

Nice to ear you like kde 4... even if you don't like the bouncing cursor (I love it! ). But you can change even that: go to the kde system settings panel, click on Desktop and with the last option on the left (something like "launching notification"... I'm translating from Spanish --yes, I know which flag I have on my profile... just don't ask) you will be able to change the bouncing cursor to something else.