I had been a heavy GNOME/Ubuntu user for several years. I loved the simplicity of GNOME, and once even tried adding KDE to Ubuntu, and felt jarred by it. I thought there was no way I would like the "clutter" and "complicated" nature of KDE, myself being a simple and uncluttered person.

Recently, my desktop hard drive crashed (lost valuable data also). I installed a new hard drive, and thought I would give a KDE distro a try. I installed openSuSe, and started to use it for a day. It is true, things are a little more complicated than GNOME, but I felt there was a lot of power and configurability underneath it. I also loved some of the applications (like okular, which simply blows away evince) on KDE. I loved the idea of activities, which allows me to separate out things I would not want on the same desktop (so, less clutter). I kept at it, and I must say that in about 10 days, I have fallen in love with KDE, and will probably not go back to GNOME any time in the near future.

Of the two desktops, I feel KDE has far greater potential. If it can clean up some of the complication, and yet not lose its power, it would be incredible.

Go KDE!

Also, this is my first post on the forums, so greetings to all.

Vinay

Welcome to the forums! I'm also a person who likes simplicity and feel that some parts of KDE Software appear a bit cluttered. However, because of the great flexibility of KDE Workspaces/Applications, I can configure my workspace to look more "clean" and work exactly as I want.

Vinay wrote:I have fallen in love with KDE, and will probably not go back to GNOME any time in the near future.

I'm feeling that way too.

My initial move to KDE, using Kubuntu 11.04, was supposed to be temporary as I was seeing bugs in Gnome/Unity that others were either not seeing or were not being fixed. I told myself that if I waited for the next release then all would be well so kept Gnome on one hard drive and put KDE on the other. I made the move permanent when I realised that even though I didn't like the default look of KDE, I could change it to look completely different. Within a day or two I had a set-up that I copied to the other hard drive, overwriting Gnome and in due course upgraded that copy to a test version of Kubuntu 11.10. Most of the KDE applications seem to be superior to their Gnome counterparts and there seems to be fewer bugs too.

So I now have KDE on both of my hard drives and although I've been back to the Gnome world to see how Unity and Gnome 3 are developing I don't have any great urge to go back there permanently.

I hope that KDE doesn't have the same long term view as Gnome as I'm hoping to be here for some time.

I am quite loving this KDE experience. I too, like Paul, have GNOME on one of my hard drive partitions, but I have not logged into that account for the past 10 days or so.

I must say, in fairness, that there is one thing that is mildly worrying. Two days in a row, the computer has frozen when I move between workspaces with many applications open. One thing that I admired about Ubuntu's GNOME LTS releases was that this did not happen (and I was a really heavy user). But this may be a bug that will get ironed out in time. It is certainly not something that would make me question the move to KDE.

I also appreciate how easy it is to install new themes directly through the control center instead of download, then install.

I don't want to sound negative about GNOME, because I am not. GNOME has a good place - it is simple and elegant. KDE has a different approach - one that I am liking more and more. I think it is great that Linux is able to offer this choice to users.


Vinay

I am a new comer to KDE,and I never use Gnome before. I hope to enjoy the simplicity of
the KDE .

I think that if someone is used to GNOME, then the first day with KDE can appear to confirm several negative stereotypes - "too complicated, too cluttered, reminds one of windows," etc.

I started KDE right after a disk crash, and so I just wanted to try something different. It took a few days before I realized that KDE was amazing! Almost every application I use heavily is significantly better in KDE than in GNOME. And once you get the hang of activities, it can really make things simpler, not more complicated.

To anyone starting out with KDE, especially from GNOME background, I would say don't make your judgements before you have given it a couple of weeks.

Also, I did try a few other distros (Mandriva, Chakra) before I found SuSe, and really liked the combination of SuSe with KDE. SuSe is the only major distro whose development defaults to KDE, and I think they have done really well with it.

Hope your KDE experience is as good (or better) than mine.

Cheers,
Vinay

Hi guys i'm a newbie here have used Ubuntu never used KDE will give it a go.

I registered just so I could post in this thread how happy I am with KDE4.

I decided to give Linux a try in September, went with Ubuntu 11.04. It was ok, I preferred the classic gnome 2 interface. When 11.10 came out I updated right away like a noob and was disappointed to see that the desktop classic mode was gone, and Unity wasn't my cup of tea. Gnome 3 looked like they were headed in the same direction as unity so I decided to give KDE a spin and it's just great, everything is perfect, easy to find, easy to customize, hassle free.

So thanks to everyone who did a great job on KDE. I like it because IMO it's a great environment for desktop PCs as contrasted to unity which seems to be more geared to touchscreens and smartphones.

Hehe, Unity sucks on touchscreens - alot of gui elements appear on mouse hover: left dock, menus - try to hover on a touchscreen

Vinay wrote:I must say, in fairness, that there is one thing that is mildly worrying. Two days in a row, the computer has frozen when I move between workspaces with many applications open.
Vinay

I get this sometimes too. I fix it by pressing ctrl+alt+f1 and then ctrl+alt+f7. This unfreezes my system.

I don't know where the bug is tho. KDE, X, graphics driver? I don't know where to look.