I’ve never been a huge fan of KDE, mostly because my earliest and most abortive run-in with Linux (almost eight years ago 😯 ) was with a KDE desktop, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. To this day, that goofy dragon triggers a flood of really bad memories.

But I’ve played with KDE, usually in a standalone distro like Slax or as an add-on to something like Arch, in the form of the KDEmod desktop environment. If you ask me, both Slax and KDEmod in their default forms are far better looking than most conventional Gnome setups. And looking over this thread, I wonder why anyone uses Gnome at all.

I know Kubuntu by default is supposedly rather staid, but some of the Kubuntu screenshots in that thread are anything but. And considering Gnome’s reputation for treating the user like an idiot (Linus said it, not me), I’d have to say that if I were picking a big honking desktop environment, I’d probably go with the dragon.