Gnome or KDE?

[Scott]

This "age-old" debate has always amused me. And for some odd reason I
never seem to agree with the masses.

First of all, I'll state that I for one like and use *both* GNOME and KDE.

Now as far as which one is overall "slicker".  I'll go with KDE hands
down.  GNOME gets better all the time and has improved vastly thanks
to GTK2.  But still as interfaces go, I find KDE generally more
attractive.

Someone here pointed out that most former Mac users prefer GNOME and
most former Windows users prefer KDE.  I find that interesting,
because I've heard just the opposite.  Look at Mac GUI vs the Windows
GUI.  Which one has more "polish".  OS X wins hands down. It's much
more attractive and literally "polished" than the Windows XP GUI.

Now which GUI has more "shine and polish" in the world of X-Window?  
I'll have to go with KDE. Not only that it's just (like the Mac) more
intuitive.

Now there is one caveat to all this. A lot of it also depends on what
theme you use. The default theme in KDE (Plastik) and in
GNOME..."Crux" are pretty poor compared to what you can come up with
otherwise.   On the positive side for KDE though, the Plastik Window
decoration does look much "slicker"   I also think that the majority
of icon themes for KDE are far more attractive than those for GNOME.

Now if you do like I do and really seek out "shiny" and "polished"
themes for GNOME it does improve the experience.

The clearlooks theme is on the right track (which Ubuntu modified and
made uglier) and in fact will be the default theme for GNOME 2.12.

Overall I've found that once I've spent 30 minutes working in GNOME I
think to myself "hey, this is nice!".  On the other hand a day later I
decide to switch to KDE and have the same experience.

So, I go with both.  That's the beauty of Open Source.

As far as more "minimalist" approaches like Blackbox, Fluxbox and
XFCE? Well they (especially the *boxes) are too minimalist for my
taste.  Their simplicity makes them less intuitive if you ask me.

Just had to share my $.02

Scott