I wasn’t the first person to say it, but I’ll agree with Mazza558 — I see a lot more KDE desktops in the screenshot threads for both Ubuntu and Arch forums these days. True, the Arch forums have always had a strong KDE presence, what with the fantastic effort that is KDEmod and/or the Chakra Project. I have never heard of an Arch user who hasn’t at least acknowledged that KDEmod is a stroke of genius.
But skimming through the screenshot threads suggests another trend, although I’m not part of it so I won’t make any predictions. If KDE is picking up speed, I say it’s high time … if this is just an illusion, I still say it’s high time — for KDE fans to make a concerted effort to show how much more beautiful KDE is — by default — than that ugly gobstopper called Gnome. 😛
And you can quote me on that. 😈
Motho ke motho ka botho 
Gnome is ugly
KDE is a mess
xfce is cute
Openbox is cuter
CLI is sublime 🙂
Personally I have never seen a KDE desktop that I haven’t mistaken for Windows 7 or Vista or at least was very similar to either. I’m really not a fan of the whole gloss and transparency thing. Maybe it’s because I’m a huge fan of minimalism but whatever the case is I still think that Openbox with a good GTK theme is unbeatable.
I hope this will finally make the Kubuntu team do some real work on their distro. It still used the default themes in Jaunty.
Yeah, they could make it brown 😉
So Gnome is ugly now? Whatever happened to “ugly is subjective?”
I’ll switch to KDE when they start making serious progress on their usability. Before KDE 4, their “human interface guidelines” were pretty much non-existent and the general rule of thumb seemed to be “an option for every possible customisation.” Gnome may be a bit over-zealous on simplicity (insert screensaver dialogue rage here), but they’ve been quite good at picking reasonable defaults and making intuitive interfaces without dozens of unnecessary buttons.
Last time I tried KDE 4, there was still some ways to them to go on that. All the glass in the world doesn’t matter if (for example) it takes me ten minutes to figure out how to enable double-clicking in the file manager or three trips through the control panel to find the mouse options.
Darn. I was hoping no one would quote me back at me. 😉
Umm, actually how do you do that? =S
I still haven’t found mouse cursor settings, and I only get to choose single/double clicking from running the desktop setup wizard my distro (pardus) has..
@James:
Well, “usability is relative” too. A lot of people (including me) hate Gnome’s so called ‘usability’ and Human Interface Guidelines. For some people, they are too restricting and too different than normal average desktop (i.e. windows)
@ James
That’s what I meant by ugly 🙂
Now that’s unfair, nobody is mentioning that gorgeous, lightweight, efficient, lightning fast …. Fluxbox 😀
You mean openbox, right ;)?
Nah, he must have meant JWM. 😀 Oh wait, Mich said ¨gorgeous¨… 😦
JWM can be gorgeous … which is always subjective, of course.
Yeah, I remembered that about an hour after I posted. Still, as much as I like JWM, it just can’t beat Openbox with the Onyx themes. (Which is about as much eye-candy as I really require. 😛 )
P.S. Wait a second — there is NO way that JWM is using the default xfonts in those screenshots. No way. *makes note to investigate later*
But surely KDE is resource heavy and goes against everything K.Mandla stands for?
I’m using Fluxbox myself. Lovin’ it, too.
Yup. But it doesn’t mean I can ‘t dream … 😛
Next stop: KDE 4.3 on a 100Mhz Pentium! 😆
Just out of curiosity, what is your RAM footprint (those of you not running KDE)? I’m running KDEMod 4.3 on my MSI Wind and I was surprised to see that I was only using 148 MB of my 1 GB. I was expecting it to be higher than that.
That’s probably because you’ve installed the minimal kdemod package. The full kde package includes a lot of ‘extras’.