WARNING: Geek posting...last chance to turn away!

Now for the stuff: As most of you already know, I am an avid linux fan. I use it daily, have run just about all the \"major\" distro\'s, and just can\'t speak highly enough of it. During this time, I\'ve come to know and love the Gnome desktop. I\'ve pretty much bounced between Gnome and WindowMaker ever since I can remember. I never bothered with anything else, Gnome has everything I need.

For a while, I did run KDE, but this back quite some time ago. To me, KDE felt sort of \"thrown together\" and the Qt look just didn\'t gel with me for some reason. It also seemed to cater to the less-experienced linux user which I didn\'t feel that I was part of and would look down from my Gnome throne on all the \"little people\" that *needed* KDE. (Granted Gnome is less complicated that some other environment, but this isn\'t about Gnome).

I\'m not sure what made me do it, but the other day I upgraded my Ubuntu laptop from Hoary to Breezy, (a process that went rather well considering the number of packages it had to upgrade) and installed KDE right afterwards. I was expecting the same old crappy looking Qt stuff. WRONGO!

I must say KDE [pause for effect] milk does a body good! I\'m really rather impressed with where KDE has gone. Its smooth, snappy, and clean. (My God, my fellow Gnome fanatics are probably gagging). I\'m sure its a memory hog, I haven\'t checked it and compared against Gnome which is also a hog, but I don\'t care really, I\'ve got a powerful processer, fast hard-drive, etc...I\'m allowed some resource hogging.

My first task was to make it an entire week using KDE exclusively and I must say, I think I\'ve made it. (Really Sunday will be a week, but I\'ve made it through an entire \"work-week\" so that counts.)

KMail is almost as good a replacement for Evolution. I occasionally have problems with KMail connecting to all three of my imap accounts, (work, side-job, and personal), but I like that they\'ve added the Summary Page and RSS reader. Something I miss from Evolution...(it used to have it, but they dropped it somewhere along the way). It took me a while to figure out how to setup all three accounts to use their own identities, and smtp servers, but I got there.

KDE still is doing a few things that I really don\'t like though. Konqueror is still combination web-browser/file-manager, do everything sort of app. As a file manager, I don\'t like. It \"feels\" like I am browsing my files through a web browser...something that just bugs me. I like an app that doesn\'t try to do it all. Just do one thing and do it well. I know I\'ll get crap for this but Nautilus does its job much better than Konqueror, (once you \"fix\" it since the folks of at Gnome decided to make Nautilus default to opening folder in separate windows and removing the location bar). I could probaby use something like Rox filer, but I wanted to keep this strictly about KDE core apps. The only think I really like about Konqueror as a file manager is the popup previews...those can stay.

The \"start\" menu is too full...too much there. It either needs to be scaled back or re-organized...its just way too much and being one of those folks like like my fonts small and my screen real-estate vast, the menu is hard to move around on without super-skilled, precies mouse accuracy. Its very clean looking, but annoying as hell.

Another thing that irked me about KDE is that it installed with every little bell and whistle turned on. A window maximizes (wooosh), a window pops up a dialog (ding), you click okay to remove the dialog (woosh again). On an on, over and over. After I turned all that crap off, I felt better. There are still a few sounds floating around that I missed, but I\'ll find them.

The final kicker is that KDE doesn\'t always want to shut down cleanly. It just sort of hangs X and yesterday I had to ssh in from another machine and shutdown the box because everything was unresponsive. This could be an xorg issue, but it doesn\'t happen in Gnome or WindowMaker. Its probably just something screwy I have turned on somewhere. I\'ll find it...oh yes...I will.

Outside of that, overall I\'m impressed and believe it or not, will probably go on using KDE if I can get some of the little annoyances out of the way first. (I can\'t blame them all on KDE because some of the issues I am having don\'t seem to be KDE related, but they could be).

All that being said...its nice to see that KDE has grown up. I\'m a fan now and I\'ll be watching.