KDE can be somewhat bloated, though you thankfully can ditch most of the crap. My biggest complaint is the graphical design. First off, the default theme is utter crap. For that matter I've yet to find a theme that I really like.
Secondly, I think that most qt programs have poor layouts. For an example, I personally like having text instead of just icons. With something like kwrite I don't like having icons for the save buttons and such. But, wait, you could add text along with, or replacing the icons when you configure the bar. The only problem is the text is so verbose that you'd need to maximize the application to be able to see all the commands.

In the end window managers are what I always go back to. I do like some of the ideas that *STEP has. Now only if they developed at a reasonable pace...

I have 512 MB RAM. You don't need 1 GB RAM people to have KDE!

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And you don't need 512MB to run something like xfce4 as your DE. And many wm are so competent its no wonder so many folks don't bother with a DE at all. BUT....., it's all about choice ;-)

There is a separate category for WMs anyway.

i have only tried kde and gnome, so i choose from them: gnome. it´s quite similar in philosophy to os x, simple and pretty.

I've been biting down on it with the memory usage of KDE. I don't know where people get their information, but when I run KDE with eye candy on (on my Duron 800, no powerhouse), it uses about 80mb of RAM. I have 384 mb in my system and it alsmost never uses my itty bitty 256mb swap partition. I have to have quite a few apps open before it consumes enough to do that (which is why I made such a small partition for swap). I don'tknow if this is a source vs binary thing or not, but that's one reason why I continue to use KDE over XFCE4 (which I'd get off my butt and configure if KDE let me down).

kde when i want to use Kate, ude when i don't.

Important points for me:

KDE
Fast, customizable.
Webbrowser == File Manager -> Bad Idea, and the fact that changing the default browser is difficult makes this a big dejavu
Konqueror configuration screen -> Yikes. Divide File Manager settings and Browser settings please.
GTK Apps (Firefox, Gaim, Azureus) -> Look horrible and run slow, even with gtkqt-engine whatever (nice attempt but still).
Toolbar configuration (especially in Konqueror) is very clunky. The fact that you can remove items from the bar that can't be put back is very bad.
Lots off I apps I don't need and want

Gnome
Clean look and feel
Auto mount is sweet when it works
GConf -> Big mistake. Where have we seen it before?
Lack of options/preferences -> On purpose but it sucks
Slow... -> the smooth gtk theming engine makes it faster but I couldn't find a decent theme for it
No good dvd/cd burner software.

XFCE4
Clean look and fast
No unnecessary features but also lacks some useful ones.
File manager sucks but can be replaced with Rox-filer pretty good
Customizable menus and I love the desktop right click menu

So KDE is unusable for me. I usually bounce between Gnome and XFCE. I voted XFCE because the new 4.2 has lots of improvement.

GNOME .... almost voted for XFCE though.

gnome is the best ........ keyboard shortcuts are cool....

I love KDE

Jeremy

I don't know why people complain that KDE is bloated, you are not forced to install all the packages that come with KDE, you can choose individual packages (if your distro permits it, coz I know Slack installs all packages in a group) making your KDE installation very customised. As for memory usage when my main PC was on the blinkers due to a RAM problem, I managed to run KDE on 128 megs of pc2100 ddr ram on an Athlon XP 2000 machine. It was a bit sluggish, coz I usually have a lot of apps running at the same time, but it still worked fine. Frankly I don't see much difference in speed when I am running GNOME or KDE on the same machine, however when I run fluxbox or XFCE, then I notice a difference.

Yup !!!

I like KDE the best...Its more "Windows" like...
Gnome is good also...Its kinds reminds me of a Mac!
XFCE...I never really used it..but i will give it a try.

Gnome for ever.