Gnome has really come a long way in usability and features this year! Now if we can just get it a little more memory efficient/speedy, it would rule... XFCE gets a close second though, maybe next year guys

Of course it's KDE! I keeps on improving in every release. Besides, there are tons of applications that go with it that are quite useful.

I like KDE, Gnome, and XFCE4 very much, but I think KDE would be the biggest loss to the community if it were to go away forever.

KDE - because there is no other desktop!

(Disclaimer: I used to be an avid Gnome fan and hated KDE with a passion. Now the reverse!)

Gnome. Mainly cause of a few mono apps: F-Spot, Beagle, Muine and especially Tomboy.

i don't really expect gnome to ever surpass KDE in flexibility, speed and features, while KDE can get as usable as gnome easilly. so i think KDE has a much better future. also, with all these companies throwing money at gnome (and still not getting it beat KDE which runs on volunteers), i don't like the direction it chose. clearly red hat and novell have much more influence than the users - which is wrong, imho. at least KDE is listening to their users...

thats not quite true. kde will never be as usable as gnome....ever. the reason why is that its been going in the wrong direction ever since it was first developeed. don't get me wrong, kde and gnome are both nice desktop environments. its true that gnome will never be as configurable as kde, but gnome is faster, more flexible due to its granularity, and more usable than kde even at this present time.

There's no absolute truths here. KDE is right now more usable for me, since it has features I want that Gnome does not have. For others, that may be not the case.

I am a KDE man !! Can't wait for Plasma - in KDE 4.0

GNOME ....you have a long way to catch up.

no it doesn't. they both have different agendas. perhaps you meant that gnome has as much catching up to do with kde in terms of configurability as kde has of catching up with gnome in terms of user friendliness for the average user, etc.

c'mon, what did gnome do, remove some options? remove some icons? and now it's more usable... wow, i'm impressed. hey, its the userinterface. i wouldn't say its very easy to make it usable, but it IS a point'n'click task, UI designer tools are kind'a easy. its much faster to redesign an userinterface than to redesign a whole application's design. for gnome to get faster and more flexibel (you say it is, but find me a developer that has seen both KDE and Gnome code and agrees with you), they have to do a lot more work.

gnome did a redesign after 2.0, kde can do it after 4.0. i just hope they don't dumb down their interface instead of making it easy to use as gnome did.

its more the UI of the applications. apart from inkscape, they're mainly uncluttered whereas KDE has goes the other way. one of the priciples in gnome is to keep everything simple and leave the configuration and such like for powerusers(who will know what to do anyway) and system administrator(ditto). KDE throws everything at the user all at once, so while it may be fine for the reasonably IT savvy individual, the type of individual(and there are a frighteningly large percentage of them) who would panic at the decision between pressing OK and CANCEL are more at home with Gnome than they are with KDE.

its not at all easy to redesign all the applications on kde, because thats what needs doing if it wants to appeal to the masses. i don't see why kde devs should even try - i like kde the way it is because i like all the options (well, most of the time anyway). besides, the framework may well be largely more advanced on kde, but its also much less flexible than that of gnomes. even in years to come, devs will be largely stuck with C++. theres nothing wrong with the architecture on gnome - if anything, the gnome architecture is more fluid and thats why its better for the future. like i say, its less complete at this present stage overall, but it many ways its more advanced(eg things like drag and drop, sound(ie gstreamer), mounting of devices are a lot better in gnome).


the point is, out of the box, gnome is far superior for the average user.

Voted KDE although i use Fluxbox mostly

NoWindowsInMyHome: You're trolling, using blanket statements to represent every user. Gnome is not more usable than KDE for me. You can say all these things, but the truth is simply that you are stating an opinion as a fact, and it's rather annoying. When I was a n00b, the first DE i used was Gnome and I was immediately turned off, to be quite honest.

KDE lets me set my desktop any way I like -- lots of options.