Companies which release Enterprise Servers for major consumers have somewhat other notions. Red Hat, Solaris, soon SuSE, even Ubuntu have decided to be positive about Gnome. ;) I couldn't agree more. Gnome is much more professional

Enlightenment has nothing whatsoever to do with the potential shift in th e two leading DE's market shares. again this is not a popularity contest.

I worked for a large company that beta tested RHE with everyday users.. Some high scale some low scale. We left both gnome and kde available for them to use, 90% (roughly 70 beat testers) of them used gnome over kde. Te main reason being kde looks too 'childish' is what a few people said.

KDE in the enterprise is not going to happen, it will be gnome or ximian that the corp's use when the time comes.

I like both, however I believe that KDE is more newbie-friendly (I do not mean to say that KDE is a newbie desktop invinronment, I just think KDE is easier for beginners to understand).

For the reason described above I think that KDE should stay as the default desktop envinronment in SuSE.

I totally agree :)

I'll say that I don't understand how either KDE or Gnome can be at all difficult for new users to understand.. i really don't get it. essentially they a re the same as XP, what else is there? It's interesting to read what trey85stang says about that, goes a lot in line with it being more professional in my opinion. It's just all about a different market sector requiring different functionality from their desktops.

Companies don't waive their right to sue because they use KDE instead of GNOME, especially when the KDE packages are part of the main distribution - meaning they are certified and supported just like the GNOME packages. Anyway with Bluecurve (or whatever that theme of Redhat's is?) KDE and GNOME look pretty similar - similar enough that users wouldn't be confused by using one or the other.

I have always liked Gnome better than KDE. KDE for me feels somewhat cold and square. Much like IKEA furniture. And Gnome is homey, warm and cozy. ;)

well afaik redhat admitted bluecurve bit ass, and it's gone now. hurrah! but while i didn't literally mean sueing the vendor, it's just a whole lot more comfortable, which can count far far too much in many places.

I am glad you agree :-).

In terms of Gnome and KDE I believe that both are good in their own merit, and with some distros only shipping with Gnome, or KDE this will force those who are only KDE users to try and Gnome and vis versa.

I really don't think it should be something to argue about though. Have your beliefs but respect others as well. If someone says KDE is the best, thats their opinion. I am happy that more and more people seem to be choosing Linux. I really could not care what DE they use.

But choose Gnome...

Only joking. Command line all the way :-)

Though you could start arguing then on what shell to use; Bash, Sh, Zsh ....

Addly enough, in Debian when you have both KDE and Gnome installed, they are interconnected or even intertwined. I'll try to make sense here... While in Gnome DE the performance is not affected when using KDE softwares such as Amarok, Kopete and Konqueror etc.

Bluecurve is well and truly still alive - its the default theme and icon set in RHEL4. And yes it does look crap (IMHO) but it does at least make the KDE and GNOME look and feel very consistent. The KDE packages in RHEL are just as supported as the GNOME ones - you're not going to be refused support or have warranty issues if you use KDE instead of GNOME, as long as you stick to the official RHEL packages of course.

Yes, this is what I was referring to, but at the development level. You still need to choose the library to use (and sometimes the version). I don't know if software companies would be intimidated in the case they want port their software to Unix environments. I don't think any Linux company would want to risk losing the possibilities between DE's. Users want this variety. Ultimately, the software companies would have to adapt, and maybe create some kind of inter-operativeness between the many options

More words from the Planet KDE people:
and

KDE > gnome. I honestly can't use gnome. Not because it's 'less' windows..but it lacks features...and has always been extremely buggy for me. I highly doubt it will overtake kde.

There are things I like and dislike about both, KDE and Gnome. I currently use neither of them but have used both and could certainly make do with either of them if the other were to go away forever.

That said, I'd hope they both continue to improve and give Linux users choices and options that they don't get with Windows. I tend to believe they'll both be around for a long time to come.