uninstalling Gnome and installing KDE on Ubuntu Hardy
 

I'd like to try Kde as my desktop but I don't want to lose my current setup and files with a fresh install, I also don't want both desktops at the same time.

How do I install Kde firstly and then how do I uninstall Gnome?

The reason for this is that I'm just getting into C++ and I thought I may as well be using Kde as it's C++ based.

Thanks in advance

Eric

Umm..and Gnome is not "C++ based"? Sounds new to me..

Anyway, the easiest way probably is to uninstall ubuntu-desktop and it's dependencies and then install kubuntu-desktop, which pulls in the rest - then just add any extra KDE software you need. If removing ubuntu-desktop doesn't remove the dependencies (like Gnome), then head over to your favourite search engine and search for ubuntu-desktop dependencies (or something similar) - there are numerous sites that provide apt-get (or aptitude) commands with package lists (in how-tos and such) that you can copy-paste to your terminal (be sure to check them first!) to get rid of the packages that are installed with ubuntu-desktop or kubuntu-desktop, depending on which way you're walking.

Note that KDE 4.x is different from KDE 3.x, as you can install them side-by-side.

From the last paragraph of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME#Major_subprojects:

A number of language bindings are available allowing applications to be written in a variety of programming languages, such as C++ (gtkmm), Java (java-gnome), Ruby (ruby-gnome2), C#, (Gtk#), Python (PyGTK), Perl (gtk2-perl) and many others. The only languages currently used in applications that are part of an official GNOME desktop release are C, C# and Python. (emphasis added)

Does this mean I've got something right! wonders will never cease.

I think my question should be:-

Is there any benefit as a budding C++ programmer with coding under KDE? or, to put it another way, am I missing out on any functionality using Gnome?

I am very comfortable with Gnome, I ran KDE for quite a long time before switching to Ubuntu and giving Gnome a go and I do prefer Gnome, don't ask me why, it's just a feeling thing.

Thanks in advance