Because Xfce (personal use) and no windowing or graphical interface at all (work servers) completely satisfies all my needs?

I use Xubuntu at home on two desktops and a netbook and have yet to encounter the inability to do anything while at the same time requiring very little of my time to maintain it. I'm sorry if this sounds like a plug for Xfce, it's not. I'm simply responding by asking a counter question: what exactly am I missing if I use these machines for web surfing, e-mail and lots of hobby development? I'm forced to maintain a Windows 7 x64 partition for Diablo III, netflix and some other crappy windows stuff I can't shake so maybe I'm unaware that with KDE we can now satisfy some of those things?

Can someone tell me what Linux Jesus means when he says:

Intel 3D? Does he have a 3D monitor? Are these more than just novelties now?

For me, Linux or BSD is about performance. If I wanted an integrated desktop experience with bells and whistles, frankly I'd stick with Windows XP or maybe go for XFCE.

Personally, I use Openbox. It's fast as hell and exceptionally customisable. I've ran it on machines ranging from modernish laptops to a creaking old 233MHz Thinkpad 600 and I cannot fault it. For me there is nothing missing that cannot be added (i combine mine with LXpanel and PCManFM).

Openbox doesn't get in the way or chew up system resources, and IMO that is the whole point of a window manager. I'm glad KDE exists, but it simply doesn't interest me.

You mean like this:

http://windows.kde.org/ [kde.org]

We're a Linux shop with around 400 desktops and have been running KDE for a decade. KDE3 was rock solid. KDE4, not so much. The KDE4 direction of "let's index everything" with nepomuk and akonadi doesn't work so well when home directories are NFS mounted. In fact, it killed our fileserver. Further, why on earth would I want 400 instances of mysql_community_server running and creating a 128MB DB for each user in their home directory just to index their PIM?

In general KDE login times have been getting longer and longer, and the overall flakiness of KDE up to 4.6 have led us to dump KDE in favor of XFCE. Initial feedback from users has been very positive, and we'll be completing the transition this summer.

KDE4 may have some features that are fine for a standalone desktop at home, but it took a giant step backward from KDE3 in terms of usability in a networked environment at work.

Because fvwm does exactly what I want it to and need it to.

What's wrong with Alt+F2+"fi"+enter?

It's been there for at least a decade, you know?

To be fair, a good deal of that blame lies at the distributions' over-eager hands. The KDE team stated publicly and repeatedly that the initial KDE4.x line was basically a developer preview. They stated that they didn't expect KDE to be in the same realm of usability as KDE 3.5 until around version 4.5.

Nevertheless, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. decided to be "bleeding-edge" and install the early 4.x developer preview KDE as the default desktop in their newer releases, severely harming KDE's reputation. While the KDE team could have handled the releases better ("beta" label, etc.), the distributions definitely should have known better.

I'm sorry, but I cannot regard as "fully-functional and polished" any desktop environment in which menus disappear just as I am about to click on them just because the desktop has received a notification. When KDE4 receives a notification it doesn't simply display the notification message, it also causes certain classes of other windows to be removed... and this includes the "K" menu. Several times a week that menu disappears as I am about to select an item, and I end up clicking on whatever was underneath the item just because I can't react quickly enough to the sudden removal of the menu.

I have other gripes with KDE4, but they pale into insignificance compared to what is, to me, the bizarre notion that it's ever acceptable for menus simply to disappear. Obviously, the developers must disagree with me, but I honestly can't imagine why they think this is reasonable behaviour.

Mostly my other gripes are along the lines of "feature X that was in KDE3 is either absent or poorly implemented in KDE4". Many things in KDE4 are better than they were in KDE3 (which I admit I often tend to forget), but the fact remains that when I switch back to the machine on which I keep KDE3, I always find myself somehow feeling more relaxed and in control.

why do you compare "ctrl+space+"fi"+enter" to "click+click+click+click+..." instead of the more appropriate alt+f1+"application name or desciption" or alt+f2+"anything you can imagine"? Not that I'm trying to talk you into using KDE, far from it - but, well, your argument seems dishonest.

My reason is simple. I just don't care anymore. Whatever the Distribution gives me by default, ill go ahead and use. Just as long as I can put an icon for my terminal I am good.

I use to care, but then I spent more time finding the perfect GUI then I did actually doing work. So if it has Unity, Ill deal with it. Is it my favorate... No but it isn't worth it for me to try over and over again.

I am not running KDE because it wasn't my default choice. Why am I sticking to my default choice... Because I really don't care. And whatever distribution I choose I stick with the default choice because all the bits and pieces are working. No broken links, copy and paste works, and if I need help online, I can get the easy answers from the beginner page even though I am not a beginner, but I prefer the beginner pages, because I usually get the straight forward answer to the problem, vs the Advanced Pages, where I need to discuss why am I trying to do something. Vs just getting info on how to do it. Besides I usually just need help with whatever new UI crazyness that comes out that I haven't figured out quickly.
   

So what you basically just said is:
1. You don't like KDE's default workflow.
2. You *also* don't like Gnome's default workflow.
3. You didn't bother to take any time to customize KDE's layout (and believe me it can be customized in some MAJOR ways that Gnome intentionally prevents you from doing).
4. You did bother to take the time to customize Gnome to your liking.
5. Conclusion: Gnome Good KDE bad.

I'm not following your logic at all there. P.S. --> In KDE don't use a taskbar either, I have quick launchers on the desktop and I can use the excellent krunner to launch other applications. I also have full expose features running with a single press of a customized hotkey. KDE supported 100% of these features before Gnome 3 was even launched, so I'm not buying your arguments in the slightest.

Something you probably don't get though, is that distributions have no choice.

That is wrong. Distributions actually have all sorts of choice in the matter. There is nothing preventing them from keeping to ship the older versions KDE3 or Gnome 2 while all the upgrade chaos goes on. It's open source so if the upstream maintainers don't want to do it there is nothing that prevents them from maintaining the older version themselves, getting together as a group to maintian, or even just leaving as is and not following the upgrades.

They instead choose to foist all this on their users for reasons that escape me (though being the path of least resistances for them might be why). To say they have no choice in the matter is just wrong.

My distro still supports and maintains KDE3--in fact, it's easier to choose and use it now in openSUSE 12.1 than it was with 11.3, where you had to add the repo and fix the config file for kdm manually--although I decided to give the default KDE 4.7 a try and have been (mostly) pleasantly surprised. The biggest surprise may be that I've not yet had any major inclination to switch back to KDE3.

My biggest beef so far is that the KDE 4 taskbar weather applet always shows "N/A" for the temperature, even though it gets the sky conditions right, which might explain why the temperature's now only available in a tooltip rather than under the taskbar icon showing the current conditions like it did in KDE3.5.

You can turn Nepomuk OFF. Unfortunately, Akonadi is another story. [more below]

I don't blame you one big for moving to XFCE; AFAIC it's the next-best alternative to KDE4. You're probably set with XFCE for the near future, but I'll point out the following in case in the future you retest KDE4.

Nepomuk can be turned off (on a per-user basis) by going to K->System Settings and then Workspace Appearance -> Desktop Search and turning off both the "Strigi Desktop File Indexer" and also "Nepomuk Semantic Desktop". Performance for Strigi indexing is still awful even on a local disk, let alone NFS, so I regularly turn these both completely off. Nepomuk still needs to be turned off IMHO, otherwise the Virtuoso database backing it slowly grows as you use the system. It isn't easy to find exactly what this does and what use you can make of it, but the following is a good resource that explains it:

https://kdenepomukmanual.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/detailed-kde-nepomuk-manual/ [wordpress.com]

Unfortunately Akonadi cannot be completely turned off AFAIK -- and what's sad is that (as you correctly pointed out) it does not store information, but rather only indexes PIM information. By default Akonadi has a dependency on MySQL, and EACH user that logs in requires starting a dedicated instance of MySQL server. That's a huge WTF right there. However -- you can reconfigure Akonadi (on a per-user basis) to use SQLite instead of MySQL in .config/akonaki/akonadiserverrc. But another WTF is that this has to be set up on a per-user basis. Apparently at one time there was a server-wide setting available, but if it exists today in KDE 4.8 I'm unable to find it or even a reference to it. :-/

With Nepomuk turned completely off and Akonadi set up to use SQLite, KDE4 is performs much better. Unfortunately there are certain things that Akonadi apparently cannot store in SQLite, so supposedly there can be issues with using it, but in practice I haven't run into any of them.

Using fluxbox, I assign Ctrl-Alt-t to a urxvt terminal...period. If I have a terminal open and want to open another...I just hit Ctrl-Alt_t again and, just as God intended, it doesn't give a crap if I have one running already. When doing development stuff I'd bet I do that a hundred times in one day. Seriously...what are these people thinking?

Simple: on a mobile phone, you're not going to be using multiple terminal windows. If you even have a terminal on there (maybe to ssh into a server from your phone), you would only run one instance. I can't think of any time you'd want to run multiple instances of any application on a smartphone.

Since we now have a mandate to make our desktop PCs function like smartphones as much as possible, this requirement has carried over. I have no idea where this mandate came from, but most of the UI "experts" are obviously following it (with the exception of KDE, XFCE, and LXDE).