I currently use KDE, but in the end, I don't care much. KDE has all them killer features and customizability (?), whereas Gnome is somehow "smoother". I also like Xfce when pimped with a well-configured ivman and beryl; I don't run anything without beryl nowadays anyway.
there is no "look and feel of KDE" since version 3.0 all customizable...
There isn't even a default look&feel: in a standard installation you are asked some questions before the first log-in. This wizard has been banned from most distros nowadays, but it's present in debian and might still be in Fedora, though I very much doubt it. It was in RH7.3.
I really liked GNOME ages ago because it was an embodiment of the community. Like GNU/Linux itself, you would pick and choose on each level what you wanted for GNOME, the windowmanager, the filemanager, the graphical image tool, so forth and so on, but now, it's very organised and is slowly becoming a choked system. All of the graphical eyecandy in vista was stuff being proposed back in the planning stages of GNOME 2, but those with the better of the voting got the simplify this, higgify that, reduce the dependence on these, unify all of those stuff.
There are three developers that read the features of Vista and almost certainly freaked out thinking..."They were reading my S*! THOSE F*ERS!" I love Vista for the security which will probably reduce the number help-desk people needed for anyone location, but the part that ticks me off is that people will actually think MS came up with the graphical features.
Regardless, I think in the long term, I'll be using Fluxbox, gDesklets and Bonobo in the long term...oddly enough, vista has gDesklets and Bonobo too...strange, huh? Wait...they're called something else....
"This is totally true; I swear, I am not making this up." --Dave Barry
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Gnome... I just transfered from Xfce. They really stopped attempting to keep things slick. And Edgy 6.10 is so nice. I really haven't messed with the default settings either. Any KDE evangelists out there who have some reasons to convert?
I am a relative newbie though. I switched from XP when the WGA program rolled out last year. Xubuntu was recommended and I bit. Would I be able to handle everything? For reference, I am really getting into the command terminal. Nostalgia for dos days and its fun to control everything with itty bitty parameters. My terminal has the package that lets it drop down from the top with F12 ala Quake. I luvs it.
I am working in Fedora and I like KDE more than GNOME. May be it has got to do with my liking when I saw KDE for the first time but I feel more comfortable in KDE.