I was an avid, loyal KDE 3.5.x user with openSUSE, once upon a time.
It was light, lean and mean. It could do just about anything you can think of in terms of accomodating changes to the GUI, even to the point of changing the look and feel to a Mac OSX, if you so chose.
The architectural differences between 3.5.x and 4.x are significant, some of which don't matter to the average user but make from a programming perspective the back-end more flexible and reliable.
Somewhere along the way the process for 4.x in its early phases got gumbed up and there was much turmoil so much so that I decided to do two things:
1) Switch to Ubuntu
2) Use the default GUI, GNOME
I have to say, at this juncture, the level of integration in GNOME is much tighter and tuned than what I recall my KDE experience was like.
One of my friends, Tim Patterson, will tell you that KDE quality is back and 4.x replicates 3.5.x and then some.
I keep getting nudges that I have to try Mint.
But to be truthful, GNOME gets the job done for me, using droid-ttf with compiz, and it doesn't try to force new UI paradigms on you.
The new KDE requires 1GB of memory on openSUSE. That was a 'turn-off' for me. GNOME runs reasonably well even on machines that have 256-512MB, if you've set your swap partition correctly with maybe an adjustment to 'swappiness'.
I am sorry to say, I have no interest in returning to KDE at this point but do wish the Developer community well.
Who knows, maybe the next iteration of GNOME 3.0 will get gumbed up and I'll be in the market for a new GUI, but I won't borrow trouble.
From what I have seen, GNOME 3.0 looks promising but will not be the default in Ubuntu 10.10.
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