I haven’t been much of a KDE fan. 2 years ago when I was first exposed to Linux in my Operating Systems class at ITT, I liked the layout a bit better that Gnome, but really knew nothing about it.

I’ve been using Linux as my primary OS for just about a year now, with Ubuntu 6.06 being my weapon of choice. Several times I have installed KDE, only to use it for 10 minutes. I found myself Googling the packages that were installed (because I’m bad and I don’t write important things like that down), just so I could remove them.

KDE was okay, but I had grown to love Gnome — furthermore, I was comfortable with it. I had it tweaked for performance on my midrange laptop. I knew where stuff was. KDE was a strange monster I wanted nothing to do with, that was a RAM hog the few times I had installed it.

About a week ago, I did this again. After realizing it had been the 7th or 8th time that I had removed KDE, I decided to install it again and actually give it a chance. I was up until 4am that night configuring stuff.

There are some things I like better, such as the ease of configuration (Windows control panel style vs Gnome’s registry style). There is an ability to force the size of certain windows and remember/force their location on the desktop — I use this one to keep my softphone at work a certain size. The screen saver allows you to put a gap between the start of the animation and the time your password lock becomes active. This is especially nice for me — I am constantly jumping for the mouse as the screen dims to try and stop the screen saver.

A week later, I’m still using it. I have to admit, there were several times when I wanted to race back to Gnome (and a few times I did). I have decided to give it at least a month. I’m not quite sure which I’ll end up going with.

Good times, indeed.