Re: KDE
[Author here]
*Firmly and completely in the department of my own personal opinion divorced from any professional verdict.*
> why not simply use KDE ?
It is impossible to simply use something which is not itself simple.
KDE has some 25 years of baggage, and is at heart a poorly-done rendition of the Windows 98 desktop.
If you like it, fine. I liked KDE 1.x a lot, because it was a working all-FOSS desktop for Linux, which was badly needed in 1998-1999 and it worked. It wasn't pretty but it did the job.
KDE 2.x was bloated with extra features because someone somewhere thought that the file manager should be a web browser and be able to open FTP as well and so on. Corel tamed it and made it usable. Xandros continued this.
KDE 3.x was a clusterfsck of options to twiddle with no cohesive overall vision or guidance. Even Xandros could not tame it or shape it into anything usable.
It says a great deal about the KDE community that it's KDE 3.x, the version that drove me away from the desktop forever, is the one that's been forked and preserved.
KDE 4 was an abomination best not mentioned in polite company.
KDE 5 tames the worst excesses of 4 and slaps an ugly flat theme on it so it doesn't burn out your retinas on the first run, but it's a mess, and amid a million options which I've never wanted in the midst of a fever dream, they've removed the few useful desirable ones, like a single taskbar spanned over 2+ monitors. Apparently, amid all the horrors of desktop plasmoids and other excrescences, that was too hard to support.
This tells you a lot.
Look, I am perfectly happy if people like it, and I am not here to tell anyone they are wrong. De gustibus non est disputandum. Chacun à son goût.
But if KDE were still the only Linux desktop today, I'd be forced to use CDE.
GNOME takes away choices and options and tools I *need* and use hundreds of times a day, because my impression is that the GNOME designers don't really know or care how advanced users actually use a desktop WIMP.
KDE, on the other hand, adds a thousand more I don't want, while _still_ failing to decently implement the desktop of which it's a ripoff.