KDE vs GNOME
From Organic Design wiki
I installed KDE Plasma Desktop yesterday alongside GNOME. I just installed it into my Lucid Lynx from the normal Software Center so that it would become an option for users to use as their desktop environment when they log in.
See these instructions for how do this on Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwal).
After it first installed though it crashed my system and I could no longer boot into any desktop environment. I was still able to use CTRL+ALT+F1 to get to a different console and log in to a shell. I couldn't figure out a way to fix it from there so I tried a do-release-upgrade. This brought me up to Natty and everything was functioning correctly. Users can now select from GNOME, KDE or Unity desktop environments when they log in.
Pro's
- Many more options for windows available
- Theming much better supported, all connected to net with ratings, most installed, most downloaded etc
- KMail, Korganiser, Kontact are all pretty impressive for task and contact management, for superior to Evolution
- Application selection such as for setting startup-apps or file-associations uses the same app structure as the launcher, unlike GNOME which leaves the user to figure out the application command.
- KDE has nice desktop widgets and they can be shared across the network
Con's
- Can't adjust the position of loaded apps in the taskbar
- KMail is always busy downloading entire folders of emails unnecessarily, Thunderbird seems to stay up to date in real-time without needing to do this
- The size of fonts in menus is too big and nothing I do changes their size - first very irritating bug
