One perk of Linux is that you can choose different desktop environments. Don’t like the way your current desktop looks? Change to a different one (and I’m not talking about just the wallpaper). Last night and this morning I made the leap from GNOME to KDE.
The main change in KDE was the presence of additional menus and the default setting of the menu at the bottom. Thanks to the complete reorganization of the menus, Pidgin took me several minutes to find, and many items were included in more than one menu. This could probably be fixed with some menu cleanup, but it was frustrating enough that I didn’t want to bother. Even after customizing KDE, I couldn’t tweak it to my liking. I couldn’t change really important things like the size of the workspaces on the navigation bar, which took up much more space than necessary and gave the bar a cluttered appearance. I switched back to GNOME after a few hours and uninstalled KDE, then customized GNOME even more to my liking.
KDE may not be for me, but a lot of Linux users I know love it, which prompted me to try it. I’m glad Linux offers desktop environment diversity.