Back in the turn of the millennium, Linux was the mean & lean new player in the OS field. Windows 98SE and Windows XP both suffered from catastrophical stability issues. When Windows XP hit the markets in 2001 it was barely usable. It wasn't until the SP2 it got its act together. Nobody really gave any attention about the new, slow & bug-ridden OS X, either.
KDE on the other hand had practically reached maturity: it was fast, easy to use, and most importantly in comparison to commercial competition from Microsoft and Apple, it was very stable.
Fast forward ten years to present day. Windows 7 is extremely stable, better optimized and faster than 10-year-old Windows XP. UI is responsive and well thought out. It's a pleasure to use.
Unfortunately Linux desktops have not been blessed with the same development trend as the commercial ones. Exactly the opposite has happened. KDE 3.5 was a mature product, but then the developers decided to scrap it all, start from a scratch and imagined a concept for a super-modern semantic desktop where everything is a plasmid (a kinda powerful widget). Three years after it is obvious they have failed miserably.
I tried to like it and some aspects of KDE are truly outstanding, but it still is not a product I can recommend to anyone without malicious intend. It is filled with instability, cluttered UI, development uncertainty, and bloat. Indexing/meta-data combo which should be the very core of this desktop is extremely buggy. It can hog 100% of CPU in some cases, it is prone to crashing and simply doesn't work (can't index PDF's, can't index even ODT). Disable that combo of doom, and you're left with a glitchy UI which isn't nearly as responsive nor stable as Windows XP was before SP2. Windows 7 outright stomps its teeth on sidewalk. It is simply a big unusable mess with no way out. I've had enough of KDE4 after tolerating it for so long, filing bug reports, hanging in IRC and posting on mailing list. I really wanted to believe, but nope. It will never happen.
GNOME3... ahh, where should I even begin? Like team KDE, GNOME devs decided that perfectly functional, stable & simple GNOME2 is bad. So they scrapped it, started practically from scratch and gave birth to GNOME3, which is oversimplified to the point of unusable. Drawing inspiration heavily from OS X and iOS, it simply fails to work on computer that is operated with mouse and keyboard. It is inflexible, un customizable and on top of that, it consumes more resources than anything else on the market. What were they thinking? Now here comes the really disheartening part: even if it seems like handicapped to retardation, it still is better than the current KDE and it seems to have future.
In ten years FOSS desktop ended from pack leader status to absolute garbage. It isn't fun anymore.
KDE on the other hand had practically reached maturity: it was fast, easy to use, and most importantly in comparison to commercial competition from Microsoft and Apple, it was very stable.
Fast forward ten years to present day. Windows 7 is extremely stable, better optimized and faster than 10-year-old Windows XP. UI is responsive and well thought out. It's a pleasure to use.
Unfortunately Linux desktops have not been blessed with the same development trend as the commercial ones. Exactly the opposite has happened. KDE 3.5 was a mature product, but then the developers decided to scrap it all, start from a scratch and imagined a concept for a super-modern semantic desktop where everything is a plasmid (a kinda powerful widget). Three years after it is obvious they have failed miserably.
I tried to like it and some aspects of KDE are truly outstanding, but it still is not a product I can recommend to anyone without malicious intend. It is filled with instability, cluttered UI, development uncertainty, and bloat. Indexing/meta-data combo which should be the very core of this desktop is extremely buggy. It can hog 100% of CPU in some cases, it is prone to crashing and simply doesn't work (can't index PDF's, can't index even ODT). Disable that combo of doom, and you're left with a glitchy UI which isn't nearly as responsive nor stable as Windows XP was before SP2. Windows 7 outright stomps its teeth on sidewalk. It is simply a big unusable mess with no way out. I've had enough of KDE4 after tolerating it for so long, filing bug reports, hanging in IRC and posting on mailing list. I really wanted to believe, but nope. It will never happen.
GNOME3... ahh, where should I even begin? Like team KDE, GNOME devs decided that perfectly functional, stable & simple GNOME2 is bad. So they scrapped it, started practically from scratch and gave birth to GNOME3, which is oversimplified to the point of unusable. Drawing inspiration heavily from OS X and iOS, it simply fails to work on computer that is operated with mouse and keyboard. It is inflexible, un customizable and on top of that, it consumes more resources than anything else on the market. What were they thinking? Now here comes the really disheartening part: even if it seems like handicapped to retardation, it still is better than the current KDE and it seems to have future.
In ten years FOSS desktop ended from pack leader status to absolute garbage. It isn't fun anymore.