I had a few frustrations with Gnome after upgrading my main
machine to FC4, so I’ve been giving KDE a try this week.

I have to say, amaroK is very
nice, the best music player I’ve tried. I find, to my surprise, that
I love all the weird little gui things they do. I don’t understand
why the panel part of it shows up in the notification area though; I’d
rather have a full set of player controls directly on the panel.

It also seems like the KDE panel is a bit more configurable — it
can act the
way the Gnome panel could before FC2.

On the other hand, in some ways KDE seems less nice. The KDE
terminal doesn’t to turn URLs into links (that I can see). The KDE
panel sometimes moves applets around without my intervention (this one
seems to be a plain old bug). I had to install kbiff separately (the
whole point behind this exercise), and it is kind of clunky.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the x-chat notification
thing I have also works in the KDE panel. I guess freedesktop.org is
earning its keep :-).

In general the two desktops feel pretty similar, much more than I
would have thought.

Anyway, I think I will switch back. I’m more used to gnome, and
now that I found out about mailnotify, my most
pressing irritation has gone away. I really wish Gnome had just
automatically run this applet for me instead of giving me a useless
error about the mailcheck applet going away. I literally went for a
couple of weeks thinking that they had simply dropped a useful applet
without providing a replacement. Foolish me, I guess, for not reading
the release notes; though honestly I think this easily falls into the
“just works” category. I usually put off upgrades because history has
taught me that in amongst the new goodies will be some unexplained
deletion of a feature I rely on. Upgrades are a fact of life,
handling them with some grace will make people happier.