KDE 3 is one of the sweetest looking environments I've ever seen. VERY slick and professional looking. The only problem I have with it (and this is moreso a complaint with X, not KDE), is that the graphics subsystem is just way too slow. It makes the system feel sluggish. I really, really think that the Linux/*BSD community needs to either dump or SERIOUSLY rework XFree86 for faster peroformance (use double-buffering with hardware framebuffer preferably). Even if for local use we ditch the X11 protocol I think it would be a step in the right direction. X11 is great for running remote applications, but on a local machine it makes no sense. It'd be better to support local display of X11 apps through an extension to the system (a la X-win32 or Hummingbird eXceed for Windows) rather than use X11 as the whole system. Just enable apps to make use of an extra -x11 flag when you run them so that they can be run remotely if desired, and if that isn't present then run under local accelerated mode. With the advent of OpenOffice and with some games actually being worked on for Linux (Neverwinter Nights is awesome. too bad it looks like I'm going to finish it on my Windows machine before the Linux version is out 🙂), there's not much holding me back from using Linux as my main operating system. GUI speed, and a good web browser (Konqueror is getting there, but it ain't there yet). I think the only thing holding it back for anyone else is a form of setup.exe for Linux with a standard uninstall repository just like windows (don't give me RPM or apt-get. they aren't nearly as simple for a newbie).
