Out of the box, both KDE3 and Gnome look like crap. There, I said it. Default KDE still uses Everaldo’s Crystal SVG icon theme, which dates from 2001. That’s about the time I started using KDE, and I loved it at the time, but these days, icon sets tend to be a little less bright. I remember KDE being compared to Playmobil a lot at that time… The default theme, called Plastik, isn’t much better. It’s perfectly all right, and more than a little bit boring.