I am not a Desktop Environment (DE) fanboy, I use Gnome because it's the default DE on Ubuntu. After a while I knew about other major DE : XFCE and KDE. I use XFCE on my older PC. From what I learned DEs have their own strength and weakness. The best thing about Linux is you don't have to choose, you can have best of both worlds. Last night I gave KDE a shot on my notebook, an hp 540. I use Ubuntu 9.04. After 188 MB, Kubuntu was installed on my system.