haggholm | From Hell's heart, I stab at KDE

I’m a big fan of Gnome, but I know that KDE has plenty of adherents, and while I didn’t like KDE 3.x, I figured that now that it has reached version 4.1, it was time to give it another shot (it being widely agreed that KDE 4.0 just Was Not There Yet). So I read about Gentoo’s new sets feature, worked around a few bugs, and installed KDE 4.1. While I’ll shortly give you a brief list of grievances, the very very short version is that I’m currently uninstalling it and hoping that I can somehow undo the damage.

KDE 4.1 is very pretty. I’ll give it that.
It doesn’t understand multiple displays very well—I use NVidia’s TwinView system, which Gnome handles beautifully. KDE 4.1 sees it as one huge display…sort of.
Panels (like the task bar with a start-type button, and so on) don’t span both monitors. However, because KDE 4.1 doesn’t see the monitors as quite separate, either, there’s no way to configure a panel to be on a specific screen. I like my panels on my main screen. In Gnome, this is easy. In KDE 4.1, I spent hours failing to make it work.
The KDE 4.1 version of KMail, the mail agent, has one fatal flaw in its IMAP handling: When I open it, leave it open, and mark messages as read on another computer, there’s no obvious way to make it recognise those messages as read. Reloading the folder doesn’t do it. Restarting KMail doesn’t do it. Thunderbird and Gnome’s Evolution have no problem with this—in IMAP, read status is a server status, not client-side!
Konqueror still makes me want to use Firefox. So I do.
I am not moving away from Pidgin.
My main applications being GTK-based, and the menu interface of KDE 4.1 unfortunately annoying the hell out of me, I decided to return to good old familiar Gnome.
Installing KDE 4.1 broke my Gnome themes! Back in Gnome, things don’t look right. Why KDE saw fit to mess with Gnome theme settings, I don’t know.
Installing KDE 4.1 broke my menus! My menus are full of KDE items, with many important Gnome items gone. Notably, the settings items for things like theming and appearance are nowhere to be found, which is very irritating given the above item.

Having uninstalled all the kde package sets and removed all packages whose names start with a k from my package list, it’s now time to try to get my beautiful Gnome system back in order. It took no effort at all to get it to work in the first place, so one small comfort is that at the cost of losing theme settings, custom menu setups, and some application settings, I can at least blitz the settings and get a sane default.

With Gnome, that is.