Using Gnome hasn’t always been the nicest experience, but for me certainly a fast one. Switching forth and back I decided to stick to KDE – until 4.0 came along that is. I really disliked the way it looked and all these widgets aren’t really my thing.

Since the development for KDE obviously hasn’t stopped and KDE 4.3 RC 2 is now available, I thought it’s time to check out what’s going on and installed KDE next to my Gnome environment. I will add a comparison between these two desktop environments and try not to start a flame-war, but show why I decided to use either one. Which one you use in the end is ultimately your decision.

Installation

To install KDE next to Gnome, which certainly is a nice way to try or simply use the positive aspects from both desktop environments, you’ll only need to add the package kubuntu-desktop (using Synaptics: Ubuntu’s package manager) which will also install the standard applications. If you would like to install KDE only, just add the package kde-core instead. Using KDE in your language can be achieved by adding these packages (example for German): language-pack-kde-de and language-pack-kde-de-base.