I decided to switch from Gnome to KDE on a new Fedora 11 install.
After a few minutes of use, it does at least look slick and doesn't
make weird noises at me. I've found at least one problem already.
The default web browser is konqueror. I'm not sure why this choice was
made, but I figured everyone seriously using KDE must be changing it
to firefox, so I just have to find out how.
Trying to use the GUI the way it was intended, I tried computer /
system settings / web browser. It tells me that I can configure my
default web browser and "all KDE applications in which you can select
hyperlinks should honor this setting".
When I pick "in the following browser" and select firefox off the
menus (which fills the box in with mozilla-firefox), the web browser
on the main "fedora" start menu is till KDE.
If the issue is that the start menu does not let me "select
hyperlinks", but instead lets me "start an application in which you
can select hyperlinks", that's a pretty fine distinction that can only
create confusion.
(i am at least impressed that Konqueror was able to load gmail and
send a mail, although it does appear that google automatically uses a
lighter version of it, since it warns me "For a better Gmail
experience, use a fully supported browser", which I can ckick on and
see a list of what I can't do. Also, the behavior when hitting ctrl
is neat. Gnome is totally unusable without a mouse, so this is a hint
that maybe KDE is trying to keep up with Windows (or Unix of 20 years
ago) in how well a keyboard works to use the system).