A current mania is to exile yourself for a certain period of time into the rival desktop environment, to see how bad (or not) you would feel: a KDE fan would use GNOME, while a GNOME guy would use KDE.

I have undertaken the challenge myself, and it wasn’t bad at all. I have used KDE in the past, albeit without very much enthusiasm. Ubuntu 4.10 converted me to GNOME, once for all, so I was very upset when Slackware dropped the support for GNOME.

In the meantime, I have changed my preferred distro more than once (BTW, I don’t use Ubuntu anymore), yet

my strong bias for GNOME was very visible.

GNOME is not the heaven on earth, so that my almost religious love for it looked bizarre. The complete rebuttal of KDE too. I wanted to feel how is to only have KDE while having GNOME habits and idiosyncrasies.

After some 3 days in KDE under Slackware (preceded by a week of isolation in WindowMaker, to keep me “free of GNOME”), then a KDE experience with PC-BSD, and an unexpected decision to adopt Pardus, I had the proof that life in KDE is possible even for the incredulous.

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