KDE vs Gnome (and Apple and Windows)

"I like KDE! " There I said it. But I don't use it. Why? The same reason I won't get a PS3 or PSP or almost any new console at launch date. There is nothing to play on it. Actually lets be honest, there are a lot of applications for KDE. However, some of my critical applications such as Firefox and Eclipse are targeted for GTK. And I find a lot more applications that I have a potential of using have a GTK based equivalent. But KDE is still better and I hope more applications go for it. Why? well here's the run down.

Feature	KDE	Gnome	Windows	Apple
Customizability	Very customizable without dealing with things that are available in the menus. More consistent than Gnome. I can make KDE work like a Mac or Windows machine so the transition to KDE is much easier than that of Gnome.	More customizable than that of Apple and Windows. However, a lot of things are very difficult to do compared to KDE. Even something as simple as periodic wallpaper changing is outside the DE and the current wallpaper-tray in the repositories are so buggy you need gconf-editor to add directories to it.	Not very, but there are some hacks to put in unsigned VS and excellent themes for it. Although most of it is extra, the stuff I use are free and easy enough to use and install.	Not very much at all. Although I haven't looked too far for it.
Registry	Not really sure, I never had to look for it in KDE.	You use gconf-editor to have something like a registry for Gnome applications. The Windows registry is something that people complain about, but Gnome has its own as well which looks like a big mess when I see it as well. So don't tell me about registry bloat.	Ya registry bloat. yada, yada, yada, blah, blah blah. Just install the user profile hive cleanup service if you have a genuine Windows XP and you'd be fine.	Same as KDE I am not sure how it works, but I never needed to look for it.
UI Performance (inside the window, so not counting Beryl)	Slower than Windows and the Mac. This is the general flaw in almost any X application.	Slower than Windows and the Mac. This is the general flaw in almost any X application.	Normal. A lot of widgets are drawn by the core libraries rather than the application process themselves I find.	Quite responsive.
Default shortcuts	KDE allows me to change the shortcuts to match whatever environment I used last. So I find it okay. The defaults are relatively the same as Gnome.	I haven't seen the option to use an established shortcut scheme for Gnome and I don't like the defaults. How does Alt-F2 represent "RUN"?	Makes a lot of sense (for English speaking people at least). Win-R for Run Win-D for Show Desktop F1 for help has been quite established now. Ctrl-X,C,V copied from the Mac but makes a lot of sense.	Application level shortcuts do make a lot of sense. So much so that other OSes steal them. But on OS X, the function key rows just don't make any sense what so ever. How is F6 (or whatever it is) representative of show desktop?
Hot key customization	Quite good, especially with Beryl. I customized the hotkeys so they make more sense to me.	Quite good, especially with Beryl. I customized the hotkeys so they make more sense to me.	If I have to change things I may need some external utility. But since the shortcuts make sense to me in general I never needed to.	I have no clue how, but I am pretty sure there should be a way.
Desktop widgets	Couldn't get superkaramba working when I was using a KDE based installation.	gDesklets are slow, ugly, unstable and sometimes US centric.	Google Desktop is okay. Yahoo Widgets have a lot more to choose from, which also means a lot of crap to plow through.	The ones I have seen look really nice. And the management interface is well done.
StumbleUpon in the common web browsers (my favorite extension of all time)	Not available for Konqueror.	Firefox has it and works well.	Firefox and IE have it.	Not available for Safari. But at least Firefox pulls UI elements from the DE.
Eye candy	Out of the box, you get support for different wallpapers per desktop.	Out of the box, it looks like crap. All you can do is some changes for the visual styles, but you can't do much things on the desktop side without going through gconf	Out of the box really looks like crap. Thankfully that is easy to change with the VS patch.	Out of the box, looks like white everywhere.
Input context efficiency. (For lack of a better term, this is a metric I like to measure UI designs on. Basically it is how long before I switch between a keyboard and a mouse)	I can't say I tried much. So I won't comment on this one for KDE.	So so. I found that my hand did switch quite a lot from keyboard to mouse. But that's probably because I don't know much of the shortcuts yet. However, I did find that my left hand was always resting at the keyboard.	Excellent. Most of the things you can do on the mouse (with the exception of pointing) can be done on the keyboard. And most of the things you can do on the keyboard (except for typing) is available on the mouse.	Poor. Yah I might not know all the shortcuts yet, but I find myself at a loss trying to do file drag and drop with the keyboard. Having only one button pointing device you don't get the privilege of having a popup menu when you drop. Then you'd need to remember what all the possible modifiers you have to deal with to copy or move or make an alias to a file. And this is because some UI guy thought that two buttons are too difficult for most people.
My impression on developer attitude	KDE development seems to be more open to many UI concepts. Although it is time permitting. The side effect of this is the sheer volume of options a user has which can be a good or bad thing depending on who is touching the keyboard. I prefer this one since I am more of a power user, but at the same time when I am new to the system, I am not too keen on going through the registry to do configurations. Although they do seem quite attached to KHTML.	Arrogant people who think they know UI design. They think they are catering to the lowest common denominator, but what they do is really alienate the people that know what they are doing and what they want. They also seem to think in a more lab/university environment rather than real world situations. Hence, the lowest common denominator tends to be more inept with computers than normal. They want people to adapt to their way of thinking rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, for experienced users we are forced to dumb ourselves down to the DE rather than the DE smartening itself up for us. This is shown by how difficult it is to make any changes.	See Gnome. However, there are a lot of free applications that can tweak the UI (sometimes even provided by Microsoft) to make it work the way the user would want it. Also in Windows there are quite a number of ways of doing things. Even old ways that some people might've forgetten about such as Ctrl-Ins for copy. Or right click drag to open a context menu of drag target options.	See Gnome. period