[KDE and Gnome both good for different reasons]
While I would hate to see Gnome consigned to the dustbin I think it's about time they gave up and admitted that KDE has won (flame away). I admit that KDE isn't perfect, far from it, but KDE4+ is streets ahead of Gnome now and the big hurdle to widespread use by companies has now vanished.
I will give you that KDE4 has a ton more features than Gnome, as well as a couple of programs that are better. However, as an outside observer (read: end-user), Gnome and affiliated programs fit my bill because they are generally more stable, and have smaller memory-footprints to boot.
Anecdotally, let me give some examples:
- At work, I have two identical machines, circa 1 year ago hardware-wise. I'm running Kubuntu 8.10 and Ubuntu 8.10 on them. The KDE one regularly "loses" the mouse or keyboard. They just plain stop responding. I used to have to CTRL-ALT-F1, and restart kdm to get back responsiveness. The Gnome version has yet to show me this behavior.
- The KDE desktop will entirely freeze from time to time. I'm not running much, just doing something simple, like switching between desktops, or alt-tabbing through windows. And bam. I have to resort to CTRL-ALT-F1. Sometimes that won't even work, and I have to hard-reboot. Doing similar in Gnome has yet to show me similar behavior. (I use them both in similar ways, for the same things - it's a test environment.)
- Programs will randomly quit. An example is KMail. If I get a new IMAP mail, it sometimes decides to quit. Evolution does this too, but much less frequently.
- Off the top of my head, some KDE programs with different, but annoying problems: Kate, KOffice, Konqueror, Kopete, Konversation, Kirc. In contrast, I find that their GTK counterparts "just work," are faster, and use less memory to boot. Gedit/jEdit? OpenOffice? Firefox? Pidgin? Yeah, very successful on the Gnome desktop.
On that note, I find that KDE and QT apps are just ... slower than Gnome and GTK apps. Clicking on a menu shouldn't take 4 or 5 seconds to pop up. It should be pert-near instantaneous. Switching desktops should take milliseconds, not seconds, nor should it matter to which virtual desktop I'm switching.
I'm not dissing KDE, but rather pointing out that it's not as complete as folks say it is. I'll concede KDE's successes. I have only small gripes against Amarok, and indeed use it as my default music client. I believe Konsole to be superior to Gnome's terminal in terms of usability. Okular is a decent program although I prefer Evince for it's simplicity.
But for the majority of my KDE4 experience ... Crashing randomly, even if it's only in my particular use case, is hardly successful, especially when the counterpart doesn't crash for my use case. Using excess memory is another no-no. I have 4 Gigs on both of these machines, and the KDE one consistently has problems, starting to swap, etc. Unacceptable.
I believe that Gnome is far from dead, and as long as KDE has these problems, it is not nearly as far ahead of Gnome as one might think. In fact, in my mind, stability and resource usage are far more important.
But what do I know? I'm just an end-user.