Oh, I meant the fonts, which don't have anything to do with Skulpture. I think Skulpture is nice enough in a "Windows 95 plus polish" kinda way... then again I'm not really looking for "Windows 95 plus polish". Liking my rounded corners and hipster flatness, actually...

I'm not sure I can see the problems, except for the kerning issue in the small text. I'm mostly using Gnome Shell and GTK 2/3 applications at the moment and frankly didn't notice a difference versus KDE. Deja Vu Serif looks pretty much the same to me in Gedit (say) as in your first screenshot... maybe I'm just not used to anything better...

Well, it's a headline of sorts. Not sure that could ever bother me (but there are areas where KDE (or at least Plasma) rub me the wrong way aesthetically)

I'm curious... what's wrong with the fonts and/or what's specifically "KDE" about their wrongness?

(It'll use whatever colour scheme you pick (or create); not a fan of grey myself...)

I think it sounds lovely. Much better than any closed source OS I can think of.

Actually, KDE was and is the super-customisable one... you can have panels everywhere or nowhere, put ten folder views and clocks and RSS feeds and upload-to-wherever buttons on your desktop or none, switch between different task bars and launchers and menus, change what mouse buttons or screen corners do and where and how, and so on. It only looks like Windows if you've never right-clicked anything...

It's certainly prettier and easier to use than the stock Gnome 3 Shell.

Just don't tell my AGP desktop while it's (obliviously) working fine with all the KWin & Gnome compositing bells & whistles... (KDE being a tad snappier than Gnome-Shell, admittedly)

Amiga OS -> Windows -> SuSE 7.0 (briefly; didn't work well) -> Windows -> Mandrake 8/9 -> Ubuntu -> Kubuntu. I did try and do keep trying other distributions: Elementary, openSUSE, ROSA, Mageia, Mint, Pinguy OS, Manjaro, Crunch Bang, Arch Bang... I just don't seem to have the necessary patience any more to get properly set up with them -- to install uncommon tools and games that I know how to get running on *buntu with little fussing. So in the end just go back to the APT and PPAs I'm already comfortable with. (And why not? Probably because I'd still like to broaden my horizon...)

I get Apport popups all the time in *buntu development releases, but then that's regardless of the desktop environment. I'm really quite happy with Kubuntu... the simplicity and mostly-just-working-ness of Ubuntu combined with little of the bother, some of the momentum, and a (by now again) very capable, configurable desktop environment. Of course, "works for me" is as anecdotal as "doesn't work for me".

I may have the same problem with Amarok that a lot of people seem to have with KDE in general (except I do like KDE, but prefer Clementine): for me there're just way too many little knobs and gadgets to search, sort, filter and browse music sources and playlist. I much prefer a classic file-manager-like list view with draggable, resizable, sortable and toggle-able columns for my playlist; with Amarok 2.x, designing playlist layouts is a bit of an art unto itself. It's not that Amarok doesn't work or anything like that, it's just a matter of ...style.

Do you remember the zoomy-outy thing they had at first for switching activities... and/or managing desktops? Hard to remember exactly what it was, in part because it was so buggy. It inevitably brought my PC to its knees and never got me the same combination of left/right desktops twice on a dual screen setup. And since they had different resolutions I'd get weird incomplete slices of desktops all the time. Augh. So much saner now.

One of my favourite bands is called Download. Argh! Almost as bad as the new GNOME browser... Web.

Actually, I find it easier to distinguish between a "dapper drake", a "warty warthog", and an "intrepid ibex" than between a growing number of big cats. If anything, the (mostly) alphabetic order of the Ubuntu codenames lets me know if something's much older than something else. But then I've never used OS X (I don't even leave the house that much) so I don't associate "Puma" or "Cheetah" or "Panther" with anything at all.

I'm not sure it caters to the novice user either. People who like to explore their options with the mouse, who may not even know what they're looking for yet, are presented with a number of additional clicks (some of them less than intuitive) before they end up with something resembling a categorised applications menu. Similarly the applications' menus are kinda hidden until you mouse over them. Unity is fastest when you know what you want and have your fingers on the keyboard ready to search Dash/HUD for it. But even (or especially?) then I prefer seeing what I've got open/running at a glance, and a text-less column of app icons (with "UI helpers" like a desktop grid or main menu mixed in) isn't really ideal for that. Shrug. Haven't used it that much because it always ended up frustrating me. It and Nautilus.