It's a lot of new bling aimed at improving the desktop experience. Will it? More importantly, will it for you? What would make you choose KDE over GNOME (or vice versa)? This week we take a brief look at KDE in both its 3.5.x and 4 incarnations, and outline a few rules of thumb on choosing your desktop environment.

Let's take a quick look at KDE's history and underpinnings. KDE was launched in 1996 and is based on the Qt (pronounced "cute") toolkit. (A toolkit is a set of libraries of the things that make up a graphical user interface -- things like windows, buttons and their functions.) But all was not right with the world. Qt, at that time, didn't use a completely free software license. This caused some concern about the legality of linking to Qt libraries, and the Debian distribution even went so far as to remove KDE from their repositories for a time.

Currently, Qt uses a dual license. The toolkit is available under the GPL (GNU General Public License) and the QPL (Q Public License), and linking to the Qt libraries is no longer an issue.KDE looks a bit more Windows-like than GNOME, but has some quirks that puzzle new users. The K Menu, both in KDE 3.5.x and 4, is similar to the Windows "Start" menu. KDE is usually arranged with a bottom panel, featuring the K Menu button, and a few frequently accessed applications (such as your home folder and Konqueror, KDE's native web browser). The panel often has a system tray and a list of open windows and desktop workspaces.

In KDE 4, the K Menu (among other things) got a radical makeover. The menu is divided into two parts, a lower panel consisting of several buttons: Favorites, Applications, My Computer, Recently Used and Leave (a really inelegant way of saying "shutdown menu"). The upper panel features animated menus depending on what is selected on the lower panel. Here you can see the Applications icon highlighted, with the Office applications loaded. It takes some getting used to (and is still a release candidate at the time of this post), but it is appealing to those who enjoy putting their own mark on the aesthetics and function of their desktop.

KDE is known for being highly customizable, both in terms of how the desktop looks and behaves, and how it ultimately handles the hardware on the system. The good news for you as a new Linux user is the amount of control you'll have over the desktop. You'll be able to configure things to look and act exactly as you want. The bad news? The amount of control you have can be puzzling to the point of frustration.

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