Gnome and KDE both innovate, and both push limits, and both will learn from each other.

KDE learns from Gnome and uses the Telepathy definition.

Gnome learns from KDE and switches to WebKit which originates from khtml.

Both work together under the hood of freedesktop.org

And both are moving ever faster to replace proprietary systems.

So hey, I might be a KDE user and I might care most about KDE, but Gnome and KDE are both important, because being two projects they can move in different ways, find together again and move out again and that way cover far more ground than a single project could.

I want many people to use KDE and Gnome users want many people to use Gnome.

Lets move out, then, and create guides for our users and create many great things which bring them to the respective desktop, and while we try to create a better experience than the other free desktops, we might suddenly see, that we just surpassed any non-free desktop together.

Then we can sit down, celebrate a big free software party and begin outpacing the respective other one again.

And while doing so, we can still keep contact, share ideas and work together, and we will make a difference.
- http://draketo.de/english/free-software/light/kde-and-gnome-vs

@Ethan: You don’t know shit about Plasma or KDE 4. Plasma is not a bunch of C++ classes waiting to be subclasseed. It’s “desktop shell”, it’s what reacts to the user when right-clicking on the background, when handling and dragging an icon to the desktop. KDE-supplied plasmoids (plasma applets) ARE part of plasma (and some are very essential like the new panel.) Just because the API is well designed and allows other developers to easily write new data engines or applets (and now in non-C++ languages) this doesn’t mean the essential-and-to-be-shipped ones are not part of it. And what the hell do you mean by that Phonon, Solid, Nepomuk not visible to the end user? Is being extremely useful is NOT possible unless something is “visible” (according to your own twisted definition?) Dolphin has Nepomuk support, how invisible is that? Solid and Phono greatly simplifies developers work and enhance the end user experience, now that KDE applications are going to available on GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. How about Decibel? Akonadi? The Oxygen team (which is doing an awesome job?) How about KOffice 2 (Krita, Kexi, ..?) How about all the work being done by the KDE-Graphics (the almighty Okular, anybody?,) or KDE-PIM? Is by visible you mean “eye-candy”? Well meet plasma (now with support for Apple dashboard widgets,) and the new Kwin. And KDE switched to Qt 4, DBus from DCOP, CMake from the autotools and making their code as cross-platform as possible, in the process. That alone _is_ massive work.

That’s what matters these days, otherwise you are seen to be left behind. Apparently, it was enough for Gnome and GTK to use Cairo and for people to do things like Compiz.

I’m really surprised at all the negativity here in the comments…

As for the whole screen estate issue? Dunno about you, but Gtk+ buttons (in any style easily available) always seem much taller to me with the same font settings than KDE styles, not to mention most software lack proper keyboard control (there are some issues in KDE I can’t quite get over either, though), and the widgets keep getting randomly resized by a few pixels when clicked even if it’s just simple text in them that they already displayed to begin with, which feels a bit unprofessional to me.

I personally can’t stand the Gtk+ dropdown list and the switched button order (Is it possible to make it Okay-Cancel instead of Cancel-Okay? I mean, in a way that it works.) which is pretty much the reason I avoid Gtk+ GUIs as much as possible, but hey, tastes differ.

Anyway, I think this was a quite good post really.

Until then, well… GNOME is just another Windoze lookalike/workalike that really doesn’t interest me.