Tryed the KDE for a while and I am back to Gnome again

To the KDE users: This post is just based on my experience, may be I am not very familiar with the KDE, so please keep calm :)

Since I have been a Linux user, Gnome is always the desktop evironment of my computer, the exception is on one of my old machine, I use fvwm instead. That's not suprise, because gnome is the defaut desktop evrionment of most of big linux distributions, including Red hat, Ubuntu. Red Hat is the first linux system on my computer, about 5 years ago, and then I have used gentoo as my desktop system for about 3 years, and after graduation I used ubuntu.

Gnome is always the default desktop environment, so I never thought about to make some changes, or dedicate some of my time to another desktop environment, I mean KDE, even I known it since I tasted linux at the first bite. I even have ever tried KDE sevral times, but every time just for a glance or "play with". When I have to get start to work, I restart the GDM and enter my familiar environment - Gnome.

I tried Arch linux this week, because I want to install it to my laptop, whose CPU is not so fast. KDE4 is out, as they say, KDE4 is a great gift to the opensource community, So I think I should give me a change to try it. Anywhere, I just want to only one desktop environment installed. I tried KDE first, it beautiful, I thought I would love it. "The desktop of 21 centry", ah ha, now I have it.

But one day later, I changed my mind, because I found some problem which is rather important for me.I am a java programer, In most of my work time, I use eclipse, netbeans and some other java (develop) programs, freemind, argouml, etc. In gnome, I can get a native look and feel when I use these java programs, but in KDE, they only show the strange face to me, the java look and feel. As for as I know, in the java world, for linux, gtk is the only supported GUI lib. if you use SWT based programers you still can get a beatiful look and feel from GTK, if you have configurated the GTKRC, but with Swing, you can only get the strange java look and feel, that makes me feel uncomfortable. For the KDE4, I think it still need time to be really mature, there are so many KDE applications only available for the KDE3, e.g., I want use KMyMoney for my finance management, but it's not available for the KDE4 at this stage. I will not try to use KDE3 now, I found in KDE, the Chinese characters are not renderd clearly engough just as in Gnome.

Finally, after some carefully consideration, I decided to back to Gnome.