I've long been dissatisfied with both KDE and Gnome. The idea of an intergrated desktop environment is great, but it has to occur at the operating system level, as it does on Mac OS. Since the two applications I use most heavily are Firefox and Thunderbird, and neither are "true" KDE or Gnome apps, using either one always feels discordant and slightly "off". Also, as you're supposed to use the crappy applications that come with the environments, I always find myself running KDE apps under Gnome and vice-versa, seeking the one I prefer (gEdit over Kate, but amarok over whatever Gnome uses). But since they won't buy me a Mac at work, I was using KDE as the lesser of two evils. But the other day I decided to try out Xfce, a much more lightweight windowing environment that really works well and it's fast. Then i decided it was time to get compiz running, so after a bit of hacking I have everything running perfectly. Also I switched to slim, a much more stripped down version of xdm or gdm or kdm or whatever those are called. Now I'm finding everything more convenient, plus with all the bells and whistles of compiz and emerald (and what bells they are!). I couldn't get amarok to behave without KDE so I've switched to exaile, which isn't quite as nice of an interface but works pretty well (though I had to muck about with python to get it working).