The future of GNOME - an interesting subject. GNOME 3 has been out and about for a while, and it hasn't exactly been a smashing success. One of the efforts to take GNOME to the next level is what the team refers to as GNOME OS - but in reality, it's a set of improvements to GNOME that are just as interesting to GNOME-the-desktop-environment.
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Member since:2005-06-30
Most of the changes are fine-tuning, and fall into two categories: the perception of speed (disabling blur by default, changing the delay focus policy to 50ms, making popups and animations faster), and UI refinement (getting rid of huge areas of padding/dead space in Dolphin and KOffice, applying the same font type and rendering to GTK+ apps by default, get rid of the cashew, an updated icon theme, popup notifications that don't steal focus and doesn't get in the way of suspend/resume). I use KDE and have for years, so I know how to make it look nice and fast, but I can also understand how a new user will become frustrated at the slow, confusing defaults. Whatever KDE5 ends up being, it should be more of a cleaning up of the solid base that KDE4 has become.
Member since:2012-08-10
I completely agree with what you are saying.
Unfortunately, this is not going to happen. The KDE developers have made it clear that certain decisions are there way, or the highway.
Example: The absolute insistence of making the "cashew" impossible to hide or remove shows very clearly that they are completely out of touch with what their own users want. It's their way of saying "We know better, accept it or p### off".
For this very reason, I choose not to use KDE anymore.
The sad irony is, KDE is the closest thing the open source world has to a great desktop. Year after year, they continue to shoot themselves in both feet.
With the help of an actual designer, and a complete willingness from the developers to fix the problems that have been raised for years now, KDE could be great again.
Sadly, we all know, this is never going to happen, too many egos will be hurt in the process.
Member since:2007-03-26
When posting my earlier comment I was honestly expecting to strongly disagree with you, but instead finding myself in 100% agreeance.
Like yourself, the 1st thing I do when I install KDE is fine tune the settings and, up until now, never really noticed nor thought about it.
Very nicely put mate 
(you'll have to settle for an imaginary +rep though as I've already posted)
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Member since:
2007-03-26
What's wrong with KDE at the moment? Most of the defaults seem alright to me but you weren't clear on which settings specifically you don't like so I might be missing your point