I just recently upgraded my home desktop. It was nearing 10 years in age and desperately whispering to me in my sleep that it wasn't going to last much longer. The new machine is a Quad core AMD phenom with A Gigabyte board and 8 gig of ram. This of course necessitated a new OS to go along with the shiny new hardware, so along comes Ubuntu Jaunty with its 64-bit joy and the shiny new KDE4 desktop. I had previously switched from kde to gnome despite being a kde fan for years because gnome had just begun to feel more cohesive. I still disliked the lack of configurability as compared to gnome but overall gnome felt better. But with the new kde4 I've come back. Plasma and the kde desktop have really upped the game. The whole experience has vastly improved and kde no longer feels like it's lagging behind but has leaped ahead of the competition. If you haven't checked it out yet you should give it a try.