Pawlerson

It looses with KDE badly. It doesn't even offer ability to change simple things like fonts (unless you install a third party tool). Gnome shell has serious usability flaws.

Simply, the most feature rich, the most friendly and powerful desktop environment in the world. It offers dozens of excellent applications like Amarok - a wonderful music player, far better than itunes, digikam - excellent photo manager and editor. It's a fast desktop environment built with advanced Qt toolkit.

It's the best toolkit I've ever used. Nearly entire KDE is made using Qt, so it just proves its power.

It's probably the best distribution for Linux newbies. It ships with powerful and easy to use KDE. Kubuntu offers thousands of easily installable packages.