Gnome 3 was also doing a major restructure, which forced MATE to be built. I liked some things about Gnome 3's original release, but I was insanely annoyed because a lot of it went away, I'm not sure if it was just distro specific or packages changed drastically, I don't even know how to describe the feature, but for example Gnome 3 had apps that could show / hide on the edges of your screen, so if you were logged in to MSN (or even XMPP) you could chat with someone, then it would 'hide' it was really cool how that was implemented, I was upset to never see it again on any other OS, it felt like a nice way to keep a chat window available but still out of the way.

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RIMR a day ago | parent [-]

It has felt quite good to be a KDE long-timer watching all this unfold.

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72deluxe 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I missed KDE 3.5 for many many years, as KDE 4 was terrible by comparison, and went to MATE due to the awful GNOME 3. KDE 3.5 was so so usable and Konqueror handled everything well.

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samtheprogram 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m sorry, but the release of Plasma, around the same time IIRC, was not without controversy.

	▲	overfeed 21 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		KDE 4.0 - which introduced plasma - was released in 2006, and it was awful and wasn't supposed to be generally available (blame the distros and/or poor version naming). By version 4.5 (2010), KDE had stabilized. By the time Gnome 3 and Windows 8 were released in 2011/2012 respectively, KDE plasma was pleasant to use and rock-solid It felt great to watch Gnome stumble after all the shit-talking, some schadenfreude was in order. I didn't care much for Windows 8; Vista was a the bigger mess of a release.
	▲	jrm4 21 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		But, come on, a WHOLE OTHER LEVEL of "controversy." Plasma criticism was pointed and deliberate and grownup. Windows 8, less so.