I use kde for the same reasons than you (programming and sysadmin), and I'm a big fan actually. I don't use activities, dolphin, konsole, kate, nepomuk, etc. I

I use kde for the same reasons than you (programming and sysadmin), and I'm a big fan actually. I don't use activities, dolphin, konsole, kate, nepomuk, etc. I just don't care about all of this, my kde environment basically consists in fullscreen terminals (real fullscreen, with no window decoration and no space eaten by menu bars) and full screen browsers. No menu bar (I use the run command for everything I do not launch from terminal), no plasma widgets (my tmuxes give me hour, which is all I need), no whatever desktop integration. I even don't use compositing. So, why am I using kde, would you ask ? Because I never found any desktop environment as much configurable. Kde is over-featured, but still never get in the way if you want to. Each window has an incredible set of configuration to make it looks like what you want. Those settings can either be temporary or be persisted, using regexp on various attributes allowing to target specific applications, or even specific popup created by specific application. The list of keyboard shortcuts you can define is massive. And every application allows to redefine its shortcuts individually. I've actually never found any action I wanted to redefine and it was not allowed (and keyboard is by far my main interface). Damn, you can even define keyboard shortcuts for calling your own scripts. I'm a big fan of gentoo for the control it gives me over my system, and kde is just the perfect counterpart in the desktop environment world. So yeah, they can do whatever they want with themes, fonts, plasma widgets, etc, I won't mind :) Performance is indeed a problem. In the past, I've switched a lot between kde and wmii, which offered the same kind of configurability (through its plan9 virtual fs - not sure it's still the case since wmii developers are obsessed with removing features) just because of that. Today, I have the kind of computer you have after being developer for a while, so it's a non issue.