@craigevil
"
Ubuntu which is undoubtedly the most popular distro uses Gnome"
Reason is simple: Qt was not free and only gtk was available. Now things have changed:
1. Qt if free.
2. The boss of Ubuntu is now the main boss of KDE => [url=thtp://
www.cyberciti.biz/tips/mark-shuttlewort ... oject.html]Mark Shuttleworth financially supports KDE project[/url]
"
Gnome releases a new version every 6 months"
Which change ? The background wallpaper ?
Do you compare gnome changes with KDE3 to KDE4 transition ? I hope not.
KDE3.5 is very stable, never have had any problem.
KDE4.3 is not as buggy as you imagine. Very stable for me for months.
You just need to make a clean install of KDE, and not a mixture with gnome libraries.
"
As for iceweasel/Firefox like many other users all I can say is it hasn't crashed for me"
And what do you conclude ? Nothing !
If for a given configuration and given test, Firefox 2 and Opera are not crashing at all, the conclusion is clear: something is broken in Firefox 3.5.
The exact same bug I see is still reported in 3.6a (I am not surprised / it can take 2 years to correct a bug).
The program 'firefox-bin' received an X Window System error. This probably reflects a bug in the program.
My guess: as long as gtk does not make a too bloated browser for windows, Firefox will continue to use gtk.
For KDE, Opera is a very good alternative, followed by Konqueror, Arora,
Rekonq etc etc
Frankly, still in 2009 having to play with old plugins like plugger, moz-plugin more or less maintained or other glue which try to make the interface with media libraries is really painful, especially when stopping playing the media crashes Firefox (reported many times).