KDE 3.5 is still the best desktop environment I've ever used. I pretty much stopped listening to music on my local computer once it became too hard to use Amarok 1.4 (Clementine is not an adequate substitute), and more generally I basically gave up on local applications once I couldn't run KDE3 (e.g. I started using webmail instead of KMail, google docs instead of KWord, ...)

> I still think KDE 3.5 was awesome and we really didn't need KDE 4.

http://trinitydesktop.org/ does kde-3.5, and it is not too bad.

This. I switched to Gnome 2 as soon as Mandriva switched to KDE4, and then ran the last version of Ubuntu with Gnome 2 until I had to upgrade.

Those were the days.

I remember doing the same thing. I loved KDE until KDE 4. Then I used Ubuntu with Gnome 2 for a while and really liked it, but then Ubuntu decided to switch to Unity which I found to be pure rubbish. About that time, Gnome decided to go against all reason and foisted Gnome 3 abomination on us ... so I checked out KDE 4 again and they'd fixed most of the bugs and made it reasonable again :-)

And through all the migrations, I still liked KDE 3.5 the best.

MATE is maintained and based on Gnome 2.