I've tried KDE briefly a few months ago and I didn't like it. The reason was they were way to many customization options. I spent more than an our going through all the settings and I got completely overwhelmed.
Gnome Shell has little to no options out of the box, but it has extension that do just that.
Unity recently added some basic options into the default (new tab in the appearance dialog). They didn't add a lot of options but just the ones I seem to need :)
Re:Gnome Shell and Unity
by adambyrtek on Friday April 06, 2012 @08:11AM
(#3806824)
I'm sure KDE is more customizable, because the goal of both Gnome and Unity is to keep the number of preferences to the minimum. On the other hand, many settings not shown in the UI are still available via gconf.
How does it compare to KDE? I used Gnome(2) for some time but it was really (and I mean really) bad when it comes to customization of basically anything. I then switched to KDE which I found to be great in this area. I didn't like the look (and with my limited taste couldn't help it much) but I loved I could customize virtually anything. Just few clicks in GUI. I've used gnome-shell briefly and I think you can mess around with the javascript to configure a lot of things. But there was almost no configuration for the users.
So, my question. How is it now, compared to KDE? Both Gnome and Unity. Are some 3rd party tools (I'd imagine there would be for the gnome-shell at least) which could help?