Why don't they have these same people use kde everyday and come back and say if they still want all the options hidden.
This is where the gnome ui designers went wrong. They took away all the options and messed up their desktop trying to be the best DE for first day users. Then the users use it for a few weeks and are no longer first time users and switch to something more meaty.


I have to disagree with you. In the last 8 years or so, I've used Solaris (on UltraSPARC), OpenBSD on x86, Red Hat Linux, Windows (95, 98, 20000, XP), and Mac OSX. Guess what. I can not stand to use KDE precicely because it is so cluttered. GNOME and OSX do it right. The interface is clean, uncluttered, unconfusing. I spent some .01% of my time configuring things and 99.99% doing real work. The uncluttered interface helps with this. The configuration that most folks are likely to need are easily available, and anything more advanced is available via gconf-editor.

Take the CVS integration in Konqueror. I'd be shocked if more than the smallest fraction of all KDE users have ever used it. It should NOT be there by default.

I'm not opposed to having advanced configuration. I am opposed to user interface clutter (which [in my opinion] KDE has in excess).