I’m probably a bit late with this, but I just noticed that Munich council decided to use KDE for their desktop. I think they announced it quietly in January 2006.
As someone interested in showing how Linux can finally make life better for users, and thus make the world a better place, this is a bit depressing to me. If Munich’s employees get a standard KDE desktop then they will be overwhelmed with its complexity, technical orientation, and inconsistency.
I know I should be glad that it’s a Linux and Free Software project, but I’d like it to be a success, and I don’t want to spend the next ten years hearing from people here about how much they hate it, and having to explain that that’s not what I do, and that’s not how it has to be. However, the project’s managers have otherwise seemed to be very smart and pragmatic, so I guess there’s a chance that they will heavily customize it, and this might be a wake-up call to the KDE developers that not all users are geeks, or that not all people should be forced to think like geeks, and that confused users should not be dismissed as too stupid to use a computer. Maybe there will be more in their LinuxTag 2006 presentation about how they made the decision.
(This is my personal opinion and not the official opinion of the GNOME project.)