[jraph]

Which KDE 3 fiasco? Are you thinking of the first releases of KDE 4 which were buggy?

It appears to me it's not the fact that KDE is configurable that you dislike, but the design and default configuration choices or the bugs. Or its differences with what you are used to.

I 100% agree with you that the desktop environment should come with good defaults and you shouldn't need to mess with the settings. Life is too short for pointless configuration.

But you are not actually pointing to anything specific so it would be hard to discuss in details or (dis)agree. Not that it's actually an issue, of course. But we can't take any particular insight from your comments other than "this person doesn't like KDE for some reason". If you pointed us at some actual dumb defaults that you shouldn't need to configure but need to, we could actually get your point. The only example you gave is for Gnome, actually. I don't remember struggling with the terminal size on Gnome but then again, I pretty much always maximize all my windows or put them on a side of the screen with a keyboard shortcut, and use tabs so I don't actually create a new terminal window too often.