Seigo: on introducing new ideas to free software communities

Yes, your nerd friends don't count ;) Note, it wasn't just the desktop, it was also present throughout the applications. Today you have superior functionality across the board, but it is not in your face.

> On the other hand, I don't know anybody who used KDE4 with all of its Plasma and Activities functionality.

Well, it is hard to assess your social life, but I do know a number of people using plasma. I also use it myself. Activities is a bit more exotic, haven't really caught me yet. However, notice that you choose to focus on two functionalities that were either non-functional/extremely buggy (karamba) or non-existent (Activities) in KDE3. Neither of which you seem to have gathered first hand experience on. Neither of which you find worthy alternatives for in any other desktop. Yes, even nerds like me enjoy the cleaner user experience with even more functionality than KDE3 ever had.

If you take the time to investigate the design and functionality of the filemanager in KDE, Dolphin, you should understand what I am talking about. It is only an example, move on to investigate Okular, Gwenview, Amarok, Ktorrent, Konsole, Kdenlive, System Settings, Ksysguard, Rekonq, Kontact, Kdevelop, Kate, Kile, Krita Digikam, Ksnapshot, you will see it across the board. The desktop itself really tops it off, just the way users can share various goodies from kde-look.org is amazing and miles ahead of KDE3 or any other desktop on any OS.