There are people that have NEVER run gnome or kde and don't have
any interest in doing so. They don't to. They can be accomodated quite
well. Everyone can do their own thing without it being a problem.
I have a 300G hard drive on my desktop machine and a 150G hard drive on
my laptop. KDE doesn't take up much space at all on a modern hard
drive. I have KDE4 installed with all the desktop effects switched on
and the performance is excellent. Conversely, if I were still using my
old P4 with 384Mb RAM and a 40G hard drive, I'd probably still use
Windowmaker. That's the beauty of choice.