"2 years ago I installed my first Linux distro, Red Hat, and stayed with them. Since KDE has been described as eye candy, and GNOME as flat, I'll tell you how to make your GNOME beat both KDE and Mac OS X in looks.
"gDesklets is a system that sits on top of your GNOME, providing applets on your desktop. I am not on expert on how gDesklets work, but I've found out that you'll need Python packages installed..."