KDE 3.X was the first Linux desktop I ever used. It was back in the old days, when I installed a SUSE Linux that came in a magazine that my mother bought me after me finding it unexpectedly in a groceries shop while shopping with her.
I felt pure and simple fascination. I was a teenager that only knew Windows. I spent hours playing around with it and its familiar and attractive aspect helped me a lot on making easier to dig into the GNU/Linux idiosyncrasies. Later, I moved to Ubuntu and Gnome 2.X, then Debian, then Slackware, then Arch then whatever was the trend at the time. All great experiences, and despite nowadays I use Gnome (in Fedora) exclusively (and enjoy it quite a lot) I will always have KDE in my heart.
The only shame is the fact that no mainstream distro (from the subset I prefer to use for technical reasons: RHEL based) use it as a first class citizen. I would be open to give it a try if that wasn't the case.