If you really don't like GNOME, the Debian based distros aren't what you should be looking at. Most Debian based distros have very bad implementations of KDE. Personally, I would recommend Fedora if you want to use something other than GNOME, despite that it is a GNOME-centric distro. Their KDE implementation is one of the better ones, and its very easy to use. But if you ABSOLUTELY must have Debian based, go with Kubuntu. Kubuntu isn't the worst of the bunch, but it definitely isn't the best.
