Booting from a LIVE USB

openSUSE 12.3
KDE 4.10

I just made one and tried it out.
This is what I used. https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Live_USB_stick
I think something is amiss in that the desktop looks exactly as if I had booted from sda1 or what I used to call C:\

The icons are the same, the background is the same, all my customizations are the same.

I thought it would look like a brand new install, fresh and clean.
Is that not the case, and is there a Konsole command that I can run that would tell me from where I had booted ?

thanks