For people who already tried both, what’s the reason you’re sticking with GNOME or KDE as your desktop environment?
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GNOME3 was designed by absolute morons who refuse to hear anything that doesn’t support their echo chamber.
KDE is like a swiss army knife and the best part about it is just using the knife.
I found KDE to be cleaner, they work extremely hard on making GTK apps look like native Qt apps for example. Or how tray Icons (which need a plug in on Gnome) look and behave. On KDE they feel native, Gnomes plugins make them look foreign.
So weirdly enough KDE is imho the cleaner of the two.
I’m really easily distracted and have things to do when I use my home PC(s). So gnome is really the only thing I can reliably set up and not spend all my time customising. Also, Ubuntu was my first distro (tbh it was Kali Linux but we don’t talk about my larp era) and I liked the DE from that.
Its not like I don’t customise it mind you, but that’s limited to changing the default wallpaper, installing blur my shell and dash to panel, then adding custom icons, usually Tela circle. After that though I don’t touch anything in the DE. If I’m on a laptop, I go full Ubuntu and put the dock on the left vertical side of the screen
In comparison I once spent hours customising KDE to look and sound like windows 98, only to realise I didn’t like it, to change it to something completely different 3 more times. I did not pass the assignment I was meant to be doing. Its fun but I’ll do anything to procrastinate.
One adapts to me.
The other requires me to adapt to it.
The best thing about this comment is we all know which is which
KDE doesn’t adapt to you. You adapt KDE to yourself.
it lets me
Before:
- Gnome 2 was great
- Gnome 3 was terrible
- KDE 4 was terrible
Today: KDE.
Why not Gnome:
- It’s missing basic features.
- General new users startup is:
- searching online to try and fix things
- 50% chance of it working.
- 50% chance of it not working because the fix doesn’t work on your version of gnome and having to find another fix
- Common recommendation for missing features (to use extensions) is a non-starter since the extensions break after every update, so every update you need to go back through the general new users startup steps above.
Why KDE:
- It has all the basic features by default, and a bunch of extra stuff.
- General new user process is:
- looking through settings and changing the 2-3 they care about
- looking through features, trying them out to see which ones you want to use, turning on/off the 2-3 you care about
- Never needing to look through or remember the other settings, because your computer is already set up for you.
Future:
- Gnome: more of the same, likely basic features missing until specific people are removed (could be 5-10 years, then another few years of catching up).
- KDE: Will continue making updates and consolidating similar features where it makes sense.
- Cosmic: Will continue sanding off rough edges and fill in last remaining missing features. Will probably surpass Gnome for 90% of user’s needs in a year. Will probably be trading blows with KDE in 3 years and will surpass them if KDE ever makes any missteps.
I’ve stuck to KDE because it’s more customizable and the devs don’t try to actively remove features from updates. Gnome might be a cleaner experience, but I don’t want to have to search for alternatives when my favorite gnome extension gets unexpectedly killed by an update.
KDE appears to be much more stable in that regard in that they’re actively trying (Union) to make themes more resilient over time.
Gnome with paperwm - infinite tiled scrolling has been my goto on the laptop for a while. Its infuriating to use with a mouse, so when i plug i switch to kde.
paperwm looks cool, is there an equivalent tiling tool for kde?
I haven’t found one that’s as seamless and easy to setup as PaperWM.
I use KDE. I found GNOME annoying and extemely opinionated. I also got turned off by it when I asked a question on mastodon like a year ago about an issue I was having with GNOME and an actual GNOME dev replied to me and essentially said I was using the DE wrong. basically I wasn’t using it the way the GNOME devs use it.
I always find it quite funny that when talking about KDE, your type of people always talk negatively about Gnome instead of just saying why you like KDE. It just reminds me of the little children I work with.
fine. KDE is more customizable, more configurable, more solid, better wayland support, doesn’t break scripts or addons when updated, and the devs nor the users (i.e. you) don’t have conniption fits if you knock it. I swear GNOME users are just like Omarchy users. heaven forbid you knock their poor choices.
You almost did it! Congrats, big steps. Not a gnome or KDE user tho… <3
I’m running Plasma at the moment. I actually prefer three look out Gnome and I think I would use it if my home computer was used for anything productive. It’s mainly used for gaming though and Gnomes main design doesn’t quite flow as well while gaming on a dual screen setup.
It’s just easier to be able to see the task bar and all open programs (and sys tray) on my second monitor all the time instead of having to go through a hot cornet or hitting the super button.
Sure, this could be fixed through the use of addons (like Ubuntu has by default for instance) but these tend to break on new versions of Gnome while Plasma just keep working.
My preferred setup while running Gnome was the stock adwaita theme, dag to panel, arc menu and whatever that sys tray addon was called.
If I could have the same look over in Plasma I’d be pretty happy tbh but I haven’t really made the effort since it just works the way it is and doesn’t look bad doing it either.
Gnome is simple and clean. It gets out of my way and functions the way I expect a modern DE to function.
I started with gnome back when Linux was a very young project. Then they started removing options despite the protests of their users so I moved to kde, which added functionality constantly, much to the delight of their users.
And many years later, here we are.
I’ll probaby move to Gnome when my hands are too arthritic to operate a mouse and keyboard properly, and I just want to punch big icons and buttons I can barely see anymore. And I’ll be too far gone in dementia to customize my desktop anymore, so I won’t be able to hurt myself having settings I can mess up. I’ll understand where to find apps like “Mail” and “Files” instead of hard names like Thunderbird and Dolphin.
Then Gnome will be fine for a couple years just before I croak.
Ι stick with KDE Plasma after trying GNOME, KDE, and Cinnamon. In GNOME, many settings are not available in GUI (I don’t remember which they are now), while they are available in KDE. And back when I used Cinnamon it didn’t support Wayland while some of my apps (especially Waydroid) needs Wayland. But I mostly use CLI for daily tasks for automation and easier copy-pasting forum answers, asking LLM, and sharing to GitHub, so I may not be a representative DE user.
Over the years, I don’t think there’s many DE’s or WM’s that I haven’t tried to live with on a daily driver, such as KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon, Qtile, XMonad, I3, AwesomeWM, etc etc. What I found over the years was how much I appreciated a clean, simplistic UI for an operating system.
After spending multiple years on ‘window manager only’ setups (got fed up with updating configs on major updates, and got fed up with the amount of config I had to do), I returned back to KDE mainly for the intense amount of OOTB customisation. However, what I realised after a while was that I was just setting up KDE to look and behave like Gnome.
So 2 years after last using KDE, I’m now just using Gnome all the time. I like the workflow, on laptop personally I think the gesture navigation is better than any other DE, and I love the simplistic design. Plus extensions get me what isn’t included OOTB.
Downside to Gnome is when major updates occur and extensions break as a result, other than that I can’t think of much bad about Gnome
my favorite setup used to be i3+plasma. basically you could replace kwin with i3 for window management but everything else was standard kde. was one of the easiest setups and configurations I’ve used with sane defaults. Now I’m curious if it still works with everything moving to Wayland.
Gnome feels like Linux to me, I don’t want discount Windows, I could just use Windows.
I don’t need or want to customize every little detail, I have a life.
Testing out KDE broke a lot of video and mouse inputs, don’t find it worth trying to fix just to test.
Naming everything with K is dumb as hell.
