Linux

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.

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 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'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.

One adapts to me.

The other requires me to adapt to it.

The opinions of Gnome are not a match for mine.

KDE let's me get really specific on the things I want to, and its well supported.

Just that simple for me!

Gnome is simple and clean. It gets out of my way and functions the way I expect a modern DE to function.

GNOME expects the user to adapt to the workflow its developers have in mind. It's the desktop environment that should adapt to me, not the other way around.

Plus, I love customization and theming. But GTK app developers create angry websites where they try to shame me for it.

KDE just works. The few things I want to change I can. GNOME by default is further away from what I want and you have to get extensions that break with updates to change anything.

I needed a desktop environment with a UI that wasn't intended to be hidden away. Or a desktop that wasn't challenging the way that I intend to work with the computer.

KDE may be boring and it may not challenge any paradigms. But it works well and stays out of the way.

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.

Gnome. Sublime flow, very polished. Simply works.

KDE can be OK but it is very overloaded on customization, not nearly as polished, and honestly I dislike that style it upholds. IMHO.

Gnome always felt too basic and minimalist. KDE feels powerful and like I can do anything I want. On KDE I don't ask myself "can i do this?", I ask myself "how do I do this?"

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.

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.

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 got tired of "customizing" everything and just wanted to get work done. GNOME is the default on many distros, so I learned the intended workflow instead of fighting it. Now I can just install a distro and be productive immediately instead of spending time tweaking things.

KDE looks modern, has features I didnt even know I wanted. Whatever I can think of wanting it's either already there or I make a post on the fourm and its there in a month.

When I had an issue with an update removing something that I liked. I made a post and KDE devs added a toggle so I could keep the functionality I had before. Even though it was a minor thing they could have told me not to worry.

GNOME. It's clean, I like it, and I don't feel the need to customize it.

I test KDE each couple of years: install it on my current OS or in VM, trying to change theme/move panel, get a crash shortly after, then delete it. Even "kde neon" that was supposedly polished distro from devs themselves, crashed within couple of minutes in my hands.

Maybe it just my hands, but Gnome never does that.

I've been running KDE now, almost exclusively, for almost 15 years. KDE works (by default) in a way similar to the way Windows XP worked in the late 90's - late 2000's. It felt familiar enough that I didn't have to try and figure out most things that I wanted to do. The few things that didn't work the way I wanted ( or felt they should) were easy enough to change. XFCE was similar (had a Windows 95-98 feel) but was not as configurable.

Gnome 2, I rather liked as it had a feel similar to Mac OS 8 from way back when I was in school, however I just never got along with Gnome 3. Everything felt... off. I can use it, Just don't care for it. Same for most other DEs.

I used GNOME for work and it was interesting. There are pros and cons, but generally I prefer KDE A LOT and basically made GNOME look like some form of KDE.

GNOME seems to be significantly more stable but also has significantly less features. Both are very important and sadly the stability doesnt seem to have changed much. I still have the panel disappearing after some time etc. KDE got way better here and they want to invest into their CI a lot including memory leak tests. We can also expect improvements due to the funding they get for their 6.6 LTS version (funded by Kubuntu Focus).

GNOME has extensions which can do a lot but have basically no guarantees to be secure or verified or anything, which is very problematic also for security. On GNOME you rely on those even for simple things like a clipboard manager or blur.

I like some GNOME apps, but generally they are just so much worse than KDE apps. They have no up-to-date terminal that has features, like wtf? Their text editor is too simple and they dont have a simple IDE like Kate, theirs is too much "project focused". They dont have a simple image editor, at all. Or a QR code generator, or KDE Connect, or GUI settings for half the things etc.

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.

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.

I used plasma for nearly a decade and only recently switched off of it because I wanted to try something different. I moved over to GNOME for a bit, and while it was nice, I kept running into issues with customization, specifically Gnome Extensions are a pain in my ass.

I moved to cosmic a few weeks ago on my desktop rig, which is my server, but is also for gaming. I don't want this one to feel like an "office" machine, and cosmic does a great job of feeling like just a computer. On my laptop, which I use for development, I prefer a stable "no-bullshit" interface, as such I use MATE there. MATE, if you're unfamiliar, is the successor to Gnome2. It is a more traditional desktop experience, using familiar idioms. Customization is limited (out of box) compared to the more major DE's like KDE and GNOME