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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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
Gnome is simple and clean. It gets out of my way and functions the way I expect a modern DE to function.
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!
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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 doesn’t need customizing. My parents use KDE and have never opened the settings dialog. They are productive.
Why do you think it needs customizing?
I interpreted the question less about kde vs gnome, and more about kde or gnome vs other desktops. Maybe OP intended the former now that I read it again. I used to have heavily personal setups of DWM or CWM back in the day, with lots of small scripts to cover some functionality, but now I just want the “default” because the OS itself stopped being my hobby. Nothing against KDE, I just found GNOME to be more polished out of the box and stayed.
Nothing against KDE, I just found GNOME to be more polished out of the box and stayed.
I see. No problem. Just personal preference. I thought that KDE had unreasonable defaults compared to GNOME or something, hence the question about customising.
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 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 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.
GNOME. It’s clean, I like it, and I don’t feel the need to customize it.
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.
XFCE!
In all serious, while I use XFCE on most personal things, if I was pressed to choose between the big two, I think I’d choose KDE over GNOME; in fact, when I had to loan my younger sibling a laptop recently and that laptop was too old to run Windows 11, I put them on Debian with KDE. I think KDE is also my backup plan if major applications start dropping xorg support before XFCE has implemented sufficient Wayland support, although they seem to be making progress.
Out of the box, KDE tends to be more Windows-like and just better for my workflow in general, while GNOME can just be… weird. Like, I don’t quite hate GNOME as much as I used to - I plan on throwing it on an old Surface tablet soon - but like others have said, it’s very opinionated and doesn’t like customization and whatnot. I also resent GNOME in the sense that they tend to make design designs (such as in GTK 4) that reduce ease of interoperability across different open source desktops.
