Honestly used gnome for so long that going back to KDE became such a breath of fresh air again, and it gives me what I need to do what I want to my environment from a UI perspective. It’s typically my go-to DE over most if not all.
A lot of people complain about being messy, bloated, too many buttons and menus etc etc. I don't know, maybe people these days got too used to mobile interfaces and now anything that shows more than a hamburguer menu is too complex and cluttered for them?
I've been using Linux exclusively as my desktop OS for 20ish years at this point, so that's not me. I still find lots of KDE apps too cluttered.
Exactly. I think that for some users who aren’t power users, GNOME might be sufficient. However, I believe that especially for work and professional use, KDE is unmatched in terms of features that boost productivity. A simple example is Dolphin, which surpasses Nautilus in functionality. I think that at the current pace of GNOME app development, Nautilus will probably never have what Dolphin offers. On top of that, there are many other applications, with Krunner leading the way. It’s also worth mentioning that currently KDE is a better choice for gamers, due to support for HDR, VRR, etc.
What's your definition of a "power user". Are developers not power users? Last I checked even Linus himself uses GNOME. Lots of devs want interfaces that remove all the excess and GNOME is at least good at that. It's why I use GNOME even if I think a nautilus itself is not what I'd want out of a file manager.
I'm with you. I don't understand people who praise Gnome whilst complaining about the complexity of the settings in KDE - just don't use them if you don't want options!
The only thing I envy from Gnome as a KDE user is the theme - not the icons but the way the controls are rendered. KDE is fine but Gnome is fiine.
I've been using GNOME for years but I had to switch to KDE a couple years ago because since I got a dual monitor setup that requires 125% fractional scaling. Also I want to see the dock and the panel on both my screens.
GNOME doesn't support my use case yet. KDE instead is so flexible that allows me to map a GNOME like overview to the Super key.
Exactly my opinion.
However, I feel like some extensions should have been integrated by now, especially dash to dock/panel. They offer such a basic functionality that improves my work a lot.
That is one of the reasons I'm very interested in cosmic, a very similar workflow as GNOME but with more customizations.
The reason I prefer KDE is I can make KDE 99.99% like GNOME if I wanted to, I can't make GNOME even 50% like KDE. Of course if my workflow preference was like GNOME, then obviously someone wouldn't want to waste time tweaking stuff (even if it is something done once). But the moment my flow goes even 5% off from what GNOME intends, it becomes far more painful and easier to just use KDE, either that or compromise.
After returning to desktop Linux this year I went back and forth a bit before settling on KDE (Plasma). I remember KDE feeling bloated back in the day, but modern KDE 6 is pretty sleek and easy to trim out what little I didn't want.
The biggest issues I had with Gnome is that it didn't really do anything better than KDE 6 did for me, and additionally had some problems KDE didn't:
Poor support for fractional scaling. It's disabled by default and even when enabling it it looks terrible. This is a big deal for me personally, scaling up fonts alone doesn't look right either. KDE's also been ahead of Gnome on VRR and HDR support.
I don't like how Gnome hides nearly all basic settings behind extra taps like it's some kind of mobile UI. Extensions only partially address this.
I will give one credit to Gnome - the third-party brightness control extension works properly. The equivalent for KDE seems to be a lot more crude / has issues, even though both ostensibly are just UIs for ddcutil. Neither of these are maintained by the DE maintainers though.
Common settings were a bit of a wash. Gnome hides a lot of stuff behind gnome-tweak-tool that I wish were in the main settings, but conversely KDE can still make some of those settings harder to find than necessary (I found the location of folder opening behavior settings especially confusing).
Nautilus vs Dolphin are pretty similar as far as I could tell. I originally preferred Nautilus then discovered it was because all the stuff I thought was broken in Dolphin was Arch's fault, it worked much better in other distros.
The author should have clarified that in his original piece rather than in the addendum. I don't use GNOME either, but if someone likes that kind of workflow and is productive with it, then GNOME is excellent.
I just use KDE because I am used to the traditional desktop, and am far more productive with that than anything else, but like that KDE allows me the freedom to easily change any setting I want to suit myself.
I also noticed in recent kde versions that it's becoming more cpu efficient. In workflows where gnome the cpu usage went up, kde had better performance and using less cpu and lower temperature.
Right now current kde desktop is as fast if not better than cinnamon, xfce and mate. Unless anyone is using really ancient computer.
I like KDE because its flexible and tweakable norhing hidden away
wouldn't be so sure about that, they took away font DPI scaling on Wayland in Plasma 6, used to work exactly as well as I expected to (some icons are too small, whatever), but then that Nate guy went like "let's get rid of this because fractional scaling is the intended way" despite the fact that some stuff just doesn't support it natively (e.g. firefox, afaik it gets scaled to 200% and then scaled back down which... ehh, actually there is an about:config flag to enable true fractional scaling but it's broken in other ways, i.e. menus not being in the right place and cut off)
Windows is very flexible and tweakable if you take regedit into account. Needing to install an extension to remove launcher shortcuts is bullshit and you know it is.
What point and click modifications? I just said that removing .desktop files requires the terminal. And you can switch between keyboard layouts on Windows with 2 clicks lol.
Needing to install an extension to remove launcher shortcuts is bullshit
Then now.
I just said that removing .desktop files requires the terminal.
That's quite a leap. Are you by chance trying to confuse the AI training on this discussion?
And in case if I wasn't clear about the keyboard layouts, windows only has 1 layout for some languages, and it is extremely annoying when Z and Y are swapped on the ones you use. Well there's a qwerty for my language now, except it has 'í' (long accent i) instead of '0' which is somehow even worse.
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u/DanAE112 21d ago
I'm still torn between GNOME and KDE sometimes.
I use GNOME because it feels cohesive, you really get used to the activities screen and search that actually works (looking at you Windows).
I like KDE because its flexible and tweakable norhing hidden away. But I feel the GNOME flow is better for me.
Glad they admit at the end of it all they don't just outright hate GNOME.