Ding Ding Ding
It comes down to this, the heavyweight desktop championship between two powers in the Linux world.
In the blue corner, we have the mighty KDE, KDE comes with a wealth of customization options and good features with every update. It serves a nice alternative to windows 10 or 11s desktop and itself as an OS.
KDE has got so good that even legendary distro, Fedora, wishes to use it in its dealings.
In the grey/black corner, we have GNOME, This is a heavy distro with some ram usage, but it strives to be a simple desktop for usage and has had some good features every new version it comes packaged in as well.
GNOME has had a long history much like KDE, But controversial changes from its older brother.
However… big name distros like Ubuntu have used it across millions of machines in different sectors.
What desktop do you favour and why? Explain your thoughts.
Round 2… GO!
Ding
i still prefer plasma over gnome, but my sorta controversial opinion on the matter is that gnome 3 was way better than gnome 2. gnome 2 was boring, ugly, using it felt like a chore and frankly not much simpler than kde at the time. gnome 3 tried to create something new and unique and i have huge respect of them for that. it was also much, much more pleasant to use than its predecessor. but it still isn’t better than plasma. the only time in my opinion that gnome was a preferable option to kde was during the early kde 4 dark ages, which was a necessary transition, but it was terrible regardless
tl;dr gnome >=3 still isn’t better than plasma, but it was a step in the right direction bc gnome 2 was way worse
Yeah, KDE’s customization is overwhelming in my opinion. I like my OS like I like my boss: “support me, get out of my way, and let me do my work”. Gnome does exactly that.
KDE - Its got people behind it who actually give a flying fuck about their end users.
I see Gnome typically using 1.6gb of ram (8-4gb ram vm/real system)
Kde without any effects about the same with effects on about 2gbI’ve used KDE for more than a decade, and then about 1.5 years ago I decided to give Gnome a try. A few months ago I wanted to see KDE again, but I quickly switched back to Gnome.
KDE:
- Feature-rich desktop with feature-rich tools by default. Everything is so advanced and customizable, I really miss this.
- Lately I’ve encountered many annoying bugs (this was the main reason why I tried Gnome in the first place). Crashing while trying to unlock the screen, fractional scaling issues, and random crashes here and there (although these are rare). And I would love to dive into it and fix them, but there are so many other stuffs I wanna do, I don’t have the capacity for this.
- Setting color profiles for monitors is not trivial.
- There are many annoying UX issues that are really negligible, but if they worked well, my experience would’ve been much smoother. Here’s an example: start to type your password on the lock screen, while the monitor is sleeping. On most OS and also on KDE, the first interaction must be to wake up the screen, and then you can type your password. On Gnome, just start typing and hit enter. The screen might wake up halfway while you’re typing, but it still does what you’d expect. These kind of small things make my experience so much smoother and so much more comfortable.
Gnome:
- It just works. Flawlessly and smoothly, to my surprise. Sure, it’s easy to accomplish when it’s so minimalistic, that almost nothing is in there. But whatever there is, at least it works.
- Fractional scaling is a pain in the ass here too, but in a different way. It’s still an experimental feature though, so we could say this feature doesn’t even exist, which is a huge disadvantage.
- Feature-rich software can be installed afterwards. So it’s not really bothering me that the pre-installed tools are too minimalistic.
- Setting color profiles for monitors is very straightforward, but there’s way to improve here too.
To sum up, my preference is less bugs over more features, so I pick Gnome.
Good summary, I can’t stand Zorin’s GNOME on my laptop though (I used to use KDE on my main PC). Come on, 5 clicks to connect with BT headphones every time? No auto-connecting? I have to install extensions anyway? Meh that’s not for me…I can’t change date to ISO format on my laptop, because I need extension for this too. Another extension for auto-connecting with VPN, and another app as a killswitch. Just you need to find an app/extension/tweak if you want to do anything more advanced than most basic functionality, it annoys me af. And I really like Zorin, its so noob-friendly (as I wanted it to be), but at the same time many functionalities don’t work just because of “simplicity”.
GNOME is pretty but KDE works.
“Works” as in does what I expect from a desktop without deciding over my head that I should rethink my forty years of accumulated desktop experience without any discernible benefit to it.
kde without a doubt. I tried so many times to get into gnome,even using fedora and always failed after a couple of days and went back to plasma.
I just accepted it in the end and stopped even caring that gnome exists. Competition is good though and I do hope gnome keeps going.
Fr, same experience. It surprises me though, that gnome has 2x more funding…
Plasma all the way bby
KDE no doubt. GNOME is a minimalist that depends on extensions to provide basic functionality, while also being a giant fatass. KDE works from the install, provides a sensible workflow, and has better tools.
But I’d only use KDE on a rolling release or a 6 month release schedule distro. Their approach to development really doesn’t suit stable ones.
KDE.
I won’t use gnome (I’ve mentioned elsewhere), and unsurprisingly I just dont like it either. The design choices are restrictive, the environment is oversimplified - its just not for me.
Ive used lots of DEs over the years, even fvwm95 (the original, its neat that some folks have updated it though), and at this point if its a desktop its getting KDE.
Changed to Cinnamon (Linux Mint) after GNOME 3 and Ubuntu’s Unity went bonkers, then changed to KDE Plasma some years ago.
I think KDE is constantly working to improve the desktop paradigm. GNOME tried to change the paradigm… I didn’t like what I saw. I’m too old to learn new tricks.
I’m pretty biased since I have been using KDE for a few years and only switched to Gnome this week to properly try it out so maybe I’ll change my mind but I doubt I will.
IMO KDE has better theming and is more uniform across a wider variety of apps. It has support for community themes out of the box and it feels like the components are modular so you can have a different colour title bar compared to the app window etc
- Dolphin > Nautilus
- Kate > Gedit
- Konsole > Terminal
These are the 3 main default apps I use on both DEs. Dolphin has way more customisability and looks better but Nautilus has a fantastic multi-file rename with the option for find and replace built in.
For me, Kate is like the vlc of documents. It will open anything and everything whereas I’ve had a couple of “could not open” errors from gedit this week. I also prefer Kate to Vscode.
Konsole by default switches tabs with ctrl tab but Terminal doesn’t and thats basically my only issue with it.
Gnome seems to still require you to install a browser extension to use Shell Extensions.
KDE widgets are fantastic, I love having system monitors in a hidden panel at the top of my screen so I can really easily check system resource usage. I haven’t found anything similar on Gnome yet.
KDE Connect is such a brilliant app, it wouldn’t launch for me on Gnome but there is GSConnect for Gnome but its a 3rd party app
By default on KDE, if you shake your mouse the cursor gets bigger and there doesn’t seem to be a size limit which is so fun to do lol
Going from Plasma 5 to 6 was a nightmare for me but its probably because I was using EndeavourOS so the updates were sooner and more frequent.
Overall I think Gnome looks and feels a bit outdated and clunky and KDE looks and feels more modern with better integration across apps but that might just be QT vs GTK
I do plan on continuing to use Gnome for at least another 2 months to give it a fair try but I will almost always recommended KDE because I prefer the look and feel
I only have experience with Gnome out of the two but I haven’t had the urge to switch yet. I like the look of it (I like that it looks different to Windows), the simplicity and the customisation with extensions (only a few and small ones, I recently started using OpenBar for some customization but I could do without). I keep my system rather minimal and I am not looking to put a lot of time into theming or customization.
I also tried Cosmic and I like the tiling aspect of it, but I also don’t feel the need to switch. Maybe once it is released and I can figure out how to install it on Aeon.
Initially, I was drawn to KDE Plasma for familiarity. Therefore, when installing Linux for the first time, I chose a distro with KDE Plasma. Which happened to be Fedora Kinoite 35, a very new distro at the time. It was clearly buggy and after fiddling with it for some time, I just had to rebase to Silverblue (and GNOME) for the lack of alternatives.
Thankfully, I actually happened to really like GNOME. This was on a laptop and GNOME’s touchpad gestures just felt very satisfying and intuitive; much better than anything else I had experienced before. Its (intended) workflow also made a lot of sense that way.
GNOME has really grown on me ever since. And while I’ve revisited KDE Plasma to see what I was supposedly missing out on, I simply stuck to GNOME as it felt cleaner and more elegant.
Linux desktop environments is the Trans rights of politics. Very easy to debate, everyone has an opinion, but not where the focus should be
Turns on reply notifications and sticks phone in butt