My favorite is a really minimal Gnome on Debian:

• Launch Debian Expert Installer
• Deselect all software packs except “Standard Sytem Utilities”
• Install and reboot
• Install cups, flatpak, fonts-recommended, gdm3 (this pulls in Gnome), gnome-console, nautilus, network-manager-gnome
• Uninstall gnome-browser-connector, gnome-shell-extension-prefs, im-config, yelp (which were pulled in as recommendations)
• Remove configured network interface from /etc/network/interfaces and reboot

This gives me a Gnome shell with no visible GUI apps in the menu, except for the settings, terminal, file manager and network manager.
Now I fill up my hard drive with FlatPaks ;)

I prefer Gnome cause it has fewer options, the overview works really well on a notebook with touchpad, and I like that it is more unique.

What I hate about it is the “depression dark grey with medium grey as highlight color” theme in dark mode.
And in light mode you get “blinding white with medium grey as highlight color”.

Give me some fucking color for fucks sake!

Love gnome with dash to panel. Zero complaints.

KDE - Its got people behind it who actually give a flying fuck about their end users.

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.

Damn this thread really makes me feel like a minority, but I prefer GNOME! It comes useful out of the box, sane defaults, easy to extend without ripping out the soul of how it functions. Best of all it has a new and interesting direction for the desktop UI rather than just copying Windows. It has some original ideas that really serve it well.

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

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.

I’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.

Plasma all the way bby

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

KDE, because it’s familiar yet customisable. Gnome is just too strange for me, and doesn’t seem to allow me to un-strange it.

I think gnome used to be fantastic but sadly lost their edge over time. I love plasma but it is still a bit too unstable for my liking.

Personally use Hyprland nowadays and I think I’ll never go back to using a DE anyways

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.

As GNOME gets ready to strike, KDE appears to start studdering… What is going on over there?? Is that the KDE baloo file indexer starting up? Oh no! A perfect connect as KDE falls to the ground!!

Oh what’s this - GNOME seems to be standing there idle. Did the boxing task get backgrounded? Heaven knows it’s impossible to find the running programs on GNOME. KDE and GNOME are both tabbed out of the boxing window!

Let’s take a look into the crowd… MacOS seems to have left the building to refresh it’s permissions, and Windows is still booting up the programs that all self updated post restart. XFCE is hanging out in the corner but is all out of sync due to poor refresh rates on X11. Hyperland seems to be bullying someone in the bleachers, but it’s hard to see exactly what’s going on there…

Ding ding ding

Looks like KDE is out! Baloo didn’t finish in time for KDE to get up. Let’s see what happens in round 2!