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 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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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'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'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 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.

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

I like KDE because it is super customisable out of the box, and I personally prefer the more contrasty, colourful look of KDE over the more minimal and padded GNOME.

However, if you like GNOME, that's perfectly fine! With GNOME Extensions, you can also customise a lot, far more than Windows or MacOS lets you without sketchy third-party tools. And of course, Cinnamon, XFCE, Cosmic, etc. are all great too.

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.

Gnome lost a lot of functions when streamlining, just compare Dolphin to Nautilus, and instead of fighting their vision I went for a DE that works the way I want.
I love information density and easily get hooked on spreadsheet games, I feel as if that is the exact opposite of the Gnome vision.

edit: I prefer Gnome for touch only devices like Microsoft Surface Pro 7 without physical kbm.

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.

Gnome. I am often tempted to switch to kde because it is often ahead in terms of adopting new technologies, but gnome is just more comfortable to use. And I was not able to customize kde to have gnome-like workflow.

I used KDE for years only recently switched to Niri, what I can say for KDE is I don't have to dicking around config files and nice features that are missing from other WM/DE like ICC profiles and HDR also very easy to customize. The reason I switch is because KDE getting too good and boring and using Niri reminded me when I use Linux for the first time again (same with switching from Windows to Linux because Windows is boring and barely customizable and cuntpilot)