After 2y on Linux I can say with full confidence that switching from GNOME to KDE (for me) is a bigger barrier than switching from Windows to Linux ever was.
I’ve tried a lot to like KDE but I just can’t. I usually see people discussing distros but I feel like picking the right DE makes much bigger impact. I’m yet to try Hyprland though.
Considering the fact that I’m itching to get Steam Frame and VR on GNOME will likely be broken indefinitely, idk what to do.
I prefer KDE. It works well out of the box and offers a good amount of customization. I tried gnome for a bit and didn’t like it.
What I like about Linux is that it’s easy to switch between DE. Just try out a few ones until you find something you like. I can recommend looking into Cinnamon (the DE of Mint).
Interesting, I feel like it is not easy at all to switch between DEs. Going from KDE to Gnome? Better rip out KDE first before you install Gnome, no way to keep them both. I really want to try more DEs but for me it feels like work to figure out how to do it without breaking anything existing.
I’ve had both installed on my machine without issues. Jumped back and forth until I decided Gnome wasn’t for me.
For me it’s pretty important because I want my computer to feel good to use, so I’ll spend quite a lot of time making sure everything’s set up the way I like it. In terms of GNOME vs KDE, I’m definitely a KDE person. Not that I hate GNOME or think there’s anything wrong with other people using it, I just don’t get along with it personally. For me it feels like there’s too much stuff in GNOME that should be part of the core DE that relies on extensions, which tend to break with updates so there’s always something that’s not quite working.
I only use one extention “Dash to Dock” and I had no issue of it breaking from Fedora 38 to now Fedora 43.
On the contrary, I had to use so many widgets and addons on KDE to get a somewhat passable experience that it took me over 5h of customising and still felt not enough… also no “Latte Dock” on KDE 6 :(
Yeah I do miss Latte Dock. I’ve managed to get my docks pretty much back to where I had them using Panel Colorizer though.
I haven’t seen this one yet, looks definitely nicer than what you can do with the dock by default
I’ve also tried Gnome very briefly before going back to KDE. I never went deep enough to try extensions, as I’d also agree that most of that stuff should be built in to the DE, and I was annoyed by it missing these features that KDE just had out of the box. Hearing that extensions exist kinda reminds me of what I’ve heard about MacOS, where features that have existed on Windows for over a decade and Linux for years still require third party applications.
I honestly think DE is one of the main reasons people don’t switch from windows.
They just want to use what’s comfortable. The large majority of people would be fine with Linux alternatives, but they don’t want to deal with the different designs.
i prefer WMs
Every decade since 1999 (the year of the Linux desktop—for me) I spend a few weeks trying out all the hot new shit in terms of desktop environments. I’ll switch to Gnome for a few days, get disappointed at how much I miss from KDE, and then try one of the newer ones like Cosmic. Then I’ll play with the latest versions of the classics (xfce) and marvel that they still make you configure everything in a single file or they still lack basic shit that normal people want like a clipboard manager.
All the actually useful or just plain really, really nice/handy stuff is built into KDE Plasma. I’ve been using so many of those features for so long, I can’t fathom having to go back to a world without say, being able to navigate the filesystems on all my other PCs via
ssh://(and other KIO workers).I remember when KDE 2.0 came out and it added support for kioslaves (now called KIO Workers) and it completely changed how I viewed desktops. That was in the year 2000. How is it that literally nothing else (not other FOSS desktops nor Windows or Macs) has implemented the same feature?
It’s not just the file manager, either. I can access
ssh://(or any other KIO worker) from any file dialog! The closest thing is shared drives in Windows but even that isn’t nearly as flexible or feature rich (or efficient, haha).Then there’s the clipboard manager (klipper), Activities, and a control panel that lets you customize everything to extreme degrees. It even supports fractional scaling and has supported that since forever. I remember when they introduced that feature over a decade ago and it still blows my mind to this day just how forward thinking the devs were.
Monitors since forever have had a different X DPI than the Y DPI. Yet only the KDE devs bothered to both query the monitor’s DDC info to figure that out and set it correctly when the desktop starts.
There’s other features that drive me nuts when I don’t have them! For example, the ability to disable global shortcuts on specific windows. So if I’ve got a remote desktop open to my work I can send Super-. (Win-.) and that’ll open the Windows emoji picker in the remote desktop instead of the KDE one (locally). And it will remember this setting for that application!
I can make any window I want stay above others temporarily to take notes, enter values into the calculator, or just turn any window into something like a HUD (you can control any window’s transparency on the fly!).
It even supports window tiling! A feature most people aren’t aware of. Like, if you’re already running KDE, why bother with a tiling window manager? You’ve already got it (though the keyboard shortcuts to manage the tiling layout in real time are lacking).
TL;DR: KDE Plasma is the best desktop in existence across all platforms and this is easy to prove with empircal evidence.
I don’t care at all about DE, as long as it is not gnome. I run vanilla kde with minimal configuration. I tried many DEs through the years, tiling wm and so on. Now I just want something that works and that I don’t worry about. But gnome, I don’t get it. I did try it a couple years ago and my colleagues at work use it, it feels like it is hindering me. I don’t like how the application switcher works, the software launcher and so on. When I use it it feels to me I’m fighting the UI in order to do very simple things.
I feel the same way with KDE as you do with GNOME which is interesting to me because one would think that when I’m used to Windows UI the KDE would just click with me but it’s actually annoying as hell to use to me.
I’ve used several iterations of Gnome, several iterations of KDE, Mate, Cinnamon, Hyprland, XFCE, LXDE, Fluxbox, and several other things I can’t be bothered to remember. I can be productive on any of them given some time to set them up.
I do have preferences though, and I like KDE on a laptop/desktop and Gnome on a tablet. I just wish Gnome would do something about its horrid onscreen keyboard.
Gnome get’s up and out of my way. 9/10.
Gnome only ever gets up to get in your way.
You need countless extensions to duct tape it to a wall to remotely make it get out of your way.
Very critical. GNOME and KDE have two very different UX paradigms.
Usually people used to Windows opt for KDE, and Mac or older Ubuntu users opt for GNOME.
The thing is though, a golden standard DE can easily be setup to act as both. XFCE is so customizable that I’ve seen both DE types setup as UNIX like or Windows like workflow.
I’m not sure if KDE or GNOME can do the same because I’m pretty sure they focus on a target audience.
What are your issues with KDE exactly? I always hated GNOME’s lack of standard window buttons and handling multiple windows in a Mac like fashion. Also the app menu which gives me flashbacks of ChromeOS.
i’ve tried gnome, cinnamon, hyprland, lxqt and whatnot… but everything i have settles on KDE
Gnome is where the heart is for me! It’s just so customizable, the extension framework is such a cool concept. And yes, I know, KDE has a lot of bells and whistles, and I think think that’s why I dislike it. It’s cluttered, Gnome is simple. I like the polish and the smoothness, KDE is nice for people who want more but I’m happy with less. Thanks for coming to my TED talk!
Pretty?
In my mind, I equate Gnome with OS X, while KDE is more like Windows.
I can use both competently, but I prefer KDE. Back when I used Ubuntu, I’d always use Kubuntu.
Gnome is soooo annoying. You can’t customize anything without “tweaks” that barely work.
I definitely prefer the customization of KDE.
I usually see people discussing distros but I feel like picking the right DE makes much bigger impact.
Yeah I often wonder about this too. I think that the package manager is another major factor. But I think I might be happy with any distro running KDE. I’ve gotta get outside my Debian bubble to see.
Actually that’s what I like about GNOME. I don’t want a ton of customization options, a right-click menu with multiple dozen entries and a settings menu that needs a “table of contents”.
Reduce the UI to such a degree, that you cannot remove anything more without breaking. Thats what I want.
I don’t always mind not having the customization of Plasma, what I mind is needing that customizstion because the defaults are awful and GNOME’s “opinionated” design to me has done clearly awful decisions on the defaults
I’m not trying to convince you to like something you don’t, and KDE is a fucking great suite of software.
However, it does sound like maybe you haven’t used GNOME in quite a long time. It does have various customizations built in that are available to users through the settings UI these days, and “tweaks that barely work” isn’t really a representative critique of the general ecosystem anymore.
GNOME’s extension platform is very mature at this point, and I’ve personally used a bunch of the same extensions for years now spanning like 10 major releases of GNOME without issue. Yeah, the little fly-by-night extensions that get two point releases and then are abandoned don’t work forever, but that’s true of a lot of old software, and is probably a good thing, honestly.
I use kde for my main desktop. Although I will probably switch to a window manager when I get the time to learn it.
I tried gnome once because I thought it was better for laptops (I used asahi for a little while on my macbook) Although I quickly changed to kde because I could not live with the horrible window tiling (only half and half no quarters) I realise now you can probably fix this with extentions but I didn’t get around to it.
I’ve changed DE multiple times, most of them are fine. KDE is a bit obtuse but it’s ultimately what I settled on because I want good built-in themes. If KDE didn’t exist I’d go with Xfce, followed by LXQt (never tried LXQt though).
In terms of how important a DE is, I think picking the right distro is more important. This basically means staying away from anything Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based because in my experience those are the least stable.
