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 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
You didn’t mention KDE’s lack of any adequate stability. That’s what makes it incomparable to GNOME. They serve completely different use cases.
You didn’t mention KDE’s lack of any adequate stability
What year is it
2024, mister/miss, and I’m talking about Plasma 6.
KDE Plasma is wonderfully stable if you mean reliable, if you mean unchanging then yeah, it has quite a few changes.
I meant reliability. It’s bad if you use ANY feature besides virtual desktops and app opening. In my understanding “stability” is stability of ALL features of the program, no matter how rarely they’re used.
It really isn’t, at least in my experience. And I have an Nvidia card!
All software beyond a moderate complexity has bugs.
It really isn’t, at least in my experience
works in my machineis an opinion not an argument. Different people have different expectations and experiences.Doesn’t work on my machine is an opinion not an argument. Different people have different expectations and experiences.
It really isn’t, at least in my experience. And I have an Nvidia card!
Oh then it makes sense why you argued. However it’s important to keep in mind that experience can vary among users. For example, in my case Plasma was very unstable on an Intel iGPU.
All software beyond a moderate complexity has bugs.
Not an excuse tbh.
You didn’t mention KDE’s lack of any adequate stability. That’s what makes it incomparable to Gnome.
But then also:
However it’s important to keep in mind that experience can vary among users.
Oh the irony.
It’s not irony. Floating defects and hardware-specific fixes exist.
Not an excuse tbh.
The thing to do is participate in the beta programs and report any bugs you find, as you’re having so much instability you would be an ideal participant whereas me with my smooth running wouldn’t.
It’s not what I’m saying. KDE releases untested and buggy builds to stable. It makes it unstable software. If you’re a KDE fan, I understand, but don’t reject objective facts.
What part of
All software beyond a moderate complexity has bugs.
didn’t you understand?
i know i’ll get downvoted but this was my experience last time i tried kde a few weeks ago (kubuntu and fedora kde):
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cool animations but stuttery as hell
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browser randomly consuming 10% of cpu, making everything else slow as if it was using 100% (tested: firefox, librewolf, floorp, brave)
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programs refusing to install
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programs refusing to open
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editing the taskbar often resulted in all the items going on top of each other, i couldn’t move them until i rebooted. couldn’t find an option to reset the whole thing
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i put cpu and gpu temps in the system monitor and it always borked after it had been closed a few minutes
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kded5 or something like that constantly popped up wanting to create a new wallet. couldn’t figure out how to disable. guides pointed to a configuration file that didn’t exist on my system
idk if it’s an nvidia thing but none of these happen on other DEs
My experience of anything Ubuntu based is that it is buggy as hell. I have no knowledge of Fedora.
well yeah i tried ubuntu a couple years back and i remember having some issues with it too.
weird thing is that mint has never had any issues even though it’s based on ubuntu. not even nvidia related issues.
It’s more of a distro problem than KDE. I have nvidia toi, and I admit, it bugs sometimes out.
well, cinnamon works great on mint and fedora, and i have had less (none) gpu related issues on mint than i did even on windows. kde wouldn’t play nice with my old pc components either and gpu is the only thing that i kept, so i would suspect it’s some weirdness between my gpu and kde.
and too bad i can’t go with amd because i need hdmi 2.1
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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!
Hyperland seems to be bullying someone in the bleachers, but it’s hard to see exactly what’s going on there.
Report it is.
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.
Same. GNOME is too “appleish” for me. KDE customization is amazing.
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
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.
I like both. I prefer KDE for keyboard and mouse use and GNOME for touchscreen use.
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 seems to still require you to install a browser extension to use Shell Extensions.
You can download the Extension Manager from Flathub. You don’t have to use a browser to install extensions at all.
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.
There are extensions for that in Gnome. I would mention “Vitals” or “Astra Monitor” if you want to go overkill.
Konsole by default switches tabs with ctrl tab but Terminal doesn’t and thats basically my only issue with it.
Default Gnome terminal is bad. Even Fedora which is a distro that ships almost every DE without any changes switched from the default Gnome terminal to Ptyxis. Ptyxis is probably still not enough for power users, but at least it has more settings including the ability edit keyboard shortcuts and looks better.
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
There’s also an extension for that in Gnome although it probably does not have this funny “feature”.
Thank you! I’ve been hesitant to install a whole bunch of extensions but vitals and astra monitor look great, I’m going to try them out this week and see which I prefer.
I’ve been avoiding flathub, it just doesn’t seem like my cup of tea but I may have to reconsider and take a proper look at it because it sounds better than a browser extension ngl
I was just so surprised that a terminal that supports tabs doesn’t have generic tab switching, at least I know I’m not crazy now for not enjoying Gnome terminal lol
I promise the giant cursor is a useful feature even though so many people have thought it was a weird bug lol I constantly do it when I’m trying to figure out how to word an email and on the very rare occasion where I can’t find my cursor it has actually been helful!
What desktop do you favour and why? Explain your thoughts.
Xfce & Cinnamon.
If I had to pick between KDE or Gnome, I would go KDE without any hesitation as I quite like it whereas I’m not really a fan of Gnome. Gnome UI is OK I guess, it’s just the way they want to decide for everything I am not a fan of (After 35+ years using Apple, I did not switch to let anyone else decide for me ;). If I don’t use KDE it’s mostly because it requires too much work to “tone it down” and make it behave like I want my DE to. Out of the box, there is too much features I have to turn off and configure, features that are also spread between too many (and not all of them… obvious) menus/settings. What’s great with KDE is that it’s at all possible to configure all that, it’s amazing. It’s just too much for me. Be it XFCE (on Debian on my desktop) or Cinnamon (on Mint on the laptop) I barely need to change anything to have them do what I wish.
So, to summarize I would say it’s my untamed laziness that dictates my choice of a DE :p
It’s also the reason why I do not use one of those tiling WM I know exist and I know, as a user spending my time with my fingers on the keyboard, I would love to use in place of the standard floating windows. Alas, having them correctly configured and running, and then having to relearn decades old habits, would require a time and an energy I have no desire to spend. So, I don’t. Still, I understand why some people like them so much ;)
edit: clarifications
XFCE team here !!! Though I was kinda surprised they didn’t enable XFwm (as stated by arch linux wiki) by default and had some strange issues with GTK apps (big black shadow arround apps). Took me some time to figure that out.
If I had to chose I would probably go for KDE. Gnome is great and it’s nice to have alternatives that are so different and also up to date ! However, I hate GNOME’s design choice. I hate my Mac and Gnome feels to similar to even bother with it.
I use Mint with Cinnamon with the Cinnamenu menu (instead of the default ugly one). I’m able to make Mint to start up at 700 MB of RAM. On my fast desktop I have Debian Testing with Gnome 47, that one starts at 1.5 GB of RAM. I’m thinking of using Mint there too.
My standard position is that GNOME is good, if you want to just use an existing workflow, whereas KDE is good, if you’re looking to create your own workflow or you’re fine with a mediocre, familiar (Windows-like) workflow.
But unfortunately, GNOME is really disappointing in some ways. Every so often, we have someone at work accidentally using it, because it’s the default, and they always run into the same nonsense, like not being able to type a file path into the file manager, or not being able to give a name to the file they’re trying to save. These are pretty bad problems that normal users are quick to encounter. It’s a mystery to me, why these can’t be fixed, but ultimately I just tell people to install KDE and they’ve all been happy about it.
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.
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.
Their approach to development really doesn’t suit stable ones.
I’m relatively new to Linux as my full time desktop OS and I’m loving KDE. I’m curious what you mean by this, though.
They have frequent releases that introduce features and bugs, and then they squash them every week.
A stable distro like Debian will only update KDE once every ~2 years. If the version they use is full of bugs, you’re stuck with it.
On the other hand you’ve got a DE like xfce that gets a release every few years, and the Devs make sure it’s as reliable as possible to fit that stable release schedule.
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.
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.
