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’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”.
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
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.
personally i find gnome to be kinda weird to use and kde has been so completely crippled with bugs and performance issues every time i have given it a shot (may be a skill issue on my end), that i still have to vote for gnome.
cinnamon ftw.
KDE - Its got people behind it who actually give a flying fuck about their end users.
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 mean 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 rare 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. 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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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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!
Love gnome with dash to panel. Zero complaints.
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.
I prefer Gnome on laptops. It had the best setup for laptops.
I prefer Plasma on desktop. It has better support for modern gaming features.
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.
I love gnome’s design a lot and I want to use it so badly but for whatever reason it crashes on my PC if I game. Entire DE just closes and I’m back to the login screen. I thought it was just some weird Nvidia bug but same thing happenes on my AMD card.
The issue is the vram will fill up from gaming and both cards I have only have 4GB of VRAM.
However KDE doesn’t crash once the VRAM fills up. I don’t understand why or how the DE is affecting VRAM management but on KDE it’ll start using my ram and that’ll fill up a good bit. Game will slow down to a crawl but hey at least it doesn’t crash.
