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
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.