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’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
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
You can download the Extension Manager from Flathub. You don’t have to use a browser to install extensions at all.
There are extensions for that in Gnome. I would mention “Vitals” or “Astra Monitor” if you want to go overkill.
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.
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!