The KDE guys have been on fire for the past two years. Between their theming, color selection, and session handling they’ve come a long ways. They’ve also implemented some gnome-only features such as the overview, albeit in a very optional way. As opposed to eliminating a panel and forcing you to use the overview to see what applications or windows you have open, or available to launch, it’s just a window management tool instead of a UX paradigm.

Their wayland session is stable and also deals with xwayland in a very different way. If you set a custom scaling factor, the QT apps and GTK apps are talked to in a way that makes the same scaling factor consistent across all your applications, even under a wayland session with xwayland. The Gnome devs hand-wring about how the world has to be perfect before implementing an idea, where the KDE devs try something and then iterate if it’s successful.

• Calling the Arch Wiki contributor’s clowns
• The public tantrum with System76 because of the poor attitudes on the part of the Gnome project
• The Gnome way: stop making shell extensions and contribute to the Shell or get fucked.
• The overall attitude of the devs regarding user opinions, resulting in the plethora of extensions available, and the tone deaf attitude regarding all of them.
• The world must be perfect before we do jack shit about fractional scaling, despite people moving to HiDPI/4K monitors.

Trundle on over to KDE-land, and you find a very different tone. They’re not too proud to adopt paradigms that conflicted with core design principles if they’re widely beloved (look at Overview as a prime example). Fractional scaling is miles ahead of Gnome in functionality and performance impact, solved in both X11 and elegantly in Wayland so that xwayland apps have a hook to get correct DPI info without looking blurry. The deep customizations available have negated the need for much of their session modifications, as they rapidly adopt good ideas (floating panels anyone? Ahh yes, Plasma has got you).

They’re also extremely nimble when it comes to changing course on their backend. They went from having a buggy Wayland session to having the most stable one by far. They also take criticism far better, either taking it in stride or recognizing then they did something off-base.

Gnome can go to hell, and fuck the stupid ass GTK which is objectively inferior to QT. Redhat can nibble on my shit too for all I care.

This money would have been far better given to KDE instead of the assholes at Gnome.

This right here. Apple did a very artful job of making everything available way back when on a unified storefront with “everything”. Netflix did much the same, and for a time it was “everything enough” until each studio decided it was a good idea to make their own storefront. The mistake is that they inadvertently rekindled piracy not so much because of the pricing, but due to the convenience factor. Now the piracy is most convenient because it has it all in one spot. People will pay for content, that’s not the issue. It’s the same old adage as going to the same grocery store that just has all the shit you need so you don’t have to drive all over town.