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

  • helmet91@lemmy.world
    162·
    29 days ago

    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.

    • lemmus
      3·
      29 days ago

      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”.