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 see Gnome typically using 1.6gb of ram (8-4gb ram vm/real system)
Kde without any effects about the same with effects on about 2gbI 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.
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.
Yeah, KDE’s customization is overwhelming in my opinion. I like my OS like I like my boss: “support me, get out of my way, and let me do my work”. Gnome does exactly that.
Initially, I was drawn to KDE Plasma for familiarity. Therefore, when installing Linux for the first time, I chose a distro with KDE Plasma. Which happened to be Fedora Kinoite 35, a very new distro at the time. It was clearly buggy and after fiddling with it for some time, I just had to rebase to Silverblue (and GNOME) for the lack of alternatives.
Thankfully, I actually happened to really like GNOME. This was on a laptop and GNOME’s touchpad gestures just felt very satisfying and intuitive; much better than anything else I had experienced before. Its (intended) workflow also made a lot of sense that way.
GNOME has really grown on me ever since. And while I’ve revisited KDE Plasma to see what I was supposedly missing out on, I simply stuck to GNOME as it felt cleaner and more elegant.
Linux desktop environments is the Trans rights of politics. Very easy to debate, everyone has an opinion, but not where the focus should be
Turns on reply notifications and sticks phone in butt
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.
I like both. I prefer KDE for keyboard and mouse use and GNOME for touchscreen use.
I prefer Cinnamon and Budgie
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.
KDE Plasma is wonderfully stable if you mean reliable, if you mean unchanging then yeah, it has quite a few changes.
sorry, i love plasma and i’d use it over gnome any day of the week, but there are still a ton of papercuts that make me feel uneasy about recommending it to anyone else. gnome is boring and it personally slows me down, but i feel safer setting up a corporate workstaion with gnome knowing the user won’t break something by accident
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
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.
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
Rel man, I got pretty good nvidia gpu, but its 10 yo, it never played well with linux, but I feel like recently its much smoother experience on KDE wayland, before I had to use xorg as it was unusable on wayland. I think new major version (6) + constant updates to wayland made it usable, thats why i praise KDE so much, great DE and all their apps (like KDE connect, filelight, partition manager etc.).
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I meant 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 rarely 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
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.
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.
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.
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
What year is it
2024, mister/miss, and I’m talking about Plasma 6.
Damn this thread really makes me feel like a minority, but I prefer GNOME! It comes useful out of the box, sane defaults, easy to extend without ripping out the soul of how it functions. Best of all it has a new and interesting direction for the desktop UI rather than just copying Windows. It has some original ideas that really serve it well.
there are dozens of us. dozens.
half a dozen of you, tops. ;)
GNOME is pretty but KDE works.
“Works” as in does what I expect from a desktop without deciding over my head that I should rethink my forty years of accumulated desktop experience without any discernible benefit to it.
Love gnome with dash to panel. Zero complaints.
KDE no doubt. GNOME is a minimalist that depends on extensions to provide basic functionality, while also being a giant fatass. KDE works from the install, provides a sensible workflow, and has better tools.
But I’d only use KDE on a rolling release or a 6 month release schedule distro. Their approach to development really doesn’t suit stable ones.
Their approach to development really doesn’t suit stable ones.
I’m relatively new to Linux as my full time desktop OS and I’m loving KDE. I’m curious what you mean by this, though.
They have frequent releases that introduce features and bugs, and then they squash them every week.
A stable distro like Debian will only update KDE once every ~2 years. If the version they use is full of bugs, you’re stuck with it.
On the other hand you’ve got a DE like xfce that gets a release every few years, and the Devs make sure it’s as reliable as possible to fit that stable release schedule.
The first desktop that I used on Linux was GNOME, probably either 2.0 or 2.2. It was a bit clunky, but it was fine. I distro hopped for a while and discovered Mandrake 9 and thought the desktop was great. This was when I discovered desktop environments. I hopped over to Fedora Core when it was first released and was unhappy with the desktop again.
So I started desktop hopping on Fedora. I tried XFCE, Fluxbox, Openbox, and several others. They were cool, and the KDE experience on Fedora Core 1 was not great. At some point I switched to Gentoo and used the KDE experience there. When Ubuntu came around, I found that while the install experience was good, the desktop was kinda clunky. I ended up sticking with Gentoo. When Kubuntu 5.04 came out, though, I switched over. And I’ve been using some combination of Kubuntu and KDE Neon ever since.
If GNOME had been my only option, I probably would have gone back to Windows. Initially because I found it clunky (and tbh kinda ugly), but more recently because every time I’ve used GNOME in the last decade or so, it feels like it’s lost features I used heavily. Meanwhile KDE has taken a different approach to configurability of trying to cut down configuration options by figuring out what a better option that everyone can agree on looks like. It’s still very configurable, but it has nowhere near as many knobs as it had in the KDE 3.5 days. You know what, though? I cannot think of a single lost configuration option in Plasma that I miss.
So I am strongly in the KDE Korner between these two, and much more weakly favour KDE Plasma vs. other desktops.
