Both are great options, but KDE/plasma 6 is my pick.
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024
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I gotta say, i love how these comments are civil. Linux often seems to devolve into turf wars. Just made me happy
Both KDE and Gnome are stable. Anaconda works the same way for both of them, because that stuff doesn't have anything to do with the DE.
It really depends on your preferences. KDE is easily customizaple and has a lot of features and UX improvements. But it can clutter quite easily: these options can be overwhelming.
GNOME follows a very strict workflou design that's more similar to how phones work and helps an ADHD brain, like me to focus more. You can customize it, but you'll do so at your own risk.
Best to try out both in a live system and do some things that emulate your day-to-day workflow. Then you can decide. And you can always change afterwards! If you have a separate home-partition, reinstalling a new DE/Distro is super trivial.
i always found gnome somehow irritating to use, like the tray area popping up all of the system controls when i just want to change the sound device. or little stuff like trying to paste a file into a folder that is too full to scroll past the bottom. i can't r-click to the background, can't adjust the columns to get empty space on the side. i need to use the menu. or pause fiddling with my noodle and ctrl+v...
Nautilus has empty space on the sides these days to paste.
I might get eviscerated for saying this, but you can replicate the GNOME workflow fairly well on KDE—KNOME if you will.
There's an overview similar to that in GNOME, you can set up shortcuts to mimic the keyboard+one-app-one-workspace workflow, etc.
Good luck trying to recreate Plasma with GNOME though.
I tried to do this before, but it did not work out.
I couldn't make the meta key alone open overview. I also tried to add a dock there, but I can only have a panel when not in overview, which is the opposite of that I wanted. I also liked the notification menu and the quick toggles menu in top right corner.
I have been planning to get into plasma extension development to fix some of these issues.
Yeah it's not a one-to-one conversion of course. An update few months back allowed meta to open Overview on its own though, fwiw.
I'd still like the dock in the Overview too, like yourself, but for now I just have a launcher on the bottom like dash-to-dock.
I used to prefer GNOME, until I started using KDE daily on the desktop, I thought it would just be temporary, but I ended up liking KDE way more because of the features that are built-in, the integration is simply priceless and I'm tired of those GNOME extensions that keep breaking at the next GNOME major release and I have to wait weeks for the poor devs to catch up and fix them up to get the compatibility going again, in some ways that also happens on KDE with the widgets, but, arguably, you will need way fewer of those to extend the already wide functionality provided by the Fedora KDE experience, so you risk incurring in that issue a lot less. Note I specifically mention Fedora both because it's the system you want and because the pool of apps included is the best for a streamlined, but not bloated, experience, which also allows me to use Kinoite without troubling myself to overlay crucial apps that aren't provided (or don't work fully) as Flatpak.
Widgets and themes broke when version 6 was released but that was a major upgrade which changed the underlying technology (Qt5 to Qt6) and it was announced before-hand. It tends not happen with minor and patch updates.
I see, I guess that's what happened to those that broke for me
Both GNOME and KDE are first-class DEs in Fedora - stability is a non issue. You can install both if you want and select your choice at the login screen to just switch back and forth. The only thing you might want to keep in mind is that both have their own prpgrams, like file managers for example, so you'll have two programs for the same task.
Performance is a wash, really, with a halfway modern setup. Your browser will be consuming way more resources than the desktop by far.
Compatibility is also a non issue nowadays, both implement the Freedesktop standard and are fully compatible with each other.
I'm pretty sure that the installer is the same for all major spins.
Hope you have fun with Fedora!
I've used them both in the past, but prefer Xfce now. So I'm probably not too biased either way on Gnome v. KDE. I'd say they're both extremely well-supported, popular, respectable, and safe choices. They're quite different in style though, so odds are you might find you have a preference for one or the other. Go with whichever you like best.
From a performance and overall compatibility perspective, does either GNOME or KDE outshine over the other for this?
Not unless you are doing specific things. Last I checked, but I know Gnome is moving on these fronts too. Things like HDR, VRR, Virtual Reality Games and stuff like that you are going to want KDE for. There was probably some other stuff, but that's what I have off the top of my head. However, if you try Gnome and decide that you really like them. They are making moves on those fronts too, but I'm not sure how long it is going to take.
If it's you're first install go with gnome since it's intentionally simplified.
You WILL get lost in all of the customization options that are available in KDE and most xwindows environments if you have no experience w anything besides Windows or Mac
I used to only use KDE but fedora made me love gnome
Cinnamon