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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

KDE, because it’s familiar yet customisable. Gnome is just too strange for me, and doesn’t seem to allow me to un-strange it.

My standard position is that GNOME is good, if you want to just use an existing workflow, whereas KDE is good, if you’re looking to create your own workflow or you’re fine with a mediocre, familiar (Windows-like) workflow.

But unfortunately, GNOME is really disappointing in some ways. Every so often, we have someone at work accidentally using it, because it’s the default, and they always run into the same nonsense, like not being able to type a file path into the file manager, or not being able to give a name to the file they’re trying to save. These are pretty bad problems that normal users are quick to encounter. It’s a mystery to me, why these can’t be fixed, but ultimately I just tell people to install KDE and they’ve all been happy about it.

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

As GNOME gets ready to strike, KDE appears to start studdering… What is going on over there?? Is that the KDE baloo file indexer starting up? Oh no! A perfect connect as KDE falls to the ground!!

Oh what’s this - GNOME seems to be standing there idle. Did the boxing task get backgrounded? Heaven knows it’s impossible to find the running programs on GNOME. KDE and GNOME are both tabbed out of the boxing window!

Let’s take a look into the crowd… MacOS seems to have left the building to refresh it’s permissions, and Windows is still booting up the programs that all self updated post restart. XFCE is hanging out in the corner but is all out of sync due to poor refresh rates on X11. Hyperland seems to be bullying someone in the bleachers, but it’s hard to see exactly what’s going on there…

Ding ding ding

Looks like KDE is out! Baloo didn’t finish in time for KDE to get up. Let’s see what happens in round 2!

I like both. I prefer KDE for keyboard and mouse use and GNOME for touchscreen use.

I only have experience with Gnome out of the two but I haven’t had the urge to switch yet. I like the look of it (I like that it looks different to Windows), the simplicity and the customisation with extensions (only a few and small ones, I recently started using OpenBar for some customization but I could do without). I keep my system rather minimal and I am not looking to put a lot of time into theming or customization.

I also tried Cosmic and I like the tiling aspect of it, but I also don’t feel the need to switch. Maybe once it is released and I can figure out how to install it on Aeon.

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.

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.