I’ll probaby move to Gnome when my hands are too arthritic to operate a mouse and keyboard properly, and I just want to punch big icons and buttons I can barely see anymore. And I’ll be too far gone in dementia to customize my desktop anymore, so I won’t be able to hurt myself having settings I can mess up. I’ll understand where to find apps like “Mail” and “Files” instead of hard names like Thunderbird and Dolphin.

Then Gnome will be fine for a couple years just before I croak.

I switch back and forth based on which one has the smallest number of annoying bugs. Right now, I’m on KDE because they finally fixed a long-standing refresh rate bug, and because gnome has serious trouble keeping the mouse clamped to the right screen in UE5 games without the assistance of gamescope

Ι stick with KDE Plasma after trying GNOME, KDE, and Cinnamon. In GNOME, many settings are not available in GUI (I don’t remember which they are now), while they are available in KDE. And back when I used Cinnamon it didn’t support Wayland while some of my apps (especially Waydroid) needs Wayland. But I mostly use CLI for daily tasks for automation and easier copy-pasting forum answers, asking LLM, and sharing to GitHub, so I may not be a representative DE user.

I used plasma for nearly a decade and only recently switched off of it because I wanted to try something different. I moved over to GNOME for a bit, and while it was nice, I kept running into issues with customization, specifically Gnome Extensions are a pain in my ass.

I moved to cosmic a few weeks ago on my desktop rig, which is my server, but is also for gaming. I don’t want this one to feel like an “office” machine, and cosmic does a great job of feeling like just a computer. On my laptop, which I use for development, I prefer a stable “no-bullshit” interface, as such I use MATE there. MATE, if you’re unfamiliar, is the successor to Gnome2. It is a more traditional desktop experience, using familiar idioms. Customization is limited (out of box) compared to the more major DE’s like KDE and GNOME

I use both on different computers:
Gnome has auto-rotation out of the box so it goes into the tablet.
KDE has better extensions and wobbly windows so I can make it cursed whimsical enough to my liking

• Gnome has consistently moved away from a desktop experience and towards one that is geared towards touch screens. Which is fair enough, I suppose. But it’s not what I want. I don’t want bigger, more colorful icons that are more friendly to a touch screen. I don’t want drag gestures to do everything in my laptop…that’s what my tablet is for. By trying to make something that works for both, they don’t excel at either one and just end up making a mid-version of either experience.

• Its design is trying to make things “easy” for people by taking away their choice, which I fundamentally disagree with. To me, making things easier is about making sane defaults that people don’t need to change, but leaving those options for when the user gets more familiar. Taking out the ability entirely is dystopian windows level “you do what we tell you and you’ll like it” levels of glazing.

• This is minor, but the fact that I need to have Firefox in order to do anything of any substance in terms of what little customization there is on Gnome just bothers me. Why does your desktop still rely on another project in order to achieve full functionality?

I’ve stuck to KDE because it’s more customizable and the devs don’t try to actively remove features from updates. Gnome might be a cleaner experience, but I don’t want to have to search for alternatives when my favorite gnome extension gets unexpectedly killed by an update.

KDE appears to be much more stable in that regard in that they’re actively trying (Union) to make themes more resilient over time.

I use KDE on my desktop, Cinnamon on my laptop. I really dislike the way Gnome looks, but aside from that I’m really dependant on my mouse. Gnome doesn’t seem to appreciate that. I also don’t like their approach of dumbing things down and forcing their ways on the user.

Back in the day I really liked Unity. It was simple, looked good and optimised the screen like nothing else did at the time. When Ubuntu ditched it, I ditched Ubuntu.

I started with gnome back when Linux was a very young project. Then they started removing options despite the protests of their users so I moved to kde, which added functionality constantly, much to the delight of their users.

And many years later, here we are.

I used to be a gnome 2 user for a long time. I sometimes tried out KDE but it seemed to unstable so I moved back to gnome.

But the problems started with gnome 3. I had never put much effort into customizing my desktop but I just didn’t like the defaults for gnome 3. Even worse some things I didn’t like were hard to change, some required plug-ins (that sometimes broke) and some just couldn’t be fixed at all.

I could use my system but it always felt a bit like I did so begrudgingly. That was when I wasn’t using Linux full time. When I finally wanted to ditch windows completely I tried a lot. Different DEs, different distros and so on and I noticed that KDE felt good. I was skeptical but I gave it a real chance and I stayed. It feels good. It’s not perfect but I really like it. It is customizable enough but has sensible defaults. It doesn’t get in my way and I don’t use it begrudgingly.

I’m sticking with KDE because I like to have some say in how my computer behaves, like I prefer to have a sidepanel with useful things and not top panel with calendar. I also like to have window buttons like minimize, maximize, close, pin, etc.

Gnome feels like Linux to me, I don’t want discount Windows, I could just use Windows.

I don’t need or want to customize every little detail, I have a life.

Testing out KDE broke a lot of video and mouse inputs, don’t find it worth trying to fix just to test.

Naming everything with K is dumb as hell.

the gnome on the distro I had before did not work well with windows snapping so I installed kde. my current distro kde is the default.

Tuning / ricing is overrated. I used to spend hours years ricing my desktop (enlightenment DR16 anyone?). Screw that, Gnome it is: simple, elegant, functional.

I do add 2 very useful plugins tho: Wobbly Windows and the Spinning Cube. Shows my age I guess.

I test KDE each couple of years: install it on my current OS or in VM, trying to change theme/move panel, get a crash shortly after, then delete it. Even “kde neon” that was supposedly polished distro from devs themselves, crashed within couple of minutes in my hands.

Maybe it just my hands, but Gnome never does that.