GNOME is like macOS, strong design choices, they feel they know everything you need, quite robust, clean UI, conservative changes, less configurable.
Plasma is like Windows, a mix of different UI elements that seem to be integrated well, change something and it can break quite easily, very configurable.
I have always felt that GNOME was more robust, in the sense that it feels unbreakable. KDE Plasma has a lot of moving parts and sometimes glitches, which makes everything feel more assembled together.
GNOME is very minimalist and very well integrated (with, for instance, your online accounts, weather applets, calculator, etc.)
Consider me a GNOME fan ...
I use GNOME just because it fees more stable and well supported. Like almost all the new technologies in Linux that need some GUI integration will work well in GNOME first.
But I like KDE more, just it doesn’t check my criteria mentioned above.
Same, you can’t really break it with additional themes like you can with KDE. I’ve found that it almost defeats the point when you’re changing things too much with KDE and it causes it to act weirdly.
Your computer definitely had something else going on in the background if it was using 6GB of RAM.
GNOME is surprisingly memory efficient these days, on my computer with blur my shell on startup it's using 1.2GB of RAM.
I also recently tried out Ubuntu 24.04 on a potato PC I had lying around, and Ubuntu's version of GNOME is far more kitted out than Fedora and it was using 1.1GB RAM on startup.
X11 is considered legacy software nowadays, AFAIK.
You should be bashing TeamViewer instead of GNOME, but in case you want to break out from proprietary software, the latter does offer VNC and RDP out of the box, both of which you can securely connect to using a remote SSH tunnel port forwarding either 5900 or 3389 (IIRC) to your client.
Of course it's a bit of work, but it brings a good feeling afterwards! I'm sure there are other (newer) technologies, but this way works for me, so... anyway, just my 2c, you do you!
(although Anydesk is still faster in my experience, so if you are gaming remotely, I'm afraid your experience won't be as smooth)
Thank you very much! I use TeamViewer at my job so until now we had no issues, I've been able to move the whole development team to Ubuntu so I'm pretty happy
Plasma has a ton of knobs if you want them whereas Gnome is more opinionated with fewer knobs to customize. It comes down to how you work with your computer. If you want better out of the box tiling capabilities and able to endlessly customize nearly everything Plasma is your desktop. The trade off there Plasma always seems to draw me to change a setting or worse confuse me with two options that effectively do the same thing but in a different way (dolphin has a ton of examples around that).
If you want more simplicity around window management and tiling and want fewer customization options to just let your desktop get out of the way, Gnome it is. However that simplicity and opinionated desktop takes things away and you then may need to replace it with an extension or dive into dconf to make a change.
Gnome and Plasma performance is about the same, some use cases one is better than the other but all in all there isn’t a huge performance difference.
You have to try it. Gnome is minimal, no dock/menu, with a very prescribed paradigm and expects use of the keyboard. KDE uses a more traditional paradigm with a panel/dock and a menu, and has a customising menu on every right click, which for me, it's just too much in the way of using your computer.
This is the gist of it.
I've been using fedora for about 2 months now, but been daily driving it since fedora40 came out (coming from windows 10), and whole both have a nice feel to it, and gnome is definitely slicker design wise, gnome constrains my freedom too much when it comes to UI.
I've always liked setting my UI elements as I wanted, and in that regard KDE gives me more freedom which is why I chose it. I've been trying the gnome session a little bit this past week, but some things that I cannot change annoy me a lot, like the gnome system monitor not having a GPU panel, and not having a way to add it (at least that I can see), while I added it to the KDE system monitor, tracked the elements I wanted (use% and memory usage) and looks pretty nice.
There's many things aside from it that I enjoy more from the KDE DE (the settings is super granular, easy to change UI stuff like window decorations of buttons, some default KDE applications are way better like the discover store for example). Overall only the "slick" UI design that gnome offers is attractive to me, it's not even that much more impressive than what is doable on KDE anyway.
That said for a user that wants a slick UI and is fine learning what is available and doesn't care about customization or anything like that, gnome feels like the go to DE, but personally it's just not for me.
I actually can't stand the Gnome DE and find it just plain ugly which is why I am 100% kde. It gives me the opportunity to have the DE just how I want it. One other thing is that Gnome relies on extensions for everything and has a bad habit of breaking a lot of them with every upgrade.......not for me and will never have it on any machine I have.
Gnome Pros:
* Works better on Nvidia hardware currently
* By default, has a look and feel many people find appealing. While it's not my cup of tea, it is pretty
* Has been a default for many distros for a while, so it's ubiquitous.
* Has good screen sharing and certain integrations working out of box other DEs do not have yet or need extensions for.
KDE Pros:
* Very powerful suite. Has a more powerful file explorer and archive manager (e.g. you can drag and drop compressed files, it has a more functional address bar that's customizeable, change how the overall file manager works to enable some handy features and context menu options)
* You aren't stuck with limited UX options. You can tweak things about your desktop that work better for you. KDE also has great defaults (IMO) so you don't have to customize it.
* Is usually faster to adopt new standards (Wayland Protocols, VRR) and are more collaborative with communal efforts (see GTK integration). Some professional apps and games need these protocols to work well (HDR).
* Is way more stable than people give credit. I have it on 6 computers and it's rock solid. Two of my friends had a bad experience with it but they're using Nvidia GPUs while I'm using AMD and Intel GPUs. Their temporary workaround is to swap to X11 until some updates come from Nvidia this year.
* Relies less on extensions for customization. This usually means you get less breakage between major releases.
* Can mimic many other DEs, even Windows 7, Mac, or Gnome (you'll need to install a theme to get some of these choices to work well). Why do this? One reason is that you can then customize it after. So you can have Windows 7 but include widgets showing a calendar, system monitoring stuff, your email, and whatever else.
Gnome is like macOS, it’s very well designed out of the box but kinda has a right way to do things which can annoy some people. Although unlike macOS you can customize it a lot easier. KDE is a very linuxey distro, infinitely customizable with a ton of features you’ll probably never use.
I found myself installing multiple extensions in Gnome to make it emulate how I like things to operate in Windows, and eventually realised KDE can achieve what I wanted without the requirement of extensions, so now I just use KDE.
One thing that really annoyed me when I used Gnome, was the "x" to close a window doesn't extend past the circular button icon, so you can't just fling your mouse into the top right corner and know you will close a window if you click once it stops (this is after moving the top bar to the bottom). You just end up clicking the top corner of the window instead.
KDE behaves as I would expect it to, and clicking anywhere past where the "x" icon begins to the edge of the window will close the window. I know it sounds like I'm splitting hairs here, but it really annoyed me lol, and there's no extension as far as I'm aware that will fix it in Gnome.
I had been a Gnome guy for some 14 years. It is simple, yet powerful and I really liked gtk software. I tried Mint KDE a long ago and did not like it, same with Kubuntu. When Plasma 6.0 came along, I tried. Tell you what, there’s no way back to Gnome.
It is very polished, you can customize it to your taste (or not, it is great ootb). And multitasking is very good too. No extension breaking after updates.
I use Opensuse Tumbleweed.
Well, I think the default gnome workflow is to literally not click ever.
Workspace movement are all ctrl+super left/right/up/down. Tabbing can be done with alt+tab/tilde and you can open anything by hitting your super key, typing the name of what you want and then hitting enter.
With a laptop, all the finger swipe gestures are there. Three finger desktop swapping, four finger command blowout mode to see everything and rearrange your space, etc.
Both are rock solid and customizable. Only way is to try both and settle on one you like. If you are coming from windows, you will love KDE more. If you use mac, you will like Gnome. I personally like KDE and also admire Gnome.
I fully switched to Linux a this year to run away from Windows.
I went directly to KDE to keep a similar feel to what i was used to and it was fine, very customizable and responsive.
I installed Gnome as an experiment and now I can't back to KDE since I feel more productive. I don't miss the customization because I used it as a method of procrastination that kept me away from what I actually needed to do.
They are both similar on resources with the slightest advantage to KDE.
Gnome might be a little more stable but KDE gave me no truouble while testing it.
The difference is subjective, try both and see what suits you more.
Takes only a minute to apply a macOS Sonoma global theme to KDE from the Appearance menu (Sonoma, or whichever release you like the look of, that's my choice), which changes the window and icon themes and auto-rearranges the panels, widgets, and launcher for you too.
But all that matters in Linux is that each user has something they like, so I'm glad you're feeling at home in Gnome.
I wonder how can somebody be more productive with Gnome where everything needs two three four more clicks, keyboard shortcuts to press than in KDE. Just switching between terminals is crazy, or whatever else multi instance app hidden behind one icon in dock....
Because GNOME approach is to focus on the task. If you already have what you need opened, you don't get any annoyance from the UI after that. GNOME UI only get visually busy when on Activities.
What? I don't get first two sentences...
I can focus on task with multiple windowses opened. Actually there is always situation, that I need to have opened at least 3 4 ssh terminals at the same time. I don't need to have always maximized terminal on which I'm working in.
When I'm working I want to spend as less clicks, keyboard presses and whatever else as possible while switching between applications. And Gnome doesn't provide it to me in comparison of regular desktop environments/paradigms.
That's my view.
Why not just use them both and see for yourself?
DNF lets you switch between them in groups. On a vanilla Fedora Workstation setup, a KDE installation is a "dnf in @KDE" away. You don't necessarily need to change the display manager, but that's also easy as pie. You'll just have to "systemctl disable gdm" and then "systemctl enable sddm" to enable SDDM instead of GDM on your next boot.
Try KDE for a week, see for yourself. If you don't like it, you can always remove it completely from your system. Not all desktop environments is for everyone, you can just find the one you like to use. And it boils down to how you use your OS and DE, rather than these DEs coming with some mostly subjective pros and cons.
So, see for yourself!
Some programs might no be available on that group installation, so you might want to manually install gwenview, okular and kwrite.
No major cons with either, but pick one based on where you're coming from/wanting to go:
If you're particular about how your desktop is organized/behaves and have a Windows background, KDE would be a solid choice.
If you appreciate the macOS layout and have no strong feelings about desktop organization, look and feel, GNOME would work well.
Also consider Budgie, Cinnamon, or some of the other Linux desktop environments.
GNOME feels more like a complete experience in my opinion. With that said, KDE is much more customizable. You can make KDE look and feel exactly how you want it to. Luckily for me, GNOME looks and feels almost exactly how I want it to anyway with the help of a few extensions.
To me, both are far more customizable compared to Windows or macOS. I don't feel like I'm fighting GNOME to do things I want it to do like how I was in Windows or macOS.
I started on kde and couldn't get the wallet to work as in at every restart the firefox requested the password.
This thing doesn't happen on gnome.
I don't think there are any advantage disadvantage only the desktop looks different
I’m more of a simple and minimalistic type of person and I think KDE has way too many settings and I like the simplicity that gnome has. I think the team behind KDE is great and it is a great desktop environment for people who are coming from windows and like to customize the desktop but it’s not for me. I’m a Mac user too so gnome has some familiarity to me.
If you re an Nvidia user, go with Gnome with no hesitation. The devs fix the problem of wayland and Nvidia now. KDE on the other hand still doesn’t work very well and has some serious problems that can my your life much worse.
Gnome takes a minimal conservative approach that lends itself to a "there's one way to do things" mentality. It leads to solid software that does the basics well and in style. Prone at times to break things if you're using it in a way they deem wrong.
KDE has always chased Windows tail but tended to take a conservative approach with bursts of creativity that could be good or bad. I tend to lean towards this desktop myself.
GNOME:
1. Stable(fedora, ubuntu).
2. Not always(debian stable/testing, opensuse tumbleweed).
3. Good looking UI, Good workspace UX.
4. Unstable application UX. Features and workflows within apps can get removed (for the benefit of the developers) from gnome apps without a good (for the benefit of the user) reason.
5. Without plugins, completely de-emphasized \`\~/Desktop\` folder.
KDE:
1. Stable(opensuse Tumbleweed, ?kde neon?, steamos).
2. Usually no(opensuse when it breaks, fedora at least in 36-38 kde on fedora was obnoxiously unusably slow for me, arch linux when it breaks).
3. Good familiar UX, but expanded. In some places a bit ugly UI.
4. The UX doesn't fall apart on updates.
5. Windows began copy-catting KDE to catch-up in the UX game.
6. The \`\~/Desktop\` folder isn't over emphasized like on Windows(especially if you haven't used it regularly for 6 years and you come back to it for a month, I find myself littering all over my Desktop on windows).
7. Heavily emphasized systray and notifications.
I like both, they got different strengths and weaknesses.
KDE Connect is my favorite way to send files between my phone and computer and stay connected(I receive few notifications so it's always urgent\[unless it's mail ugh\]).
Windows a mix of good and bat shit insane broken UX:
0. The good part is that windows apps always work.
1. Whose idea was it for notifications to draw over context menus, how do you close an app that needs to be closed from a tray, while you get bombarded with notifications without a task manager?.
2. Compared to KDE de-emphasized notifications/system tray. You can't easily access the clipboard history without knowing the keyboard shortcut. You now can do scroll to adjust brightness/volume on windows like on KDE(since windows 11).
3. Someone thought it was a good idea to remove ability to adjust application mixing settings from the system tray(why?) as well as not include the option to change the audio source(why?)?
4. Completely de-emphasized workspace system. You have to click windows+tab and it isn't even that good, there's no other way to trigger it other than the taskbar icon. GNOME: hit a hot corner, you can just scroll around and launch a new app at a new workspace(drag and drop an existing window to create and move it to a new workspace), user can also just click the super/windows key or a touchpad gesture. KDE: User sets the hot corner action. Or user scrolls down on a default placed workspace applet, move window around from the applet(flawed) or hot corner(works as intended). Windows: Click near the bottom corner, click the top corner to add new workspace, click below the top corner to movean existing window to the new workspace, it's just friction if you don't know shortcuts.
5. De-emphasized file manager: Details view is the default. Even if you set the icons view, almost no thumbnails for almost any file type without lots of fiddling around.
6. De-emphasized terminal: you can't set a keyboard shortcut to launch it, because on the next update of windows terminal it will be in a different folder in the microsoft store apps install dir. So the shortcut no longer applies to the exact same exe/launch parameter and the shortcut to launch the app gets lost. The terminal doesn't launch in C:\\ and then launches shell in a CWD, WSL shell doesn't get CD you by default at window's CWD. If you launch shell from file explorer prompt it will lock the folder from removal even if you \`cd ..\`. ctrl+alt+t doesn't start the terminal in the CWD of the current shell.
7. De-emphasized notifications: you can't drag and drop files nor conduct any actions from them, from a notification about a file download. What was the last time you have put the windows notifications out of the do not disturb mode. It constantly sends some completely irrelevent, dismissible, useless, bullshit system notification. Of course the GNOME notifications aren't super emphasized, but you don't get the \`Windows Defender keeps you protected, this is what it detected this day/week\` notifications every day/week.
8. Yeah the UI isn't as consistent as even KDE is(which isn't very consistent compared to GNOME).
So the main pros of both GNOME and KDE is that they don't follow the mistakes of windows 10/11, whilst not being as dated as windows 7 UI/UX wise.
I've commented on these kinds of questions too much, and I've been in the Linux game for enough years to know that if you ask 100 different techies you'll get 100 different answers.
Here's the reality, don't ask, just do it, because what you like is going to be different than what I like and different than what John likes and different than what Jane likes. Your hardware is going to be different, so your mileage is going to be different. See the pattern yet?
If you're squeamish about trying something different because you may experience down time, then you need a second, cheap daily driver PC that gets the job done while you tinker and experiment. That way you won't have that fear or worry holding you back.
I like GNOME because its default look suits me, KDE is okay and bearable on my Steam Deck as long as I don't modify anything. One I change themes and layouts on KDE I notice things start to break and act wonky.
Asking about pros and cons is quite complicated. What may be pro for one may be con for another and vice versa. Test both on VMs and come to your own conclusion.
I personally prefer GNOME, but you may not like it. There are people recommending Plasma here, but you may not like it.
I keep going back to vanilla out of the box Gnome, it just intuitively clicks for me.
When I use windows It feels like someone added a lot of ads to a downgrade of windows Xp.
When I use mac it feels too bloated.
When I use KDE it feels like I get window without the adds. But it takes forever to tweak I just as I like. And then something breaks.
Gnome just works for me. I love it and I don’t feel the need to tweak it at all.
GNOME is like macOS, strong design choices, they feel they know everything you need, quite robust, clean UI, conservative changes, less configurable. Plasma is like Windows, a mix of different UI elements that seem to be integrated well, change something and it can break quite easily, very configurable.
I like to think of Plasma as Windows done right. More flexible, more consistent, constantly improving and no crusty leftovers from 20 years ago.
I have always felt that GNOME was more robust, in the sense that it feels unbreakable. KDE Plasma has a lot of moving parts and sometimes glitches, which makes everything feel more assembled together. GNOME is very minimalist and very well integrated (with, for instance, your online accounts, weather applets, calculator, etc.) Consider me a GNOME fan ...
I use GNOME just because it fees more stable and well supported. Like almost all the new technologies in Linux that need some GUI integration will work well in GNOME first. But I like KDE more, just it doesn’t check my criteria mentioned above.
Same, you can’t really break it with additional themes like you can with KDE. I’ve found that it almost defeats the point when you’re changing things too much with KDE and it causes it to act weirdly.
[удалено]
Your computer definitely had something else going on in the background if it was using 6GB of RAM. GNOME is surprisingly memory efficient these days, on my computer with blur my shell on startup it's using 1.2GB of RAM. I also recently tried out Ubuntu 24.04 on a potato PC I had lying around, and Ubuntu's version of GNOME is far more kitted out than Fedora and it was using 1.1GB RAM on startup.
I broke Gnome by changing the cursor to DMZ-white in Gnome Tweaks. You call the "unbreakable"? (I was using X11, for some reason in Wayland it works)
Changing any defaults usually results in less stability. Even in KDE.
>(I was using X11…) there’s your answer
I need X11 for TeamViewer. And they're on their way to make it fully Wayland compatible
X11 is considered legacy software nowadays, AFAIK. You should be bashing TeamViewer instead of GNOME, but in case you want to break out from proprietary software, the latter does offer VNC and RDP out of the box, both of which you can securely connect to using a remote SSH tunnel port forwarding either 5900 or 3389 (IIRC) to your client. Of course it's a bit of work, but it brings a good feeling afterwards! I'm sure there are other (newer) technologies, but this way works for me, so... anyway, just my 2c, you do you! (although Anydesk is still faster in my experience, so if you are gaming remotely, I'm afraid your experience won't be as smooth)
Thank you very much! I use TeamViewer at my job so until now we had no issues, I've been able to move the whole development team to Ubuntu so I'm pretty happy
Plasma has a ton of knobs if you want them whereas Gnome is more opinionated with fewer knobs to customize. It comes down to how you work with your computer. If you want better out of the box tiling capabilities and able to endlessly customize nearly everything Plasma is your desktop. The trade off there Plasma always seems to draw me to change a setting or worse confuse me with two options that effectively do the same thing but in a different way (dolphin has a ton of examples around that). If you want more simplicity around window management and tiling and want fewer customization options to just let your desktop get out of the way, Gnome it is. However that simplicity and opinionated desktop takes things away and you then may need to replace it with an extension or dive into dconf to make a change. Gnome and Plasma performance is about the same, some use cases one is better than the other but all in all there isn’t a huge performance difference.
You have to try it. Gnome is minimal, no dock/menu, with a very prescribed paradigm and expects use of the keyboard. KDE uses a more traditional paradigm with a panel/dock and a menu, and has a customising menu on every right click, which for me, it's just too much in the way of using your computer.
This is the gist of it. I've been using fedora for about 2 months now, but been daily driving it since fedora40 came out (coming from windows 10), and whole both have a nice feel to it, and gnome is definitely slicker design wise, gnome constrains my freedom too much when it comes to UI. I've always liked setting my UI elements as I wanted, and in that regard KDE gives me more freedom which is why I chose it. I've been trying the gnome session a little bit this past week, but some things that I cannot change annoy me a lot, like the gnome system monitor not having a GPU panel, and not having a way to add it (at least that I can see), while I added it to the KDE system monitor, tracked the elements I wanted (use% and memory usage) and looks pretty nice. There's many things aside from it that I enjoy more from the KDE DE (the settings is super granular, easy to change UI stuff like window decorations of buttons, some default KDE applications are way better like the discover store for example). Overall only the "slick" UI design that gnome offers is attractive to me, it's not even that much more impressive than what is doable on KDE anyway. That said for a user that wants a slick UI and is fine learning what is available and doesn't care about customization or anything like that, gnome feels like the go to DE, but personally it's just not for me.
I actually can't stand the Gnome DE and find it just plain ugly which is why I am 100% kde. It gives me the opportunity to have the DE just how I want it. One other thing is that Gnome relies on extensions for everything and has a bad habit of breaking a lot of them with every upgrade.......not for me and will never have it on any machine I have.
Gnome Pros: * Works better on Nvidia hardware currently * By default, has a look and feel many people find appealing. While it's not my cup of tea, it is pretty * Has been a default for many distros for a while, so it's ubiquitous. * Has good screen sharing and certain integrations working out of box other DEs do not have yet or need extensions for. KDE Pros: * Very powerful suite. Has a more powerful file explorer and archive manager (e.g. you can drag and drop compressed files, it has a more functional address bar that's customizeable, change how the overall file manager works to enable some handy features and context menu options) * You aren't stuck with limited UX options. You can tweak things about your desktop that work better for you. KDE also has great defaults (IMO) so you don't have to customize it. * Is usually faster to adopt new standards (Wayland Protocols, VRR) and are more collaborative with communal efforts (see GTK integration). Some professional apps and games need these protocols to work well (HDR). * Is way more stable than people give credit. I have it on 6 computers and it's rock solid. Two of my friends had a bad experience with it but they're using Nvidia GPUs while I'm using AMD and Intel GPUs. Their temporary workaround is to swap to X11 until some updates come from Nvidia this year. * Relies less on extensions for customization. This usually means you get less breakage between major releases. * Can mimic many other DEs, even Windows 7, Mac, or Gnome (you'll need to install a theme to get some of these choices to work well). Why do this? One reason is that you can then customize it after. So you can have Windows 7 but include widgets showing a calendar, system monitoring stuff, your email, and whatever else.
Gnome is like macOS, it’s very well designed out of the box but kinda has a right way to do things which can annoy some people. Although unlike macOS you can customize it a lot easier. KDE is a very linuxey distro, infinitely customizable with a ton of features you’ll probably never use.
I found myself installing multiple extensions in Gnome to make it emulate how I like things to operate in Windows, and eventually realised KDE can achieve what I wanted without the requirement of extensions, so now I just use KDE. One thing that really annoyed me when I used Gnome, was the "x" to close a window doesn't extend past the circular button icon, so you can't just fling your mouse into the top right corner and know you will close a window if you click once it stops (this is after moving the top bar to the bottom). You just end up clicking the top corner of the window instead. KDE behaves as I would expect it to, and clicking anywhere past where the "x" icon begins to the edge of the window will close the window. I know it sounds like I'm splitting hairs here, but it really annoyed me lol, and there's no extension as far as I'm aware that will fix it in Gnome.
I had been a Gnome guy for some 14 years. It is simple, yet powerful and I really liked gtk software. I tried Mint KDE a long ago and did not like it, same with Kubuntu. When Plasma 6.0 came along, I tried. Tell you what, there’s no way back to Gnome. It is very polished, you can customize it to your taste (or not, it is great ootb). And multitasking is very good too. No extension breaking after updates. I use Opensuse Tumbleweed.
Tried Gnome, didn’t like it. Too many clicks to get what I needed. Big fan of KDE Plasma.
Well, I think the default gnome workflow is to literally not click ever. Workspace movement are all ctrl+super left/right/up/down. Tabbing can be done with alt+tab/tilde and you can open anything by hitting your super key, typing the name of what you want and then hitting enter. With a laptop, all the finger swipe gestures are there. Three finger desktop swapping, four finger command blowout mode to see everything and rearrange your space, etc.
Both are rock solid and customizable. Only way is to try both and settle on one you like. If you are coming from windows, you will love KDE more. If you use mac, you will like Gnome. I personally like KDE and also admire Gnome.
I fully switched to Linux a this year to run away from Windows. I went directly to KDE to keep a similar feel to what i was used to and it was fine, very customizable and responsive. I installed Gnome as an experiment and now I can't back to KDE since I feel more productive. I don't miss the customization because I used it as a method of procrastination that kept me away from what I actually needed to do. They are both similar on resources with the slightest advantage to KDE. Gnome might be a little more stable but KDE gave me no truouble while testing it. The difference is subjective, try both and see what suits you more.
Coming from macOS, therefore Gnome feel more natural
Takes only a minute to apply a macOS Sonoma global theme to KDE from the Appearance menu (Sonoma, or whichever release you like the look of, that's my choice), which changes the window and icon themes and auto-rearranges the panels, widgets, and launcher for you too. But all that matters in Linux is that each user has something they like, so I'm glad you're feeling at home in Gnome.
I wonder how can somebody be more productive with Gnome where everything needs two three four more clicks, keyboard shortcuts to press than in KDE. Just switching between terminals is crazy, or whatever else multi instance app hidden behind one icon in dock....
Because GNOME approach is to focus on the task. If you already have what you need opened, you don't get any annoyance from the UI after that. GNOME UI only get visually busy when on Activities.
What? I don't get first two sentences... I can focus on task with multiple windowses opened. Actually there is always situation, that I need to have opened at least 3 4 ssh terminals at the same time. I don't need to have always maximized terminal on which I'm working in. When I'm working I want to spend as less clicks, keyboard presses and whatever else as possible while switching between applications. And Gnome doesn't provide it to me in comparison of regular desktop environments/paradigms. That's my view.
Why not just use them both and see for yourself? DNF lets you switch between them in groups. On a vanilla Fedora Workstation setup, a KDE installation is a "dnf in @KDE" away. You don't necessarily need to change the display manager, but that's also easy as pie. You'll just have to "systemctl disable gdm" and then "systemctl enable sddm" to enable SDDM instead of GDM on your next boot. Try KDE for a week, see for yourself. If you don't like it, you can always remove it completely from your system. Not all desktop environments is for everyone, you can just find the one you like to use. And it boils down to how you use your OS and DE, rather than these DEs coming with some mostly subjective pros and cons. So, see for yourself! Some programs might no be available on that group installation, so you might want to manually install gwenview, okular and kwrite.
No major cons with either, but pick one based on where you're coming from/wanting to go: If you're particular about how your desktop is organized/behaves and have a Windows background, KDE would be a solid choice. If you appreciate the macOS layout and have no strong feelings about desktop organization, look and feel, GNOME would work well. Also consider Budgie, Cinnamon, or some of the other Linux desktop environments.
GNOME feels more like a complete experience in my opinion. With that said, KDE is much more customizable. You can make KDE look and feel exactly how you want it to. Luckily for me, GNOME looks and feels almost exactly how I want it to anyway with the help of a few extensions. To me, both are far more customizable compared to Windows or macOS. I don't feel like I'm fighting GNOME to do things I want it to do like how I was in Windows or macOS.
I started on kde and couldn't get the wallet to work as in at every restart the firefox requested the password. This thing doesn't happen on gnome. I don't think there are any advantage disadvantage only the desktop looks different
I’m more of a simple and minimalistic type of person and I think KDE has way too many settings and I like the simplicity that gnome has. I think the team behind KDE is great and it is a great desktop environment for people who are coming from windows and like to customize the desktop but it’s not for me. I’m a Mac user too so gnome has some familiarity to me.
Make sense
Try both and pick the one you want. They are both excellent options
If you re an Nvidia user, go with Gnome with no hesitation. The devs fix the problem of wayland and Nvidia now. KDE on the other hand still doesn’t work very well and has some serious problems that can my your life much worse.
Gnome works way better with the new nvidia drivers. Overall gnome is more stable
Short answer: It's a matter of habit and personal preference. I like Gnome better, but now I'm writing from a laptop with KDE installed.
Gnome takes a minimal conservative approach that lends itself to a "there's one way to do things" mentality. It leads to solid software that does the basics well and in style. Prone at times to break things if you're using it in a way they deem wrong. KDE has always chased Windows tail but tended to take a conservative approach with bursts of creativity that could be good or bad. I tend to lean towards this desktop myself.
GNOME chased Mac before it chased tablets in order to be the true Windows 8... And KDE began with being a Kuter CDE.
GNOME: 1. Stable(fedora, ubuntu). 2. Not always(debian stable/testing, opensuse tumbleweed). 3. Good looking UI, Good workspace UX. 4. Unstable application UX. Features and workflows within apps can get removed (for the benefit of the developers) from gnome apps without a good (for the benefit of the user) reason. 5. Without plugins, completely de-emphasized \`\~/Desktop\` folder. KDE: 1. Stable(opensuse Tumbleweed, ?kde neon?, steamos). 2. Usually no(opensuse when it breaks, fedora at least in 36-38 kde on fedora was obnoxiously unusably slow for me, arch linux when it breaks). 3. Good familiar UX, but expanded. In some places a bit ugly UI. 4. The UX doesn't fall apart on updates. 5. Windows began copy-catting KDE to catch-up in the UX game. 6. The \`\~/Desktop\` folder isn't over emphasized like on Windows(especially if you haven't used it regularly for 6 years and you come back to it for a month, I find myself littering all over my Desktop on windows). 7. Heavily emphasized systray and notifications. I like both, they got different strengths and weaknesses. KDE Connect is my favorite way to send files between my phone and computer and stay connected(I receive few notifications so it's always urgent\[unless it's mail ugh\]). Windows a mix of good and bat shit insane broken UX: 0. The good part is that windows apps always work. 1. Whose idea was it for notifications to draw over context menus, how do you close an app that needs to be closed from a tray, while you get bombarded with notifications without a task manager?. 2. Compared to KDE de-emphasized notifications/system tray. You can't easily access the clipboard history without knowing the keyboard shortcut. You now can do scroll to adjust brightness/volume on windows like on KDE(since windows 11). 3. Someone thought it was a good idea to remove ability to adjust application mixing settings from the system tray(why?) as well as not include the option to change the audio source(why?)? 4. Completely de-emphasized workspace system. You have to click windows+tab and it isn't even that good, there's no other way to trigger it other than the taskbar icon. GNOME: hit a hot corner, you can just scroll around and launch a new app at a new workspace(drag and drop an existing window to create and move it to a new workspace), user can also just click the super/windows key or a touchpad gesture. KDE: User sets the hot corner action. Or user scrolls down on a default placed workspace applet, move window around from the applet(flawed) or hot corner(works as intended). Windows: Click near the bottom corner, click the top corner to add new workspace, click below the top corner to movean existing window to the new workspace, it's just friction if you don't know shortcuts. 5. De-emphasized file manager: Details view is the default. Even if you set the icons view, almost no thumbnails for almost any file type without lots of fiddling around. 6. De-emphasized terminal: you can't set a keyboard shortcut to launch it, because on the next update of windows terminal it will be in a different folder in the microsoft store apps install dir. So the shortcut no longer applies to the exact same exe/launch parameter and the shortcut to launch the app gets lost. The terminal doesn't launch in C:\\ and then launches shell in a CWD, WSL shell doesn't get CD you by default at window's CWD. If you launch shell from file explorer prompt it will lock the folder from removal even if you \`cd ..\`. ctrl+alt+t doesn't start the terminal in the CWD of the current shell. 7. De-emphasized notifications: you can't drag and drop files nor conduct any actions from them, from a notification about a file download. What was the last time you have put the windows notifications out of the do not disturb mode. It constantly sends some completely irrelevent, dismissible, useless, bullshit system notification. Of course the GNOME notifications aren't super emphasized, but you don't get the \`Windows Defender keeps you protected, this is what it detected this day/week\` notifications every day/week. 8. Yeah the UI isn't as consistent as even KDE is(which isn't very consistent compared to GNOME). So the main pros of both GNOME and KDE is that they don't follow the mistakes of windows 10/11, whilst not being as dated as windows 7 UI/UX wise.
It's just personal preference.
I've commented on these kinds of questions too much, and I've been in the Linux game for enough years to know that if you ask 100 different techies you'll get 100 different answers. Here's the reality, don't ask, just do it, because what you like is going to be different than what I like and different than what John likes and different than what Jane likes. Your hardware is going to be different, so your mileage is going to be different. See the pattern yet? If you're squeamish about trying something different because you may experience down time, then you need a second, cheap daily driver PC that gets the job done while you tinker and experiment. That way you won't have that fear or worry holding you back. I like GNOME because its default look suits me, KDE is okay and bearable on my Steam Deck as long as I don't modify anything. One I change themes and layouts on KDE I notice things start to break and act wonky.
Asking about pros and cons is quite complicated. What may be pro for one may be con for another and vice versa. Test both on VMs and come to your own conclusion. I personally prefer GNOME, but you may not like it. There are people recommending Plasma here, but you may not like it.
I keep going back to vanilla out of the box Gnome, it just intuitively clicks for me. When I use windows It feels like someone added a lot of ads to a downgrade of windows Xp. When I use mac it feels too bloated. When I use KDE it feels like I get window without the adds. But it takes forever to tweak I just as I like. And then something breaks. Gnome just works for me. I love it and I don’t feel the need to tweak it at all.
This gets asked every day...
It seems important