A picture of Lara Croft in new Tomb Raider hand in hand with Lara Croft from the old Tomb raider Series.
The new one labeled GNOME and the old one KDE.
Imo they are both solid technologically, but KDE delivers much more with it's defaults. Obviously you can theme both to hell and back and make them look however you want and get whatever functionality you want, but default KDE is so much more usable than default gnome it's not even a competition.
That would be way more accurate with KDE on the left and XFCE on the right. GNOME is completely different (and also, hands down, very ugly) out of the box.
I used Gnome for years and can honestly say that if you put a lot of effort into it, mess with configs, and install a few extras, it rises to a new level of kind of shitty but usable.
Fuck, KDE was pretty a decade ago, and Gnome is still just plugging away, being the bare minimum.
I honestly don’t really see it, I think vanilla GNOME looks amazing, while KDE Plasma just screams Windows 7 to me.
Having said it that, both are great DE’s with vastly different approaches. So these can definitely just co exist, while we can both agree that both DE’s are great for different people and workflows.
Used i3 for years, tried bspwm. Liked the concept - absolutely loathed the community. Ended on herbstluftwm.
If Wayland ever fixes hdpi scaling, I'll be looking for something that works the same way: configuration is entirely through scripting, not config files. I don't think I'll ever give that up, now that I've discovered it.
KDE feels like Windows to me. GNOME is something entirely different, it's UI is very touch friendly, only downside is it has old code all over the place.
Out of the box, maybe, but kde is super customizable to be how you want it. I think gnome can do that too, but it feels much more opinionated and all I ready about is install scripts that break. (I haven’t tried gnome in years though)
I feel like this is used either by someone who hasn't used KDE in a decade or has been using Linux (Ubuntu) for less than a year.
The worst thing you can say about KDE is that the default configuration is pretty basic. However, that's arguably a good thing because that format is straight up better for productivity.
KDE has also embraced user choice. Not only do they design the desktop and applications to be much more configurable than GNOME. A power user can customize KDE in a way that seems to personally offend GNOME developers. In addition, KDE 5 designed their libraries in a way that other DEs can leverage them while still doing their own thing. I haven't kept up, but at one point that was a huge boon to LxQT development.
Above all else, the KDE team seems a lot more reasonable than the GNOME team. Over the past decade, KDE has worked hard to rebuild trust after their disastrous 4.0 rollout. Meanwhile in that same period four different groups of developers have decided to go their own way because they felt the GNOME team was impossible to work with.
XCFE feels like it came from that XP/Vista period where UIs were moving away from looking like they were drawn in a terminal but hadn't quite reached "fluidity" or whatever other bs marketers call modern UIs... I could understand a tiling dm being called better than both but given XCFE is only better at being lightweight, that's a self-placed restriction because it's very reasonable to say most people can run either KDE or Gnome with virtually undetectable overhead
Xfce is highly customizable (definitely more than gnome) and can look modern with a little theming. Its also much easier to replace components of the de (like the xfce wm or app launcher for example)
Gnome reminds me of MacOS(derogatory). I mean at least Gnome lets me change shit if I fidget and fennagle enough, but it is still far too locked down for me. Extensions are a half-measure that also doesn't do enough.
KDE is good but it's a bit pudgy, I'm a XFCE user.