Linux

My favorite is a really minimal Gnome on Debian:

• Launch Debian Expert Installer
• Deselect all software packs except "Standard Sytem Utilities"
• Install and reboot
• Install cups, flatpak, fonts-recommended, gdm3 (this pulls in the barest minimum of Gnome), gnome-console, nautilus, network-manager-gnome
• Uninstall gnome-browser-connector, gnome-shell-extension-prefs, im-config, yelp (which were pulled in as recommendations)
• Remove configured network interface from /etc/network/interfaces and reboot

This gives me a Gnome shell with no visible GUI apps in the menu, except for the settings, terminal, file manager and network manager.
Now I fill up my hard drive with FlatPaks ;)

I prefer Gnome cause it has fewer options, the overview works really well on a notebook with touchpad, and I like that it is more unique.

KDE.

I won't use gnome (I've mentioned elsewhere), and unsurprisingly I just dont like it either. The design choices are restrictive, the environment is oversimplified - its just not for me.

Ive used lots of DEs over the years, even fvwm95 (the original, its neat that some folks have updated it though), and at this point if its a desktop its getting KDE.

KDE no doubt. GNOME is a minimalist that depends on extensions to provide basic functionality, while also being a giant fatass. KDE works from the install, provides a sensible workflow, and has better tools.

But I'd only use KDE on a rolling release or a 6 month release schedule distro. Their approach to development really doesn't suit stable ones.

I'm pretty biased since I have been using KDE for a few years and only switched to Gnome this week to properly try it out so maybe I'll change my mind but I doubt I will.

IMO KDE has better theming and is more uniform across a wider variety of apps. It has support for community themes out of the box and it feels like the components are modular so you can have a different colour title bar compared to the app window etc

• Dolphin > Nautilus
• Kate > Gedit
• Konsole > Terminal

These are the 3 main default apps I use on both DEs. Dolphin has way more customisability and looks better but Nautilus has a fantastic multi-file rename with the option for find and replace built in.

For me, Kate is like the vlc of documents. It will open anything and everything whereas I've had a couple of "could not open" errors from gedit this week. I also prefer Kate to Vscode.

Konsole by default switches tabs with ctrl tab but Terminal doesn't and thats basically my only issue with it.

Gnome seems to still require you to install a browser extension to use Shell Extensions.

KDE widgets are fantastic, I love having system monitors in a hidden panel at the top of my screen so I can really easily check system resource usage. I haven't found anything similar on Gnome yet.

KDE Connect is such a brilliant app, it wouldn't launch for me on Gnome but there is GSConnect for Gnome but its a 3rd party app

By default on KDE, if you shake your mouse the cursor gets bigger and there doesn't seem to be a size limit which is so fun to do lol

Going from Plasma 5 to 6 was a nightmare for me but its probably because I was using EndeavourOS so the updates were sooner and more frequent.

Overall I think Gnome looks and feels a bit outdated and clunky and KDE looks and feels more modern with better integration across apps but that might just be QT vs GTK

I do plan on continuing to use Gnome for at least another 2 months to give it a fair try but I will almost always recommended KDE because I prefer the look and feel

KDE - Its got people behind it who actually give a flying fuck about their end users.

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.

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.

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.

Love gnome with dash to panel. Zero complaints.

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

Plasma all the way bby

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.

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!

kde without a doubt. I tried so many times to get into gnome,even using fedora and always failed after a couple of days and went back to plasma.

I just accepted it in the end and stopped even caring that gnome exists. Competition is good though and I do hope gnome keeps going.

Initially, I was drawn to KDE Plasma for familiarity. Therefore, when installing Linux for the first time, I chose a distro with KDE Plasma. Which happened to be Fedora Kinoite 35, a very new distro at the time. It was clearly buggy and after fiddling with it for some time, I just had to rebase to Silverblue (and GNOME) for the lack of alternatives.

Thankfully, I actually happened to really like GNOME. This was on a laptop and GNOME's touchpad gestures just felt very satisfying and intuitive; much better than anything else I had experienced before. Its (intended) workflow also made a lot of sense that way.

GNOME has really grown on me ever since. And while I've revisited KDE Plasma to see what I was supposedly missing out on, I simply stuck to GNOME as it felt cleaner and more elegant.

i still prefer plasma over gnome, but my sorta controversial opinion on the matter is that gnome 3 was way better than gnome 2. gnome 2 was boring, ugly, using it felt like a chore and frankly not much simpler than kde at the time. gnome 3 tried to create something new and unique and i have huge respect of them for that. it was also much, much more pleasant to use than its predecessor. but it still isn't better than plasma. the only time in my opinion that gnome was a preferable option to kde was during the early kde 4 dark ages, which was a necessary transition, but it was terrible regardless

tl;dr gnome >=3 still isn't better than plasma, but it was a step in the right direction bc gnome 2 was way worse

I think gnome used to be fantastic but sadly lost their edge over time. I love plasma but it is still a bit too unstable for my liking.

Personally use Hyprland nowadays and I think I’ll never go back to using a DE anyways

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

The first desktop that I used on Linux was GNOME, probably either 2.0 or 2.2. It was a bit clunky, but it was fine. I distro hopped for a while and discovered Mandrake 9 and thought the desktop was great. This was when I discovered desktop environments. I hopped over to Fedora Core when it was first released and was unhappy with the desktop again.

So I started desktop hopping on Fedora. I tried XFCE, Fluxbox, Openbox, and several others. They were cool, and the KDE experience on Fedora Core 1 was not great. At some point I switched to Gentoo and used the KDE experience there. When Ubuntu came around, I found that while the install experience was good, the desktop was kinda clunky. I ended up sticking with Gentoo. When Kubuntu 5.04 came out, though, I switched over. And I've been using some combination of Kubuntu and KDE Neon ever since.

If GNOME had been my only option, I probably would have gone back to Windows. Initially because I found it clunky (and tbh kinda ugly), but more recently because every time I've used GNOME in the last decade or so, it feels like it's lost features I used heavily. Meanwhile KDE has taken a different approach to configurability of trying to cut down configuration options by figuring out what a better option that everyone can agree on looks like. It's still very configurable, but it has nowhere near as many knobs as it had in the KDE 3.5 days. You know what, though? I cannot think of a single lost configuration option in Plasma that I miss.

So I am strongly in the KDE Korner between these two, and much more weakly favour KDE Plasma vs. other desktops.

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.

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.

What desktop do you favour and why? Explain your thoughts.

Xfce & Cinnamon.

If I had to pick between KDE or Gnome, I would go KDE without any hesitation as I quite like it whereas I'm not really a fan of Gnome. Gnome UI is OK I guess, it's just the way they want to decide for everything I am not a fan of (After 35+ years using Apple, I did not switch to let anyone else decide for me ;). If I don't use KDE it's mostly because it requires too much work to "tone it down" and make it behave like I want my DE to. Out of the box, there is too much features I have to turn off and configure, features that are also spread between too many (and not all of them... obvious) menus/settings. What's great with KDE is that it's at all possible to configure all that, it's amazing. It's just too much for me. Be it XFCE (on Debian on my desktop) or Cinnamon (on Mint on the laptop) I barely need to change anything to have them do what I wish.

So, to summarize I would say it's my untamed laziness that dictates my choice of a DE :p

It's also the reason why I do not use one of those tiling WM I know exist and I know, as a user spending my time with my fingers on the keyboard, I would love to use in place of the standard floating windows. Alas, having them correctly configured and running, and then having to relearn decades old habits, would require a time and an energy I have no desire to spend. So, I don't. Still, I understand why some people like them so much ;)

edit: clarifications

I see Gnome typically using 1.6gb of ram (8-4gb ram vm/real system)
Kde without any effects about the same with effects on about 2gb

I prefer Gnome on laptops. It had the best setup for laptops.

I prefer Plasma on desktop. It has better support for modern gaming features.

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.

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.