Clickbaity title on the original article, but I think this is the most important point to consider from it:
After getting to 1% in approximately 2011, it took about a decade to double that to 2%. The jump from 2% to 3% took just over two years, and 3% to 4% took less than a year.
Get the picture? The Linux desktop is growing, and it’s growing fast.
I tested Gnome and KDE Plasma5 in the last year. KDE Plasma is in my opinion the first DE which is comparable with Win/MacOS. It looks modern, is pretty much feature complete and as an average user its nice to have useful apps preinstalled (calculator, libreoffice, firefox and so on), but no bloatware.
Its just a bit more customizable than windows, which is perfect and also not fiddly and a pain. It certainly has a handful of quirks, like Windows does, but you get used to them.
If I have to set up elderly relatives with a computer, I’d strongly consider a KDE Plasma Desktop
I think generally macos users would feel more at home in gnome where as windows users more in kde.
The preinstalled apps are not a feature of KDE (or Gnome, XFCE, etc.). Actually they all are structured in a very modular way where you can use or omit individual components. Firefox and LibreOffice are completely independent of it even; they merely add compatibility layers to make the integration more seamless.
What you experienced was something to attribute to the distribution you chose. They are the ones to decide which components to bundle and preinstall. That is also the reason why so many distributions exist in the first place, because different teams/devs have different visions about what the desktop should look and feel like after install.
I never got gnome, it’s like macOS, but I never enjoyed using it even after being a Mac user.
Plasma and cinnamon are my top desktop recommendations.
Well as someone who’s been using gnome since about 3.10 I might be able to explain my view:
Before that I’ve used plasma and Unity and a whole lot of Mate but then I started using Gnome for a pretty and smooth experience right out of the Box.
Now I’ve simply been using it for so long that it’s muscle memory all the way.
I don’t agree with everything the gnome devs decide and I definitely am annoyed that I have to use extension for small things that should just be a toogle in the settings but I’ve realized some time ago that if I did switch to plasma I would use all the customizability to make it work like Gnome … so I stay on Gnome.
Imo everything you just said about KDE is even more true of Gnome
Gnome really tends to drag their feet when it comes to new features/wayland protocols to implement. I’m pretty sure they didn’t even have adaptive sync for the longest time, when even smaller wlroots projects already supported it. I don’t hate gnome though, i actually kinda dig their design, but unfortunately i can’t stand using floating window managers anymore, i only use tiling.
Yeah, I’ve heard this before. I don’t believe though, that I’ve yet been a user of those still-unsupported features though, so I haven’t noticed anything affecting me yet.
Fair enough. If it does everything you need then it’s good lol
What’s great is neither of you are wrong from your own perspectives - and both of you are free to share your message and preferences.
Apparently not without ire, unfortunately. Somehow got downvoted for what I wrote…
People HATE Gnome and I don’t get it. I’ve heard the arguments but in all practicality I have tried KDE too and then minutes into trying the complicated customization features I just wanna go back to gnome. Give me a somewhat new version of gnome and 30 minutes and I’ll have it configured how I want and it looks and runs nice. I recently spent 30 minutes trying to understand customization of the bottom bar in KDE and gave up