Now, I have always loved GNOME, but I spent the last few months in KDE. That was until I switched back to GNOME a couple of weeks ago. I know it's disliked by a lot of people, but some of these changes, like accent colors and the libadwita file save/open interface, really solidify this desktop my favorite.
gnome is a fantastic babbys first non-windows DE, always recommend it as an entry point. kde while more feature rich can be overwhelming for Linux beginners I think
I'm not a Linux beginner but I like gnome because it's polished and the opinionated defaults work ok for me. I don't really want to spend much time thinking about my DE. I understand why people like KDE or tiling WMs, I just don't want to dedicate much time tweaking settings. Although I'm mainly a laptop user and just use the WM to open a web browser, so simple gesture navigation and workspaces is enough.
it's definitely a really nice out of the box experience for any level of user. I installed it for my gf having not used it in years and it's really very slick now. I like i3 on a laptop personally but I could happily use gnome on a desktop these days
KDE seems more Windows like tho. GNOME seems closer to MacOS.
I would say that's accurate but gnome is so approachable it would still be best for a windows user who doesn't care for fucking around with a bunch of settings imo. but kde is a fine rec for someone who's set on a windows -like experience for sure, it's also pretty much good to go out of the box. multi monitor can be finicky though
I haven't used KDE (outside VMs) since like 2010, but have followed development somewhat. Just seems like it's easy to configure to have a Windows taskbar like experience.
I really like GNOME, and it is nice and simple, but I think new users might find the workflow different enough from what they're used to that it's not intuitive. I've been using GNOME for like a decade though.
I think both are probably easy enough to use with default settings, GNOME is just more of a departure from the conventions of proprietary OS shells.
On first glance, sure. In terms of actual workflow, I'd say KDE is more similar to both MacOS and Windows and GNOME is off doing it's own thing. The KDE = Windows and GNOME = MacOS thing feels like a holdover from the KDE3/GNOME2 days.
GNOME2 definitely felt more Windows-like than after GNOME 3.
GNOME is definitely its own thing in terms of workflow, but noobs will always seek an understood point of reference, and the closest thing to it is probably MacOS.