I've been using Fedora for a couple of months now, and have been loving it. Very soon after I jumped into this community (among other Linux communities) and started laughing at all the people saying "KDE rules, GNOME drools," and "GNOME is better, KDE is for babies." But then I thought, "Why not give KDE a try? The worst that happens is I go back to using GNOME."
Now I get it. The level of customization is incredible, it's way faster than GNOME, and looks beautiful too. At this point, I'm not going back.
I'll happily contribute to the playground fight over desktop environments. KDE rules, GNOME drools.
I essentially did the same. Used GNOME for almost 10 years, then got my first try of KDE last year and don't plan on going back either. GNOME has some really good points, I wouldn't have used it so long if it didn't, but I can actually use an honest to goodness theme on my desktop and customize without having extensions break on every update. Also, the UI in GTK is just too big and chunky for me, it's like every window is designed for tablets or something. I don't need a title bar that's practically an entire inch tall. If you like GNOME, awesome, I will likely never say GNOME is bad, but I'm a KDE guy now.
EDIT: apparently I need to specify that the "entire inch tall" comment is exaggeration, because internet. My point being that GNOME's UI is too big for my tastes.
I appreciate KDE for being a comprehensive toolbox that will let just about anyone craft the mouse-driven GUI of their dreams given enough time and effort. I appreciate GNOME for its bold and unified vision, which isn't afraid to cull features or embrace innovation.
In what sense do you mean "faster" though? If you mean more performant, I haven't experienced that -- both desktops are extremely responsive.
Gnome and KDE are both great for different reasons. One of the things that's great about Linux as a whole is it gives people the ability to choose the stack they like most
Yes! I wholeheartedly agree with you. There are pieces of GNOME I wish I could bring into KDE, and vice versa.
I don't like GNOME for it's poor theming support and it's toxic dev community (ahem, talking about senior devs, especially Ebassi's hostility towards newbies), but I think that it has some well-designed defaults. I love the workflow - everything is fast and snappy, shortcuts are pretty nice, aligning window is quick, and if there's a lack of space, I can just drop the app in another workspace. Yes, I am using GNOME 45 at the movement, and I think it's quite nice. But I also love the roadmap of GNUStep, and maybe if I can in the future, I would love to assist Gregory Casamento.
i started using kde once personal computers became beefy enough to handle it well around 2002 but switched to gnome because gnome felt more polished at the time and i recently switched back and, you're right, the customize-ability is impressive after using gnome for the last 15-ish years.
it's also daunting/frustrating at times too.
I love both. I can't decide on which to make my full daily. GNOME sleek. KDE is nostalgic and customizable. I have Fedora with GNOME and OpenSuse with KDE. OpenSuse has issues with some SD cards and some phone's flash memory. GNOME can't have desktop shortcuts, which I find annoying. I may just go back to Debian with KDE and GNOME and switch back and forth. I think that still possible. I haven't tried that in a while.
Sleek is a great way to describe GNOME. It's really pretty and slick, and I was sure happy with how it worked. Plus, with all my google accounts hooked into GNOME, Evolution just pulled all that info and gave me real easy access to my mail. I wish KMail did the same thing.
