I’ve been running KDE now, almost exclusively, for almost 15 years. KDE works (by default) in a way similar to the way Windows XP worked in the late 90’s - late 2000’s. It felt familiar enough that I didn’t have to try and figure out most things that I wanted to do. The few things that didn’t work the way I wanted ( or felt they should) were easy enough to change. XFCE was similar (had a Windows 95-98 feel) but was not as configurable.

Gnome 2, I rather liked as it had a feel similar to Mac OS 8 from way back when I was in school, however I just never got along with Gnome 3. Everything felt… off. I can use it, Just don’t care for it. Same for most other DEs.

KDE just works. The few things I want to change I can. GNOME by default is further away from what I want and you have to get extensions that break with updates to change anything.

Gnome. Sublime flow, very polished. Simply works.

KDE can be OK but it is very overloaded on customization, not nearly as polished, and honestly I dislike that style it upholds. IMHO.

Gnome employs Jeremy Bicha as a person convicted of sexual battery of a minor and as far as we know never notified other employees especially at conventions or other employee gatherings.

I’ll stick with KDE

The opinions of Gnome are not a match for mine.

KDE let’s me get really specific on the things I want to, and its well supported.

Just that simple for me!

The way I use a computer changes frequently, having an overly opinionated desktop environment makes it feel like it’s not my computer. I like my computer to work for me at my current time and I don’t mind the inconvenience of modifying settings to get there. I would rather defaults just work but I’m not asking my computer to read my mind. I’ve settled with KDE but I often use other window managers and desktop environments. Last week I used twm for the whole week. Other than scaling issues it was fine.

I use KDE. I found GNOME annoying and extemely opinionated. I also got turned off by it when I asked a question on mastodon like a year ago about an issue I was having with GNOME and an actual GNOME dev replied to me and essentially said I was using the DE wrong. basically I wasn’t using it the way the GNOME devs use it.

Gnome is simple and clean. It gets out of my way and functions the way I expect a modern DE to function.

I use KDE because it’s good and because GNOME is bad.

I needed a desktop environment with a UI that wasn’t intended to be hidden away. Or a desktop that wasn’t challenging the way that I intend to work with the computer.

KDE may be boring and it may not challenge any paradigms. But it works well and stays out of the way.

I got tired of “customizing” everything and just wanted to get work done. GNOME is the default on many distros, so I learned the intended workflow instead of fighting it. Now I can just install a distro and be productive immediately instead of spending time tweaking things.

Over the years, I don’t think there’s many DE’s or WM’s that I haven’t tried to live with on a daily driver, such as KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon, Qtile, XMonad, I3, AwesomeWM, etc etc. What I found over the years was how much I appreciated a clean, simplistic UI for an operating system.

After spending multiple years on ‘window manager only’ setups (got fed up with updating configs on major updates, and got fed up with the amount of config I had to do), I returned back to KDE mainly for the intense amount of OOTB customisation. However, what I realised after a while was that I was just setting up KDE to look and behave like Gnome.

So 2 years after last using KDE, I’m now just using Gnome all the time. I like the workflow, on laptop personally I think the gesture navigation is better than any other DE, and I love the simplistic design. Plus extensions get me what isn’t included OOTB.

Downside to Gnome is when major updates occur and extensions break as a result, other than that I can’t think of much bad about Gnome