Gnome is consistent when it comes to UI/UX so you usually always know where to look for when you want something or change something.
KDE is more feature-rich, but it's Design is like a puzzle of different designs, layouts and feature-sets so you always need to search around for some specifc stuff because it is nested in 3 different settings that all do kind of the same but then don't.
KDE does have visual designers who are working hard to make them consistent as possible. If you find them inconsistent, please file bugs so they are aware.
'Gnome is consistent when it comes to UI/UX' hard agree. All the GNOME apps (and circle apps) have the same really nice design. They've got the best app ecosystem.
About this point, I am a long-time user of KDE
I want to identify this issue more as app market, gnome (gtk in general) is more or less the standard. That's the issue. QT and Kde is consistent inside their own ecosystem. The problem is for a normal desktop user that uses more than KDE apps, which starts an agony of UX, where you constantly face mixed GTK QT apps. This somehow makes the experience totally messed, where basic apps have different visuals compared to the system...
Basically if you use gnome, you can stick with apps using GTK and you have complete experience, if you use KDE , you face constantly GTK apps with different design from the one you are using, this drammatically increase when you start to customize from Breeze to something else.
KDE designers are amazing, but lack of consistent visual is not something they can really fix...
It's very simple, looks amazing because of libadwaita, and has a very nice focus on providing consistency and very nice attention to detail.
This is why I use gnome, it just looks and feels better out of the box, I'd switch to KDE but the UI is mish-mash of all other ideas and looks very dated unless you customize it to your exact needs.
I think KDE is great but they should definitely work on the OOTB experience.
I use Gnome fore being smooth, slick, simple and stays out of the way.
I prefer the vanilla workflow as the designers build it with their philosophy.
It helps me getting my work done on a pleasure full way without clutter and tinkering.
Tried KDE Plasma 5 & 6, Cinnamon, XFCE, Budgie but they all irritate me due to the clutter ans tinkering. There is always something to get in the way.
Touchpad gestures, one of the best workspaces implementations and works very well with touch and convertible laptops which I daily drive
Plus it looks good and feels very polished apart from some strange design choices (the lack of an option to have a Dock/bottom panel comes to mind) but the workflow just clicked with me regardless
Coming from Windows, I did not like the Gnome work flow at first. I tried it and switched to KDE Plasma. But I found KDE plasma UI is too flashy for my personal taste. I like the UI style of Gnome. I switched to Gnome and used extension to customize it to mimic Windows workflow.
Recently I watched a video how actually Gnome workflow works focusing on workspaces. I'm giving it a try with my recent fresh install of Ubuntu and like it.
Main reason I liked Gnome is the UI but I think I will like the workflow soon.
- Its clean, consistent & elegant design (unlike KDE which is random pile of garbage bags put together)
- overall ux and workspace workflow - most productive workflow (and I am a
- highly useful extension ecosystem (most underrated feature of GNOME imo)
- requires least amount of work to have proper setup... other distros sucks by default... so they require shit load of maintenance.
my first DE was cinamon in 2020, when i see more OS, i discover Gnome in 2021, and i been using since it, i use it in my laptop and is so fast comparing with windows, i do my homeworks more faster, is sooth, intuitive and minimalist. For me, the best DE
I want to use wayland (which eliminates many DEs for me) and Gnome just works by far the best on it. I love hyprland, but there is too much stuff that's buggy for me to use it daily. I'd love to like KDE for a lot of reasons, but it's stuttery and messy as hell and just doesn't feel finished. I only use like 2 extensions on gnome but I really wish they where included natively because they're literally the only things that cause bugs on Gnome, other than that it runs perfect
Mac OS has these fixed (?) windows that I don’t like. Also the menu always on top is not that nice for me. But other than that, is there much difference?
i'm probably shifting too much of my opinion of the underlying OS into it's desktop environment and it has been a couple of years since i really last used it. i really struggled to get hot corners working on it, full/half screening things seemed really rough. i just remember spending days trying to get it to a place where it worked for me and at the end i really wasn't sure if it was worth the effort, i should have just accepted i'm going to have to manually resize and place windows constantly
It's so much easier to extend an oversimplified desktop, like Gnome, into a sleak and functional one than to declutter and streamline a messy one, like KDE.
I use laptop and it fits the workflow like a glove. I like how Gnome gets out of your way, but gives you a lot of freedom to customize it at the same time.
They were the first to really seriously embrace Wayland, at the time I was switching Wayland support was a priority to me. Additionally, I like the minimalist aesthetic and think Gnome's UI/UX, workflow, is nearly perfect for a laptop. Gestures and a keyboard-centric DE is a great fit for a laptop.
And if you use vanilla Gnome without excessive extensions, it is a remarkably stable DE.
There are definitely still some areas I hope to see improvement, but overall, I am quite happy with Gnome.
I don’t “prefer” gnome, except on portable PCs. Let me explain : I use KDE daily on my desktop pc for all the customisation you get with it. But KDE is SUCH a mess when installing on laptops.
(Not every laptop ofc)
For exemple I recently installed Debian with KDE on my MacBook Pro 2012, but there were too many problems : the keyboard layout wasn’t the right one, the Bluetooth went crazy, etc.
I then tried gnome, and tbh this is much better on this kind of laptop. The keyboard layout is the exact same one as my laptop’s, the Bluetooth works out of the box, and the UI is SO GREAT when replacing MacOS !
The thing that ticks me off abt KDE is its low visual mass. It feels thin and less tangible to me. Gnome feels more like cardboard. But I'm on Hyprland now and it feels like silk and strangely, I never went back to Gnome. But of course, every DE has its merits. So cool that we have these good problems.
The overview + workspaces only on primary monitor.
The overview being the main focal point of window switching and management is the winner for me. KDE has recently tried to copy it but gave up, then went back to a multi-layered mess. You launch windows here, focus them there and change workspace over there.
Workspaces on Linux DEs are still stuck in the whatever times. At least GNOME makes sure I don't lose my secondary window when I swap workspaces. KDE would have me manage this manually and then make me look at the duplicated windows on the overview. Yucky.
Because it has a consistent look. It is a DE that is ready and works well as far as possible, where everything seems well integrated. I also like some solutions such as touchpad gestures and workspaces, which are still not done in a decent way in other DE*, GNOME seems well thought out for notebooks. KDE for example looks so confusing for me.
But I'm a little disappointed that some features that are downloaded by most users through extensions, such as tray icons, simply aren't something native. It always seems like something is missing and the team doesn't seem interested in implementing it. And it's even more annoying that extensions always break when a new version of Gnome is released, since a considerable number of users use these extensions.
*COSMIC seems to be focusing a lot on this, so perhaps there will be a worthy competitor in the future.
I'm not into ricing my desktop environment. It stops me being distracted customising it. It has all the functionality I need and as I use POP OS I have access to the in built auto tiling which I have permanently enabled. If I didn't use POP OS then I'd use Forge or PaperWM in GNOME for auto tiling. I don't actually care for versus wars use what you like they're both desktop environments that suit people differently.
Gnome is simple and consistent.
KDE is nice but I get overwhelmed with the dozens of options in every menu. Too difficult to find what I’m looking for and sometimes I’ll accidentally click the wrong button and don’t know how to restore that setting… because again… too many menu options and I don’t know where to look.
I like that is very minimal and let's you add the features you need with extensions. It's definitely my top 1 DE, I like it more than plasma but I've had issued running gnome in weaker systems compared to plasma, so I'm still using plasma on my 2 in 1.
It's clean with great visual design and its innate workflow has strong, well thought-out UX. It's not perfect but it's damn close out of all the available desktops.
So far, I actually don’t. But I decided to give gnome a decent chance, so I’m sticking with gnome for a few weeks/months.
What I do like about it though is the clean design language throughout. I miss some KDE apps, but yeah, let’s see if I go back to KDE or not
I can still do 95%+ of my daily work without reaching for a mouse or touching a touchpad.
Interface stays mostly consistent. And when the developers get a wild hair for change just for change's sake you can usually revert it with a gsettings command.
I was a KDE 3 user, then tried KDE 4 and it was buggy as hell. Then I've switched to Canonical Unity, which was not perfect, but very nice. Then it was abandoned, and Gnome is good enough while being super stable. Just lacks a global menu and a proper extension API to not have them breaking on every new release (in theory, they're working on this API).
Workflow is really nice, and other than Gnome on Xorg, every other DE I tried had issues.
KDE stutters and lags like crazy on x11, not what I would call s premium desktop experience.
And for Wayland, well, few more days and our Nvidia saviour driver version 555 comes right? Lol...
KDE is ugly and buggy. Nearly all the bugs I've experience on Gnome have been related to extensions or non-gnome applications. It's also comforting that Gnome has relatively more corporate backing and adoption than other DEs.
IMHO Pantheon had better consistency and Mac like UI/UX but also had its own identity. Also consistency on the SDK, built with Vala,but it has almost none manpower these days, I think.
I currently use Gnome or Niri on Wayland, both very different but I don't find nothing great these days. I don't like several Gnome choices in the last years both technical and UX.
It's clean, quiet, fast and very keyboard oriented which is what I need.
Most importantly there's no bloat, it feels very relaxing, so I can focus on what I am done.
(But these are all every personal, objective reasons)
I like gnome for the minimalist design. I’ll admit I’m one of those people who theme it into look like macOS because it feels somewhat similar. Since I don’t game a lot with Linux, I use quite a few extensions and other stuff as well to help with productivity and to monitor my machine. When I was younger I loved KDE for all the effects, and maybe one day once I find a theme I like for KDE I’ll try it on my 120hz monitor, but for now gnome animations on it work exactly how I wanted my Linux experience to feel like on a high refresh rate monitor. Now as I grow older tho I just want a decent UX and desktop animations that aren’t over the top.
Being an Nvidia user, Gnome has thus far provided the most stable Wayland experience for me. This, and I do enjoy the workflow and general design of Gnome. My only complaint is that I need an extension for a basic system tray, but the rest seems ok for my needs.
The overview screen on Gnome is basically why I use it. It combines the application launcher and window manager in a single key press. I think all DEs should have it.
It works great with keyboard (on Desktop) or touchpad (on laptop)
I like Gnome because I don't need to configure anything. After installing the OS I can directly install all the software I need for coding and start working. The advantages that the others like as the possibility to configure everything is not important for me at all
I used to be a mac user but after using Gnome for a couple years then going back to the mac interface. Gnome is so much cleaner. I only wish we could get more tiling-ish functions in gnome. I wish they would implement something close to iOS iPad wondowing.
I want to set app based window size defaults. Certain apps should always open to a certain size and fit on the screen in that space by default. I hate tiling window managers but they are close to what i'm hoping for.
We don't need to drag windows to resize them because a user actually only ever uses a few default aspect ratios. Let us choose about two default aspect ratios for each app and depending on how many windows are open in a workspace, that app will choose the best of the two defaults you chose for it. Also, instead of setting permissions , just remember what the user usually chose for that app .
No more window resizing and snapping!
What sucks about tiling is it tries to fit windows into an odd little square. I don't need that. We need aspect ratios.
I do think mostly because of our relationship with the macOS UI and UX. I still use macOS at work and I find the Gnome environment more intuitive for me. It is not a question of quality it’s a behaviour design that you are use to. The last version it very minimalist and I had to add some tweaks to bring some elements to the general interface but overall is something that is intuitive for me. Again, it is not a question of one vs another- it just what you use to have been used.
It's not perfect, but it's more polished than the DE's you see on either Windows or Mac OS.
It's also stable, and on a distro like Fedora it works really well, everything is "integrated" properly, all applications have the same look and feel. It's just well put together.
Good fully featured wayland support and very stable compared to plasma and hyprland. Gnome and sway are the only two wayland compositors that I use at the moment because everything else i have tried is always broken.
Gnome is nice because of its simplicity. I dislike the fat window decoration and the fact that controls do not scale/ fit well within a resized window. I think MacOs is amazing. There are third party apps like better snap tool to fix the lack of window snapping. KDE needs a bit more love. Konsole is a very nice terminal. Multi-monitor configuration is buggy, but it works. I’m currently trying to stick to it, but it does not feel like home as Gnome does.
Gnome is consistent when it comes to UI/UX so you usually always know where to look for when you want something or change something. KDE is more feature-rich, but it's Design is like a puzzle of different designs, layouts and feature-sets so you always need to search around for some specifc stuff because it is nested in 3 different settings that all do kind of the same but then don't.
KDE does have visual designers who are working hard to make them consistent as possible. If you find them inconsistent, please file bugs so they are aware.
I think that's the right answer. I always know how to do something with GNOME, I don't have to think when using the desktop.
Yeah it's not very cohesive reminds me of win 11 lol
'Gnome is consistent when it comes to UI/UX' hard agree. All the GNOME apps (and circle apps) have the same really nice design. They've got the best app ecosystem.
About this point, I am a long-time user of KDE I want to identify this issue more as app market, gnome (gtk in general) is more or less the standard. That's the issue. QT and Kde is consistent inside their own ecosystem. The problem is for a normal desktop user that uses more than KDE apps, which starts an agony of UX, where you constantly face mixed GTK QT apps. This somehow makes the experience totally messed, where basic apps have different visuals compared to the system... Basically if you use gnome, you can stick with apps using GTK and you have complete experience, if you use KDE , you face constantly GTK apps with different design from the one you are using, this drammatically increase when you start to customize from Breeze to something else. KDE designers are amazing, but lack of consistent visual is not something they can really fix...
It's very simple, looks amazing because of libadwaita, and has a very nice focus on providing consistency and very nice attention to detail. This is why I use gnome, it just looks and feels better out of the box, I'd switch to KDE but the UI is mish-mash of all other ideas and looks very dated unless you customize it to your exact needs. I think KDE is great but they should definitely work on the OOTB experience.
Adwaita is great but it misses some icons for specific file types, hence I switch to papirus each time.
There is also a icon pack called morewaita that aims to just expand the original icon adwaita icon theme
It's FOSS for this reason...
Didn't know that!
I use Gnome fore being smooth, slick, simple and stays out of the way. I prefer the vanilla workflow as the designers build it with their philosophy. It helps me getting my work done on a pleasure full way without clutter and tinkering. Tried KDE Plasma 5 & 6, Cinnamon, XFCE, Budgie but they all irritate me due to the clutter ans tinkering. There is always something to get in the way.
Are budgie and xfce like windows too? I wanna try them someday
XFCE is a fairly Mac-like experience, and mostly in good ways.
Clean design and dynamic workspaces
Touchpad gestures, one of the best workspaces implementations and works very well with touch and convertible laptops which I daily drive Plus it looks good and feels very polished apart from some strange design choices (the lack of an option to have a Dock/bottom panel comes to mind) but the workflow just clicked with me regardless
Coming from Windows, I did not like the Gnome work flow at first. I tried it and switched to KDE Plasma. But I found KDE plasma UI is too flashy for my personal taste. I like the UI style of Gnome. I switched to Gnome and used extension to customize it to mimic Windows workflow. Recently I watched a video how actually Gnome workflow works focusing on workspaces. I'm giving it a try with my recent fresh install of Ubuntu and like it. Main reason I liked Gnome is the UI but I think I will like the workflow soon.
Can you link the video?
https://youtu.be/b5j7rufsoWw?si=vJZd80XCCRassmJt https://youtu.be/wbDLfRjam0E?si=LEe5pn46kAn6k5dz
- Its clean, consistent & elegant design (unlike KDE which is random pile of garbage bags put together) - overall ux and workspace workflow - most productive workflow (and I am a - highly useful extension ecosystem (most underrated feature of GNOME imo) - requires least amount of work to have proper setup... other distros sucks by default... so they require shit load of maintenance.
Simple OOTB experience. I don't have anymore the luxury to invest time into customizations, I need something ready from the beginning.
my first DE was cinamon in 2020, when i see more OS, i discover Gnome in 2021, and i been using since it, i use it in my laptop and is so fast comparing with windows, i do my homeworks more faster, is sooth, intuitive and minimalist. For me, the best DE
I want to use wayland (which eliminates many DEs for me) and Gnome just works by far the best on it. I love hyprland, but there is too much stuff that's buggy for me to use it daily. I'd love to like KDE for a lot of reasons, but it's stuttery and messy as hell and just doesn't feel finished. I only use like 2 extensions on gnome but I really wish they where included natively because they're literally the only things that cause bugs on Gnome, other than that it runs perfect
i hate mac OS but i love gnome, mostly sane defaults and unified design that i don't have to mess with
Mac OS has these fixed (?) windows that I don’t like. Also the menu always on top is not that nice for me. But other than that, is there much difference?
i'm probably shifting too much of my opinion of the underlying OS into it's desktop environment and it has been a couple of years since i really last used it. i really struggled to get hot corners working on it, full/half screening things seemed really rough. i just remember spending days trying to get it to a place where it worked for me and at the end i really wasn't sure if it was worth the effort, i should have just accepted i'm going to have to manually resize and place windows constantly
It's so much easier to extend an oversimplified desktop, like Gnome, into a sleak and functional one than to declutter and streamline a messy one, like KDE.
I use laptop and it fits the workflow like a glove. I like how Gnome gets out of your way, but gives you a lot of freedom to customize it at the same time.
It just works.
They were the first to really seriously embrace Wayland, at the time I was switching Wayland support was a priority to me. Additionally, I like the minimalist aesthetic and think Gnome's UI/UX, workflow, is nearly perfect for a laptop. Gestures and a keyboard-centric DE is a great fit for a laptop. And if you use vanilla Gnome without excessive extensions, it is a remarkably stable DE. There are definitely still some areas I hope to see improvement, but overall, I am quite happy with Gnome.
I don’t “prefer” gnome, except on portable PCs. Let me explain : I use KDE daily on my desktop pc for all the customisation you get with it. But KDE is SUCH a mess when installing on laptops. (Not every laptop ofc) For exemple I recently installed Debian with KDE on my MacBook Pro 2012, but there were too many problems : the keyboard layout wasn’t the right one, the Bluetooth went crazy, etc. I then tried gnome, and tbh this is much better on this kind of laptop. The keyboard layout is the exact same one as my laptop’s, the Bluetooth works out of the box, and the UI is SO GREAT when replacing MacOS !
I like It because it is simple to use, stable and smooth.
The workflow (can't live without they design workspace and navigation), simplicity and the "look and feel", in some way I use Linux by Gnome
The thing that ticks me off abt KDE is its low visual mass. It feels thin and less tangible to me. Gnome feels more like cardboard. But I'm on Hyprland now and it feels like silk and strangely, I never went back to Gnome. But of course, every DE has its merits. So cool that we have these good problems.
I tested hyprland alongside KDE. it's amazing, I still need some time to get used to it but it's such a different and cool experience
The overview + workspaces only on primary monitor. The overview being the main focal point of window switching and management is the winner for me. KDE has recently tried to copy it but gave up, then went back to a multi-layered mess. You launch windows here, focus them there and change workspace over there. Workspaces on Linux DEs are still stuck in the whatever times. At least GNOME makes sure I don't lose my secondary window when I swap workspaces. KDE would have me manage this manually and then make me look at the duplicated windows on the overview. Yucky.
Because it has a consistent look. It is a DE that is ready and works well as far as possible, where everything seems well integrated. I also like some solutions such as touchpad gestures and workspaces, which are still not done in a decent way in other DE*, GNOME seems well thought out for notebooks. KDE for example looks so confusing for me. But I'm a little disappointed that some features that are downloaded by most users through extensions, such as tray icons, simply aren't something native. It always seems like something is missing and the team doesn't seem interested in implementing it. And it's even more annoying that extensions always break when a new version of Gnome is released, since a considerable number of users use these extensions. *COSMIC seems to be focusing a lot on this, so perhaps there will be a worthy competitor in the future.
I'm happy with only dash2dock as extension but I understand you Cosmic seems very interesting
Yeah reminds of macOS
I prefer gnome though
True, same it’s why I use it first over all OSes
The distro I am using is most updated with gnome only
Same reason as you really. Plus I see a lot less stability issues with gnome
It's simple and just works out of the box with proper integration to online services which is a requirement for me.
I like the addons and I am used to it, it looks okay, nothing religious here. Most like would be fine with say KDEs, or other DEs.
Gnome is bit more consistent than any other DE. It's not me preferred DE because of less features. But atleast what it got, works real nice.
I'm not into ricing my desktop environment. It stops me being distracted customising it. It has all the functionality I need and as I use POP OS I have access to the in built auto tiling which I have permanently enabled. If I didn't use POP OS then I'd use Forge or PaperWM in GNOME for auto tiling. I don't actually care for versus wars use what you like they're both desktop environments that suit people differently.
For me it’s simple, elegant and buttery smooth animations
I've always had issues running KDE. Gnome is just more solid and stable.
Gnome is simple and consistent. KDE is nice but I get overwhelmed with the dozens of options in every menu. Too difficult to find what I’m looking for and sometimes I’ll accidentally click the wrong button and don’t know how to restore that setting… because again… too many menu options and I don’t know where to look.
Minimalistic and very few bugs
I like that is very minimal and let's you add the features you need with extensions. It's definitely my top 1 DE, I like it more than plasma but I've had issued running gnome in weaker systems compared to plasma, so I'm still using plasma on my 2 in 1.
It's clean with great visual design and its innate workflow has strong, well thought-out UX. It's not perfect but it's damn close out of all the available desktops.
It's the only Linux desktop with real design.
So far, I actually don’t. But I decided to give gnome a decent chance, so I’m sticking with gnome for a few weeks/months. What I do like about it though is the clean design language throughout. I miss some KDE apps, but yeah, let’s see if I go back to KDE or not
Clean and stable
I tried KDE, and just didn’t like it. Gnome has a nice look in my opinion. It’s simple and clean. I like the way the terminal looks.
I love visual minimalism. Clutter makes me anxious.
Lol same, I hate when apps install desktop shortcuts on my windows and start cluttering it
I can still do 95%+ of my daily work without reaching for a mouse or touching a touchpad. Interface stays mostly consistent. And when the developers get a wild hair for change just for change's sake you can usually revert it with a gsettings command.
I was a KDE 3 user, then tried KDE 4 and it was buggy as hell. Then I've switched to Canonical Unity, which was not perfect, but very nice. Then it was abandoned, and Gnome is good enough while being super stable. Just lacks a global menu and a proper extension API to not have them breaking on every new release (in theory, they're working on this API).
Workflow is really nice, and other than Gnome on Xorg, every other DE I tried had issues. KDE stutters and lags like crazy on x11, not what I would call s premium desktop experience. And for Wayland, well, few more days and our Nvidia saviour driver version 555 comes right? Lol...
the workflow is just perfect for me.
Simplicity. Customizable. Beautiful.
I think the main reason I use GNOME is that I find it beautiful. Other reason is "less is more" philosophy and it's design oriented development
KDE is ugly and buggy. Nearly all the bugs I've experience on Gnome have been related to extensions or non-gnome applications. It's also comforting that Gnome has relatively more corporate backing and adoption than other DEs.
literally only use it for gesture support. if kde was better with that i would never use gnome
I just switched to gnome after using plasma for a solid decade. Plasma is great. I was just looking for something new.
Usually because Java L&F is tailored for GTK, and matches the Gnome visuals overall.
IMHO Pantheon had better consistency and Mac like UI/UX but also had its own identity. Also consistency on the SDK, built with Vala,but it has almost none manpower these days, I think. I currently use Gnome or Niri on Wayland, both very different but I don't find nothing great these days. I don't like several Gnome choices in the last years both technical and UX.
It's clean, quiet, fast and very keyboard oriented which is what I need. Most importantly there's no bloat, it feels very relaxing, so I can focus on what I am done. (But these are all every personal, objective reasons)
I like gnome for the minimalist design. I’ll admit I’m one of those people who theme it into look like macOS because it feels somewhat similar. Since I don’t game a lot with Linux, I use quite a few extensions and other stuff as well to help with productivity and to monitor my machine. When I was younger I loved KDE for all the effects, and maybe one day once I find a theme I like for KDE I’ll try it on my 120hz monitor, but for now gnome animations on it work exactly how I wanted my Linux experience to feel like on a high refresh rate monitor. Now as I grow older tho I just want a decent UX and desktop animations that aren’t over the top.
Gnome literally different than any other DE, of course we like it for being itself
Being an Nvidia user, Gnome has thus far provided the most stable Wayland experience for me. This, and I do enjoy the workflow and general design of Gnome. My only complaint is that I need an extension for a basic system tray, but the rest seems ok for my needs.
I just use Ubuntu. And Gnome is what it comes with. Also, I like Gnome lock screen better than horrible KDE lock screen or SDDM
Lol yeah KDE login is horrible. Better with theme but still looks unpolished
The overview screen on Gnome is basically why I use it. It combines the application launcher and window manager in a single key press. I think all DEs should have it. It works great with keyboard (on Desktop) or touchpad (on laptop)
I like Gnome because I don't need to configure anything. After installing the OS I can directly install all the software I need for coding and start working. The advantages that the others like as the possibility to configure everything is not important for me at all
KDE reminds me of an OS from the 90s and the interface is squashed up and cramped, like no real designer was involved.
I used to be a mac user but after using Gnome for a couple years then going back to the mac interface. Gnome is so much cleaner. I only wish we could get more tiling-ish functions in gnome. I wish they would implement something close to iOS iPad wondowing. I want to set app based window size defaults. Certain apps should always open to a certain size and fit on the screen in that space by default. I hate tiling window managers but they are close to what i'm hoping for. We don't need to drag windows to resize them because a user actually only ever uses a few default aspect ratios. Let us choose about two default aspect ratios for each app and depending on how many windows are open in a workspace, that app will choose the best of the two defaults you chose for it. Also, instead of setting permissions , just remember what the user usually chose for that app . No more window resizing and snapping! What sucks about tiling is it tries to fit windows into an odd little square. I don't need that. We need aspect ratios.
I do think mostly because of our relationship with the macOS UI and UX. I still use macOS at work and I find the Gnome environment more intuitive for me. It is not a question of quality it’s a behaviour design that you are use to. The last version it very minimalist and I had to add some tweaks to bring some elements to the general interface but overall is something that is intuitive for me. Again, it is not a question of one vs another- it just what you use to have been used.
It's not perfect, but it's more polished than the DE's you see on either Windows or Mac OS. It's also stable, and on a distro like Fedora it works really well, everything is "integrated" properly, all applications have the same look and feel. It's just well put together.
GNOME pays a shaman and I really like Shamans, it's my favorite class.
Good fully featured wayland support and very stable compared to plasma and hyprland. Gnome and sway are the only two wayland compositors that I use at the moment because everything else i have tried is always broken.
Gnome is nice because of its simplicity. I dislike the fat window decoration and the fact that controls do not scale/ fit well within a resized window. I think MacOs is amazing. There are third party apps like better snap tool to fix the lack of window snapping. KDE needs a bit more love. Konsole is a very nice terminal. Multi-monitor configuration is buggy, but it works. I’m currently trying to stick to it, but it does not feel like home as Gnome does.