I have never understood why gnome seems to the go-to choice for default DE for so many distros
Because it just works and looks really good out of the box. Its the only DE with good, seamless fingerprint support for example
I didn’t know that about fingerprint support, but my experience of it is it not working but getting in the way, and looking a bit pants compared to kde
Nahhh KDE is the one looking pants. In Gnome everything is very consistent and in KDE very much not so. Even something as simple as the toolbar looks ass.
Gnome is very intuitive too, I like the window overview and it just doesn’t get in my way.
I was an i3wm user before going to Gnome. All the defaults just work, which saves me time
Why not? It works pretty well.
KDE is janky, and most of the rest are kind of limited in functionality. GNOME just works.
I actually switched to GNOME recently because Wayland works just fine with it and KDE seems to crash, despite me having an AMD GPU. I want it because I have two monitors with different refresh rates and one supports FreeSync, and GNOME Wayland handles it perfectly, whereas KDE doesn’t even launch. I don’t know of any other DE that would work well with my setup.
I don’t particularly like GNOME, but it works well. I used KDE on openSUSE for >2 years now, and I always seemed to run into random bugs and whatnot. I switched to give it a shot after years of using GNOME on Arch, and now I switched back to GNOME on openSUSE and those janky problems went away.
I’d love for KDE to work well, it just gets in my way too much. GNOME just works, so I use it. Maybe I’ll go back to a tiling WM (maybe Sway?) at some point, but since my kids use my computer, I’ll probably put off doing that.
In my experience, KDE works well and gets out of my way, while gnome does stupid shit and is non-configurable. I don;t have multiple monitors with different refresh rates so I can;t comment on that, but I do not run into bugs in KDE often at all!
(I mean I did accidentally lock up my computer by opening several hundred copies of the screenshot app, but that was my fault - I accidentally put a banana on the print screen key!)
Here are a few issues I’ve had on KDE when I only had one monitor (all on KDE X11, KDE Wayland wouldn’t launch on either Nvidia or AMD GPUs):
- “start” bar (whatever KDE calls it) gets stuck open, when I try to have it auto-hide; sometimes it stays open even when maximizing videos
- “win” key stops working to access the start menu, which is an option on the latest KDE (I used to use an extension in KDE4 when it wasn’t an option)
- keyboard switcher bugs out and stays open after selecting a layout (I usually use Dvorak, my kids use QWERTY, so I switch often)
- sometimes locking my screen boots me out of my session into a new window manager login shell, and I lose my open windows; not sure how this happens, maybe my kids mash buttons, idk, but it happens 1-2x/month
I’m sure there are more.
With GNOME Wayland, my issues. are essentially limited to a weird rendering issue that resulted in my screen getting “cut” (as in, right half of my screen rendered down a pixel or two). That’s it. Everything else works smoothly, and I haven’t had any issues in the past 2-3 weeks since installing it.
None of the KDE issues were deal-breakers, they were just kind of annoying and made the desktop feel worse. I don’t need really any features from my DE, I just need to launch apps full-screen and switch between them. That’s it, and KDE failed at that without any extra extensions installed (just whatever ships with openSUSE).
So that’s why I use GNOME. I think KDE is fine, but I honestly don’t care what my DE does, provided it can launch and switch between applications. Once it’s set up and doesn’t look horrible, I generally don’t touch any of the configuration options. I used to care about such things, but after 15-ish years with Linux, I guess the novelty has worn off.
Old history - Qt had licensing concerns, gtk+ was guaranteed FOSS, so major distros shipped Gnome2 by default, and it stuck.
Yeah I know, i was there (and I always preferred KDE… migrated to it from Windowmaker of all things, I never could get the hang of Enlightenment, pretty though it was). But that was sorted literally decades ago!
it has less information on screen at any given time than stock dwm so it looks clean an professional on screenshots
