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Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

I could understand Gnome as an ideological hack back when KDE wasn't completely open source or when Ubuntu pushed beautiful and polished versions of Gnome 2. And when KDE was on version 4.

Today, why would anyone choose anything except KDE?

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GNOME, KDE, MATE, LXQt, Xfce, etc each have their own design philosophies, benefits, and detriments. None of them are all-around objectively better than the others.

GNOME does at least get a lot of corporate development and backing to make it integrate into Active Desktop, centrally-managed settings (aka group policy), and accessibility functions. These aspects are rather large reasons that big enterprise distributions default to GNOME over all other choices.

Most users care about none of those features. Some people just like GNOME. Some people like KDE. It's simply a choice.

KDE is much more glitchy compared to GNOME and many other DEs in my experience (but it also has way more features, so that kind of makes sense). Many users don't care about most of those features, so taking the more stable option makes sense.

There also still are big issues in KDE that "just work" on basically every other system (including Windows and macOS). KIO, Akonadi and Baloo come to mind immediately - all great ideas that in reality never really work.

(I say this as someone who daily drives KDE on both Wayland and X11 - to me, the features are certainly worth dealing with the issues)

To me KDE is overloaded with settings and menus, it looks outdated and Gnome leans a lot more into multi-workspace/keyboard controls rather than the Windows-like behavior and I prefer that.

I use KDE because I like its relatively polished design and philosophy of flexibility and empowering power users. I can and I do wrestle things that I don't like into a shape I like.

I still have to put up with many, many downsides around its stability, bugs, resource consumption, being written in C++ and builds being a nontrivial exercise.

I can sympathize with those for whom KDE does not suit well.

What distro do you use and what do you compare it to?

My preferred distro is KDE Neon, based on Ubuntu base but with KDE devs providing the KDE layer on top.

I have found this combination excellent and while I am sure it uses more resources than lightweight distros it actually seems to save me resources when I move load (IntelliJ, VSCode, Cypress) from my Windows host machine to my KDE running under WSL. Even on the limited memory and CPU I give this VM it seems to handle them a lot nicer than when I run the GUI apps in the host machine and only run Maven/Quarkus + Node + WSL part of VSCode on WSL.

And with the most recent update of WSL, running GUI apps from WSL has become effortless. (I admit some rough edges like IntelliJ sometimes freezing after suspend resume etc, but nothing that takes time or effort to resolve.)

My comment was overly dramatic, I'd say. I was implicitly comparing KDE to Apple-level quality in UI.

I am using KDE on Wayland on Fedora, and so far it's the most polished Linux desktop experience I've ever had.

Maybe it's my experience with KDE4 that turned me off after KDE3, then tidal changes of stability in KDE5 that undermined my trust.

I guess everyone has their own reason, look-and-feel being a valid reason.

For me, it’s the wonky Active Directory integration/support that is the dealbreaker.

What kind of weird question is that? They're different things, obviously not everyone is going to like the same thing.

GTK != Gnome. KDE is extremely bloated and so that is why I avoid it. One KDE package wants to pull in pretty much all the dependencies for a full desktop environment which isn't what I want to do.

If you find yourself using the term bloated you should in most cases find a new word because it communications only imprecision. It neither uses excessive RAM, nor requires excessive storage, nor runs slowly. Do you mean it has too many features?

In the context of the prior comment which was choosing between Gnome and KDE the fact that applications require you to have half of KDE is meaningless as you are if you pick KDE going to install all of KDE already.

In the context of installing KDE apps outside of KDE this is fairly overblown. Most people have hundreds of GB to TB of storage available and will install games which require 60GB. At this point in time worrying about KDE installing a few gigs of deps is like worrying about the difference in ram used by Emacs vs Vim.

> KDE is extremely bloated and so that is why I avoid it.

I use GNOME myself but GNOME is anything but lean and stable - Alt+F2 r is for me a staple and it doesn't work correctly under Wayland, it's GUI is horribly slow, every extension worsening the problem. I mostly only use GNOME myself because I stopped caring about how slow things are and I'm lazy.

> One KDE package wants to pull in pretty much all the dependencies for a full desktop environment which isn't what I want to do.

Well, any GNOME thing wants to pull the entire GNOME thing AND systemd. Much worse.

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