GNOME versus KDE Which Is Better 

KDE as an entire project is another testimony to ambitious open source projects.

It's surprising how KDE is still so similar to how it used to be even though it's changed so much.

"I see you're running Gnome...You know I'm on KDE myself"

didn't know that krita was part of the kde suit. Love it, it feels so amazing to use, even to draw with a MOUSE

Gnome is really nice on a laptop where you mainly use the touchpad, all other cases I prefer KDE.

My original Linux introduction was with Mandrake in the early 2000s, from memory that ran KDE. Then got involved with Ubuntu and gnome. Early this year back with KDE on Linux MX. I love the ease of initiating desktop special effects on the KDE - wobbly windows, exploding windows, paper airplanes, genie in a lamp. Adds a bit of bling to the desktop.

For me it's GNOME by a mile, primarily because of stability. Every time I try to use it, KDE is always prone to visual glitches and things just not working correctly. Plus the way workspaces work on GNOME is top notch.

I really like KDE but ever since I have used GNOME with the material shell, I just can't live without it. Productivity, workflow and almost everything is on another level with this material shell.

I really enjoy the tweaks KDE provides natively, however, I find Gnome waay more polished. KDE still have some bugs or behaviours that I find weird sometimes. The menu bar keeps going nuts after I disconnect one of the external displays, sometimes windows freeze graphically, etc. But maybe that's the tradeoff between a polished DE and a highly customizable DE. :)

Nice video discussion Derek. I used to be way into customization many years ago, and I think 15 years ago I would have loved all the options there are in KDE Plasma. I still like customizing, but have found that KDE Plasma is still pretty glitchy, and there are some options that don't work like I expect them. I am currently on GNOME in Fedora 36, and with the extensions that I am using, it's perfect for me.

I like both, they each have pros and cons. In terms of optics, I prefer Gnome, as it looks less cluttered OOTB, usability is more on KDEs side. But my Linux machines usually run TWM, currently Debian Testing with Awesome.

This video was very helpful and easy to understand which was much apricated since I just started looking in to Linux today and wanted to know what the difference was between Gnome and KDE. I think I might go with KDE Plasma just because of the customization and not having to worry about extensions braking every time I update. Thanks, and I hope to see more from you in the future.

I felt in love with Gnome 3 because its simplicity and clarity. And its design. No extra stuff. Efficiency. Each time I use KDE, I spend 10 minutes to find what I am looking for. Gnome : I want a file manager --> I type «files» and the application is called «Files», no doubt possible. no application weirdly called «k» something. I want a disk manager --> I type «disk» and the application is called «Disks», no doubt possible. All the desktop has been designed to fit exactly the way my mind works and apprehends the space.

Krita and KDEnlive are great, but you can almost always use them with gnome anyways

I love gnome 42, mostly the Ubuntu variation, KDE is somehow overwhelming for me. But I always have an eye on Cinnamon as well, I think it's very underestimated: it's very solid, functional, easy to use but customizable at the same time.

I use only distributions that have a default KDE environment (for desktop, for servers it's not important and I mostly use Debian). In my experience the best KDE distro and a big contributor is Suse, so my daily driver is tumbleweed. I recently tested Arch KDE distros. Yes, they are good as well and because of the better software support I may switch. But a lot more testing if it's stable enough is required. I have an pretty old, 15 years, notebook, using it for network pentesting. xfce worked fine but KDE was better. Lagging about half a second when you want to shutdown or restart is the only thing that's slower than xfce. Everything else is the same or KDE is faster. Even the core developer of xfce said at the moment KDE is better optimized than XFCE. Boot time feels the same if you use a SSD. Using a mechanical HDD, KDE may be pretty slow in comparison to XFCE since it reads more smaller files on startup. I didn't measure anything because I use my OS to work on it and not test it, so it's a strictly subjective feeling

KDE FTW IMHO 😄. Super configurable without needing extensions. Now I just need to decide what to base on: Debian, Kubuntu, Arch or Fedora

As a power user I found gnome to be too restrictive. After 7 years on arch and i3, I needed something more stable that "just werks", so I switched to Ubuntu and gnome. It's good enough, but I needed more power user stuff, so I ended up with a balancing act between stable, just werks and bleeding edge, power user. I'm now using Kubuntu with KDE backports + flatpak, some ppas and guix. This works very well, hadn't had any issues in months and I'll probably continue using this setup for a long time. The one gnome utility that is vastly superior to the KDE alternative is simple-scan. Infinitly better than skanlite. I just use the flatpak version of simple-scan so no problem there.

I really like KDE mainly because most native apps are very customizable, especially in editing shortcuts. In KDE it is quite easy to export the main system configuration files and import them in another one. In Gnome I have no idea how to do it in a simple way.

I often find KDE ugly out of the box, while I like GNOME aesthetics a lot as well. But I have to admit that the KDE suit of applications is actually very very good. Specially Dolphin. Right now I'm using GNOME 42. About the extensions breaking, that's a real issue, and I often research how solid the people supporting the extensions are before adding them to my GNOME desktop.

Also remember, although KDE allows infinite customisability, you don't necessarily need to customize the desktop and it will never get in your way or take time from you if you don't. It's simple by default and powerful when needed.

Been using XFCE full-time since 2002. Solid DE that never gets enough love. Long live XFCE !!!!

Thank you for the awesome and informative video! Am leaning towards KDE :D Thank you for all in the team in making this video.

Great video DT! I made the switch to Linux 5 months ago after using Windows all my life, and after briefly trying out a couple DEs, GNOME stuck with me the most. Like you said it's very good for people who just want a system that works good out of the box. Coming from Windows, the workflow took a little bit of time to get used to, but I'm digging it now, and I'm way faster than I was on Windows. I don't mind GNOME not being as customizable as KDE, it's nice and simple and plenty enough for me. It took just 10 plugins, a new system theme, and a new system font to level up my experience. There's just one thing that stops my experience from being perfect, and it's definitely the file manager 😂

Gnome always reminds my of my works macbook pro, so for my personal Lenovo Thinkpad i use and love KDE Neon distro and use the KDE desktop and made it look the way i like. :)

I much prefer KDE. There’s extras in KDE that simply don’t exist in GNOME and it’s a real dealbreaker for my workflow. But, there is something to be said about GNOME’s simple design. It is definitely much more polished than it used to be. I’ve switched to i3 now though lol

I am a KDE user and I have a very highly modified KDE desktop but I struggle to think of a distro that actually ships with desktop that deviates much from the standard KDE Neon layout and functionality. This is a real shame since so much can be done with all the customisation options in KDE. I doubt most people even go to the appearance settings and download new themes, let alone tick the box to apply the desktop layout. There are also window scripts, add ons, widgets, rules and shortcuts that can be applied to make amazing things happen to your desktop. It would be nice to see a KDE distro that put these options up front in one of those welcome apps to showcase the range of things you can do, Many of the features that I use have been discovered by years of constant customising and are very well buried in the KDE eco system.

KDE for my professional customers and myself, Gnome (Zorin OS) for my private customers. Has been working fine this way for years now.

wonderful explanation, i hated gnome only for a small time when they switched to gnome 3 and started liking mate for some time, and then always gnome is my favourite forever, and now i know why i like gnome - for its simplicity, minimalism

Regarding text editors: the Plasma simple text editor is actually KWrite and not Kate. Kate is the "KDE advanced text editor", i.e. programmer's text editor - and as such its not really comparable to gEdit as it has tons of programming QoL features that gEdit lacks, such as projects, git integration, find and replace in files, many many many syntax highlighting features, language server integration, symbol reference lookup, word completion, block highlighting and folding, multiple cursors and so much more. That being said, gEdit isn't really a simple text editor either - that task was assigned to the new "GNOME Text Editor" (that's its name - GNOME have apparently taken a leaf out of Microsoft's book and are renaming all of their apps by the generic category they are supposed to fill), but gEdit as a programmer's text editor is sorely lacking and has gained no new features in the last 10 years. If you want to look at a GNOME programmer's text editor - check out Geany, which while not officially a GNOME application (Geany claims to be cross platform and support all Linux desktops using just GTK+3), it is the closes you can get.

Something that's not directly related to the DE (plasma) itself, but something a lot of people overlook is that KHTML was a KDE Project and that's what a lot of modern browsers (Chromium, Safari) base their engines on! KDE Plasma isn't for everyone, but the KDE project has done wonders for Linux and for everyone as a whole. Their creative suite of applications are also the best we have on Linux with Krita going mainstream even beyond linux.

Tried kde, xfce, budgie, even sway, and still going back to Gnome. Gnome project made some questionable decisions (like ditching first-party tray icons support, can't wrap my head around why even I've read multiple posts explaining it from Gnome project members), but what they actually left - they've perfected it to the point that I'm not worried about everything crashing to hell at wrong moment, like what happened to me multiple times with KDE on Debian 11. I'm curious why literally no one mentions the ability to drag windows (including fullscreen games) from one monitor to another in Activities view. That's literally the best productivity feature I've ever seen in my goddamn life and I'm not aware of anything having it out of the box, including Windows (which is hilarious imo) and macOS. Currently running G43 on Debian Testing - everything is incredibly fast and rock-solid. BTW, libadwaita looks really nice, there is a customization tool that lets you change literally everything about its look and feel, but I really can't wait to see proper community themes utilizing libadwaita. P.S.: Also, Mutter's implementation of Wayland seems most robust and full-featured compared to others.

Thank you KDE and Gnome devs! Thanks DT!

I love KDE, but it currently has a pretty massive bug where it deletes all my desktop settings every time I disconnect or reconnect an external display, which has made it effectively unusable for the past year or so. Gnome is nice, but the fact that I need to go through 4 different apps (settings, tweaks, extensions, then the registry editor equivalent) just to find the setting I want to change has been a major source of frustration. It feels like in order to get a streamlined UX, Gnome completely lacks so many essential features - and sure there are extensions, but they break every 6 months with each major update since there isn't a stable API for them. That being said I absolutely love the activities and the overview (and I hope KDE reaches that level of polish with their overview feature soon too)

Recently I moved from Cinnamon to KDE and the experience with Plasma is just awesome!

I have found KDE much easier to break but the KDE team has been focusing on fixing many of the issues that lead to the desktop being unstable. GNOME’s extensions are prone to failing after an update, but they also tend to not bring down the whole desktop (avoid any extension that modifies the compositor to do effects in GNOME as they will often be the exception to what I just said about not killing the desktop). I use Pop!_OS, and can’t wait for the new desktop environment that they are creating. My hope is that it is memory efficient and that the System76 team makes components that are not directly tied to other components so the user can choose to add the functionality to other window managers or desktop environments.

I have been an Xfce user for ages and switched to Gnome a week ago. It took me about a day to get used to it, and now it feels very comfortable. The only extension I really need is the auto hide of that top panel.

KDE is overloaded with stuff. Thats cool.

I can't decide, both KDE and Gnome are awesome!

For me Gnome is the best DE off all systems we have on computers. It just works. If you need something it doesn't come natively, pretty sure there is an extension which will do it quite simple. Its lightweight, fast, focused on what you're doing, clean and simply beautiful.

I like that you know how to pronounce Gnome linux properly. It's not a garden statue, and not pronounced the same, either.

I've been using MATE. With the help of Compiz, the window animations are very smooth. I have no problem with file manager, I wish it had "new tab" option which would make work easier. The only thing I hate is the taskbar, there's no "icon only" option. Every task opens with its icon and name beside it. If you open two windows of same application then there are two icons with two name beside them which is annoying. But compiz made task selection easier, I just have to move the cursor to the top left and all the active windows show up by tiling themselves on the desktop and you just have to click on the windows that you want to work on.

I like Cinnamon but I wish there would be an easy way to customize it's window manager. I want to add a border around windows but can't find a way to do just that without changing the whole theme.

I prefer Xfce. It's light and capable. Doesn't clog my user experience with a ton of overhead.

from fedora user perspective using KDE is really pain in the ass since KDE development was based on Ubuntu which is deb package while fedora use rpm that often cause some disintegrated package when fedora update plasma-desktop meanwhile some dependency wasnt available in rpm repository. for me its was feel like completly a joke when they provide plasma-desktop package but without proper dependency that suit its version

I really like the video and it was containing almost all majors points to make the comparison consistent . KDE is the greatest DE and if someone could port it to Windows or MacOS a lot of users will use it definitively instead of the default one. GNOME is adopted by the biggest distro because of its documentation and its simplicity to maintain which it the downside of customization in Plasma. Moreover, users in rolling distro experience terrible bugs sometimes with the KDE which gives another point for GNOME. It is also to mention that the adoption of GNOME by the biggest distro lead into GNOME is more supported and also that GNOME possesses better workload in Wayland. I still use KDE because of the DOLPHIN, customization and certainly because of the Plasmoids which weren't mention in the video

been on KDE for about 4 years? i had faced issues. but, i keep using the same thing, same layout that i'm comfortable with, no matter how much time passes. that's what an OS is supposed to provide to me.

You mention trying both on same system, I find that messes up my menu heirarchy with multiple DEs, or maybe that is my fault not configuring it properly. I tend to have different DEs on a different partition, keeps it simple but of course requires full reboot to try alternative.

I'm a KDE guy and love KDE neon, which is my main OS.

Every time I try to use another DE, I always go back to GNOME.

I always use qtile. Between KDE and gnome, I prefer kde.

I like both. But I always find myself comming back at gnome. Had my fun with KDE, customization and all but that's it. KDE is kind of unstable too, stutters were all ovet the place. I've both Kdenlive and Krita in my gnome installation so no need for a full KDE installation either. gnome with a few extensions is perfect for me. That comes from a dude that hated gnome in the past.

KDE is lightweight? Since when? I'll have to see for myself. That said I've been running gnome for a while now. It's really hard to leave that work flow.

Although I love Debian/Ubuntu and I love GNOME, as a German, I am always attracted to the killer-combo OpenSUSE + KDE.

Just so you know, there are plenty of Mac 'tinkerers' out here! Not so much for esthetics (MacOS looks good to me), but for intuitive function/convenience - I've actually done quite a bit to my Mac to make it the way I want. Maximizing screen space, adding shortcuts & gestures, de-colorizing things (to not esthetically distract me when creating graphics/photo editing), etc, etc. And I want similar capability on LInux.

This Is Such A Great Video. I really like KDE. But I Love Gnome. KDE applications are extremely good for lightweight usage. The Falkon Web Browser, Yakuake Terminal Emulator, and Calligra Suite for office related tasks and art work, they're all more than proficient. I even tried the Rekonq Browser just for laughs (not bad). However, Gnome is what I love. The WEB Browser (Epiphany) is OK. Not exactly the browser for power users. But it's still OK. Other than that, I think this video is absolutely great!

I was watching your video. KDE really hasn't moved much for my needs since the video. One thing that is *huge* in respect to KDE, is it's handling of the keyboard system. KDE translates a "Hyper" key into "Meta". I didn't spend time setting all those xkb options to only have them converged into a key that it shouldn't be. This is very frustrating and making my move back to a non KDE environment a "solution" actually.

KDE was my first and was my favorite DE (started with KDE 3) . But Ubuntu's Gnome simplicity is my fav today.

Thank you! I was looking for a RAM, etc comparison but in the end the first few minutes of your video answered my question. I LOVE POSSIBILITIES! KDE for me, please. Now I'll look for a KDE Neon vs X, Y, Z in your videos-list to see what I can find.

I grow up in GNOME-2 on Ubuntu/Linux-Mint,, today I continue that way in MATE desktop on Arch-Linux since 2017,,

I find Plasma has matured quite well and it’s both traditional and modern. I find Gnome keeps stripping away the features and users rely on extensions to make it work. I feel some of those extensions need to be default vs having users to go through an extra step. Plasma is what I replaced on my machines which is even better with ram and better than XFCE now days. Gnome gave me weird font rendering issues on Arch running Evolution Mail app and Plasma had no issues.

This video was missing visuals. Especially when you were talking about the ascetics, and there were 0 examples of how each desktop environment might look like I couldn't watch it further. I'm sure the information in it is good, but that got me quite annoyed.

Thanks for the insights, I love Gnome I have used XFCE and Cinamon before. One day i'll try KDE

Why did you put the windows 98 start menu widget on the thumbnail instead of the actual plasma launcher what

i am the tinkerer, I blow things up and start over.. KDE is for me!

GNOME gives you a nice and polished DE, without any need and hassle to tweak it much. It is the fast option and for many users it is what they look for. KDE is really good at allowing you to own your desktop environment, and that's why I appreciate it too. The only thing I really dislike about KDE is the telemetry. I'm not a fan of such stuff.

This is helpful in guessing which desktop would work best for you, but there is nothing like actually using the desktops. Please try both and use what's best for you!

I am touchpad guy. Start from GNOME 40, there's no desktop has come close. Plasma is now better, but GNOME touchpad gestures is smoother and works well in my laptop (even compared to windows 11)

Great! Nice and fast video! I't would be great if you could put a some desktop images and videos while you talk.

I gotta defend Falkon here... I use it, A LOT. If you have a threadripper Falkon Browser maybe is garbage. But in any other case Falkon is a SPEED BEAST. (and also you can make its tabs transparent with blur and custom theming using kvantum). I always pick Falkon when I want to google something at once without NO DELAY. its only caveat is poor adblocking and lack of modern extensions. But I am actually quite allright with that. On my old netbook whatever browsing became impossible due to modern heavyness of websites. Falkon made the browsing on it not only possible but actually enjoyable. I would always install Falkon first on older hardware.

I'm a rat guy, and used XFCE as my loved DE ever since I hopped to Linux. However, touch screen compatibility was not the best. When I bought my touch screen laptop, I tried KDE and found it pretty cumbersome. I then tried GNOME, and never looked back. GNOME looked back. At this moment I need consistency and compatibility with touchscreen. Looks good and feels good, it's like the GNOME team looked for a DE that was tablet friendly. I might test KDE some other time but in the time being, GNOME is my go-to environment. I just wish I was still using good ole' Rat DE.

I am probably crazy but... Gnome seems to have softer font rendering. I probably at least sound crazy, but fonts in general seem more pretty on gnome. But the latest version KDE is pretty darn good too.

I always had favor Gnome (or almost other) over KDE, back then, because KDE was using much more memory. When it began to show it was using less memory, I git it a try (more than one if fact) but was repulsed by what seems to me a very longer booting time (it feel like 30 seconds more). This is still my feeling about it now.

I went for gnome because of issues I had with KDE that I never got fixed despite all the documentation I read. But in terms of used default programs, desktop design and workflow, KDE. I even tweaked my gnome desktop to look like KDE as much as I could

Neither. Everyone has their own preferences of DE, and some even solely use window managers.

Debian Testing / Arch + "minimum" GNOME + some extensions, works great.

"if you love customization then KDE Plasma is definitely the desktop environment for you" Thanks, that's all I wanted to confirm lol

In short, it's about personal taste.

KDE anytime. I moved from Gnome 2 to KDE 3.5 to Xfce To KDE 4 to Unity to KDE Plasma to Gnome 3 to Budgie to KDE Plasma again, and now I am settled here. The initial Windows-style look is atrocious, but this can be changed in five minutes. Gnome has broken my workflow one time too often (and that was in Budgie, weirdly enough).

I've been using debian since 1998 and I've tried KDE about once per year since then, and always reverted to mate or cinnamon quickly after bumping into bugs after 10 minutes. But now I feel it has reached a usable/stable state fortunately.

Desktop Linux is good in 2022. I use both. Both are better then dinosaur OS that I'm forced to use at work!

I came here and I am at 2 seconds in the video. To answer the title, it all depends on your workflow and what you need. If neither work for you, there are more des than what's depicted in the title. Try them both. I use KDE because it's desktop is more traditional and I can use it's stock widgets instead of having to install a bunch of extensions to get the same desktop on Gnome.

Since I have to use a Windows machine at work, I use KDE on my Linux machine at home. Thankfully I can customize KDE to look and operate almost exactly like Windows. It's a bit of work to customize everything, but it's worth to me to have a consist workflow across all my devices.

When I started tinkering with Linux in 2015 I really liked Gnome, after jumping ship from windows as my main OS to completely running Linux full time, I've gotten to love KDE, and even tho Gnome looks amazing, unfortunately the windows don't have a cohesive look, so with KDE's customization options, I can make it look just as good. I prefer Gnome's Files app (used to be Nautilus) compared to Dolphin on KDE. I'm running Debian 12 with KDE, really a badass system for my personal use tho

for me, its KDE cause it breaks less often than gnome and when KDE breaks, its predictable also i hate the gdm3 it really messes up usage of window managers

GNOME with Material Shell. Fine and beautiful keyboard-driven workflow.

It's funny how the most popular or the default solutions are often not really the best solutions. KDE Plasma arguably beats Gnome 4x in most important for the most people aspects, yet most Linux distros come with Gnome by default. C# beats Java in terms of language features, overall modernity and on average in run-time and memory performance, but Java is more popular than C#. Kotlin tends to beat Java in terms of language features when preserving the power of JVM, yet Java is still the default choice for JVM applications. Linux seems to be more performant, more reliable, more available (because everyone can afford an free OS) and nowadays even easier to maintain on your desktop than Windows, but Windows is the default OS for almost every computer. Blender is more powerful than Maya, and it is free, yet Maya is the de-factor standard in CGI production. The list of the best vs the most popular tech can go on. But really, the desire to be part of the majority makes people make stupid decisions sometimes.

I absolutely love KDE but it does give me headaches. Like kwin freezing up on me when I click on the launcher too fast or have had the computer running for a couple days. Usually a reboot will fix it, but sometimes it takes two power cycles. Still have not found a way to prevent it from doing that though. Could always be my add-on launcher though but I'm too lazy to check

I'm rocking Unity at the moment and love it

If I had to chose. I would recommend Gnome to a user who wants a simple workflow and not much customization and a desktop which integrates well with laptop. I have Fedora Gnome on my laptop and I have no issues with it. But for my desktop, I will be choosing kde simply because I like using the windows like layout on my desktop with customization

I would say KDE has become more popular because of the Steam Deck

I started using Linux back in February of this year, and have used a whole bunch of distros. Starting with Mint, then PopOS, Fedora, then Kubuntu (that being where I discovered KDE Plasma). I then went back to PopOS, used it for a few weeks, then went to Fedora and used it for awhile. Also went back to windows several times. It wasn't until this past month that I dived in to Arch based distros, after PopOS got bricked. I played around with Manjaro several months ago, with me running Arch Linux for awhile, but EndeavourOS is the one that sold me on Arch. No matter which distro I've used, KDE was always the desktop environment I went with. I've tried so many times to give Gnome a shot, and I genuinely hate it. Not saying that it's bad, but for me I hate it a lot. I find the software that comes with KDE to be significantly better. I consider PopOS my favorite Debian/Ubuntu based distro that I've used, but I hate the Cosmic desktop environment, and how even when I was using KDE on it, there was a lot of Gnome bs baked into the OS that I couldn't get away from.

I am a Gnome guy myself, as the options are to many on KDE. But that said, as mentioned in the video. It is up to the user, and most distributions have both. I would try not to have both installed at the same ti mm e though, as they might interfere with each other. No when evaluate them at least. And yes, Debian has officially different installation ISO files to choose from. 😉😎

I am a video editor, and honestly I probably could do almost all of what I do in Kdenlive. For an open source project it is very mature especially considering what it is up against.

THE ONLY DEBATE THAT MATTERS TO ME

Great video. But Cinnamon is the best. Which also means Gnome/GTK is better than KDE Plasma.

Well windows is like for everybody. Not everyone is a techie. And man, thnx a lot. This helped me a lot. Now I have manjaro kde plasma cause I like kde.

I've been using KDE since the late 90's. It's both changed very little and a lot. Funny thing is, it's always been a resource hog and it has kind of surprised me how little it uses now, but it can creep up still. Gnome on the other hand just has never appealed to me, and it's always been lacking a lot of functionality. I don't understand how anyone can find its handling of workspaces superior because KDE can customize it more and even do just what Gnome does anyhow.

I tried to use GNOME so many times, and so many times it has failed me... Honestly, it's as you said: GNOME is made to be used as default! The problem is just that: the default is not even good... not even close to good, FOR ME. Talking about defaults: I use default KDE, the most default a default could ever be, and it's freaking sweet!

This is like asking the question of which is better, Craftsman or Black and Decker. In the end their tools used to complete a task.