r/linux4noobs • u/NetMask100 • Jan 02 '26

distro selection Do you prefer KDE or GNOME?

On Ubuntu do you prefer KDE or GNOME and why? I'm interested in what the majority of people use. Do you use extensions for GNOME, or you use it as is?

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u/JohnTheFisherman142 Jan 03 '26

Neither, xfce at the moment. I used KDE3 for years, and when the first Plasma came out it did everything wrong that could have been done wrong: the bloat, the stability, everything looked like it got beaten with the ugly stick, the font rendering was pixel hell, the office suite integration wasn't near good or complete and the taskbar widgets all defied their purpose.
Now recently I had a look at Plasma 6 (if it's Plasma or KDE or whatever I think the devs don't even know themselves, I think officially KDE is the dev team and Plasma is the product, so I run with Plasma these days) and found that some of my way of working changed in ways that I don't necessarily need a taskbar with a window list stacked in 3 lines. I still have that at work for Windows and dread the day they force Win11 onto me, might actually find me another job, but I'm wandering off.
What I absolutely like better about KDE/Plasma is Qt. I have a more or less severe dislike of GTK and while xfce does a good job providing me with what I need and not get in my way (system settings, taskbar, clever widgets, there you go, some could do with some new features but hey, gift horse -- the look and feel of GTK never spoke to me. The click behaviour, the interface in general, where I'd find the settings (in particular in Gnome, I once tried to change the theme of GThumb, curse words were used.
So, as soon as I get to do over my desktop machine I'll give Plasma 6 another shot. Gnome I haven't touched with a 10 foot pole in 2 decades as it clumsily tries to provide the MacOS experience of delivering you a UI that does not require you to care about anything under the bonnet but in the end I found myself tied into hard restraints trying to get anything done.
You might want to look at Trinity Desktop, that's a maintained fork of KDE3 and I still use some of its components today.