Comment by dingnuts
2 months ago
This was true years ago but Gnome slowly removed every feature I liked and put me on an update treadmill for each and every plug-in, and I needed a bunch of them for basic functionality normal desktops provide.
A trivial example: keeping a working weather widget on my taskbar for an update cycle without breaking it was too much to ask for Gnome. I put up with this kind of thing for YEARS before switching to Plasma. Widgets for your taskbar and stable plug-in APIs should be table stakes for a desktop environment, especially if its whole philosophy is one that the core product should be minimal and most functionality should be in plugins.
You know what KDE has? Features. You know what it doesn't have a lot of? Bugs. Maybe you've tried it four times over the years but after a short trial three years ago I've been using exclusively Plasma.
It's way better than Gnome at this point, and I say this as a Gnome 2.x user. I laughed at KDE 4 back in the day.
But I'm pretty sure everyone in this thread who is bitching about Plasma has not used it in recent times. It's an absolutely fantastic, solid, polished, featureful desktop. To say otherwise is just to display your ignorance, frankly.
I agree, I just used gnome as the other mainstream DE alternative. I am a happy user of i3, due to my 1070ti giving a lot of problems using wayland. That could be the culprit of my unstability. I want to change to AMD gpus for that reason, and I'll some day test it again for sure.
My last time using kde was a few months ago, and it was stability issues (which could be hardware related), but also cumbersome customization of main UI, and minor annoying bugs, that keep accumulating through usage.
Don't get me wrong, I love KDE concept and I don't think Gnome is making great decisions keeping it minimalist (I use i3 for that reason. If I want a DE I want it fully featured and customizable).
I'm just sharing my personal view and agreeing with another user. I know what users can think about fabulous software, and that they (we) are biased in many many ways.
I was also one of the people who preferred Gnome back when it was KDE3 vs Gnome2, and I concur - the situation is very different today. Using Gnome feels like being force fed some kind of bland paste while being assured that it's healthy and good for you. With KDE, I can actually set it up in such a way that things are where I expect to find them, and then forget that it's even there.