The way I use a computer changes frequently, having an overly opinionated desktop environment makes it feel like it's not my computer. I like my computer to work for me at my current time and I don't mind the inconvenience of modifying settings to get there. I would rather defaults just work but I'm not asking my computer to read my mind. I've settled with KDE but I often use other window managers and desktop environments. Last week I used twm for the whole week. Other than scaling issues it was fine.
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
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I use KDE because it's good and because GNOME is bad.
Over the years, I don't think there's many DE's or WM's that I haven't tried to live with on a daily driver, such as KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon, Qtile, XMonad, I3, AwesomeWM, etc etc. What I found over the years was how much I appreciated a clean, simplistic UI for an operating system.
After spending multiple years on 'window manager only' setups (got fed up with updating configs on major updates, and got fed up with the amount of config I had to do), I returned back to KDE mainly for the intense amount of OOTB customisation. However, what I realised after a while was that I was just setting up KDE to look and behave like Gnome.
So 2 years after last using KDE, I'm now just using Gnome all the time. I like the workflow, on laptop personally I think the gesture navigation is better than any other DE, and I love the simplistic design. Plus extensions get me what isn't included OOTB.
Downside to Gnome is when major updates occur and extensions break as a result, other than that I can't think of much bad about Gnome
GNOME makes it a pain to switch between two applications, unless you have a touchscreen or a keyboard always at the ready. There's a reason why Ubuntu ships with the Dash to Panel extension by default. And besides, the customization in GNOME is effectively non-existent since the migration to Adwaita, anything resembling theming is literally a hack on top. KDE, on the other hand, is more flexible, only problem is that most of the themes rely on a separate Kvantum engine, but otherwise it is certainly possible to customize things to your liking much more so than with GNOME.
I think there's not too many technical reasons to choose one or the other lol, just look up a couple of videos on Youtube and that might be enough for you to decide for yourself
or use https://distrosea.com/