(If you know where I stole this from, I love you.)
I like MATE. It's Gnome with the bugs ironed out. It's very nice.
In principal, Gnome is the archetype that we all seek in a desktop.
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
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I like Plasma.
I know, real brave take
I love Plasma. It's fast, it's stable, it's beautiful, it's real simple and I intuitive, it's easily customizable via GUI, it's packed with great features (that stay completely out of your way if you don't need them). Even the KDE apps are awesome across the board.
It's all down to preference, yadda yadda, but I honestly don't understand why someone would use something like Cinnamon, XFCE or, god forbid, GN*ME instead of KDE Plasma.
That being said, just use what you wanna use.
I honestly don't understand why someone would use something like Cinnamon, XFCE or, god forbid, GN*ME instead of KDE Plasma.
RAM usage. I sometime restore machines that just wouldn't handle KDE. While GNOME is as heavy as KDE, cinnamon is lighter and xfce even more. An average finished KDE setup eats 4GB for me while a cinnamon one uses 1,5GB and an XFCE one 0,5GB. This makes KDE close to unusable on older 2 or 4GB systems.
I tried to use linux on a tablet, I've tried GNOME multiple times since it is apparently the best for touchscreen-only devices. This was hell.
As much as I'd love to be able to like that thing I just can't.
Zero customisability, everything has to be changed through extensions, but the extension manager isn't even part of GNOME's core and has to be installed separately.
The settings page is severely lacking so I had to configure everything in .conf files or through CLI directly.
And the whole thing is as stable as a one-legged chair on top of a unbalanced washing machine.
KDE extension crashing : "oupsie a part of your desktop crashed and restarted as fast as possible, hope you didn't notice"
GNOME extension crashing : "go fuck yourself, I burned your whole session to the ground, log back in and pray you weren't doing anything worth saving"
In the end I customized KDE to look and behave like GNOME, this way around was surprisingly easier than just making GNOME bearable.
Oh and to the taskbar haters out there : my first computer was running windows 95 so you'll be taking my taskbar from my cold dead hands, only KDE let me fulfill my dream of putting taskbars absolutely everywhere (even got two perpendicular ones on my bottom monitor)
All the JavaScript in gnome make it super icky to me as an ex-webdev, and unusable on hardware that is otherwise perfectly fine with other DEs. From high resource usage, memory leaks, and breaking extensions, I have a hard time believing that their userbase is anyone other than mobile native younger folk who are good at consuming via the iPad launcher paradigm. Just my humble opinion, nothing more.
Just use any Linux distro you like!
Stock Ubuntu with GNOME
I think the key is to just not hate on someone else for having a preference for one you don't care for. (And not being an overzealous missionary for your own preference.) It's fun seeing the variety and people geeking out about the little intricacies they love about their favorites
That's the right take. Every couple years I've given KDE a shot for a month and it just won't click no matter how much I configure it, this goes back pre plasma. I dislike gnome but it's closer to what I want out of the box, then popos came along and I realized I just wanted a tiling wm all along but needed the hybrid approach to enjoy adjusting.
That's just a good approach to life in general.
I got to take this baby from 999 to 1K
This made me laugh more than it should have. It perfectly captures how we all try to be neutral… until that one preference slips out. Classic moment.
I like gnome DE, I dislike the arrogance of the project team.
My straw was the login-to-exposé thing.
Can you elaborate for the curious? I tried searching but couldn't find anything. What's the login to exposé thing?
Once upon a time, when you logged in you arrived at the desktop. Then typically you'd click a docked application icon or use the hot corner to open the overview (Apple calls it exposé on macOS) and search for an application to start. Some people would just hit the keyboard shortcut and start typing an application name. Very quick.
One day, the gnome team decided that since a lot of people do this, that immediately after logging in you'd arrive directly at this overview/exposé mode ready to type an app name.
Quite a few people didn't like this change, and requested a setting so they could enable/disable it as was their preference. The response from the gnome team was essentially 'get fucked' enshrouded by weak/nonsense justifications for the change and for not making it optional, apparently taking the request as some kind of personal attack.
It was a trivial minor change but the way the team handled it was... lacking.
Yeah, that sounds exactly like the GNOME3 team.
For years, they fought back against giving users the option to change where their dock is, forcing them to be stuck with an asinine vertical dock because "vertical space is at a premium."
They do this because they're lazy and incompetent. They simply do not want more work for themselves and will browbeat any of their users into doing things the "stupid gnome3 way."
Their designers are some of the dumbest people in the industry. Since they have a yes-man/echo chamber culture, they don't ever get to learn from their mistakes because nobody holds them accountable for failure.
It was (and still is) the default input focus to the Search box on the Save dialog. Why? Just.... why? Why would I ever want to start typing in the Search box when I'm saving a file. I have never, ever thought to myself as I saved something that I should search for something to name this thing I'm saving after something else somewhere on this filesystem.
Why? Just… why?
Any time you ask the Gnome devs this, you can expect the answer to be "elegance". And then they block you.
I like gnome and it's philosophy 😬
There's plenty of "customizability" friendly options out there. I like how gnome isn't afraid to break things to improve
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I prefer the default gnome experience to the default kde experience.
I also prefer the styling of most gnome apps, and actively dislike kde apps styling.
Gnome is less customizable, but customizable enough for what I want.
I'm also biased, because I was using Ubuntu since it came out, up until a few years ago 🤷♂️
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KDE: "I just blue myself"
Gnome is very competently made except it's made for a different genre of person to me, and their attitude towards customisation is outright disdainful. You install an extension or mess around in tweaks and gnome looks at you like you just used the salad fork for seafood.
I think it's made for people who like Macs or sth.
Wouldn't be a problem(people can use whatever makes them happy) if the gnome Devs shit attitude didn't trickle outwards and harm customizability in other environments.
just used the salad fork for seafood.
What's wrong with using the same fork for salad and seafood?
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