• esc@piefed.socialEnglish
    201·
    1 hour ago

    Is it really most popular?

    It’s not more stable than plasma surely, at least when user does any customization.

    Simplicity is questionable, unless simple means ‘unlearn everything and do it our way’.

    • Eldritch@piefed.worldEnglish
      9·
      41 minutes ago

      For a long time it was. KDE kind of exploded themselves back around version 4. GNOME made huge inroads while the KDE Dev team’s got their shit sorted. Main DE to the flagship general user distribution etc. It’s just a fact. And not gonna lie I still have fond memories of GNOME 2.

      But the KDE team really put their time in and cooked. It isn’t perfect. But the over all polish shows. Not to mention its been snowballing lately. I have my whole family on plasma 6 right now. It’s familiar as it needs to be, stable and mostly intuitive. It’s just so good. In fact my only gripe right now is a niche Wayland issue and not DE related.

      • esc@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        25 minutes ago

        Meh, plasma was stable enough by 4.4 (when I’ve switched from gnome 2), there were some problems, but gnome 3 released about that time wasn’t any better. I’m not sure about popularity of gnome, it was repeated a lot but personally I’ve met one person to this day that used vanilla gnome 3/4/5/50 not representative of course but it’s just weird that supposedly everyone is running it yet among the category of people that linux is most popular with it doesn’t show.

        • Eldritch@piefed.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 minutes ago

          Sure. But the first few releases unfortunately weren’t. And you gotta be conscious of projecting your experiences onto others. I mean I sure do lol. Techy people don’t mind experimenting and putting in a bit of work. But the normie’s do. For nearly a decade Ubuntu and GNOME was what was recommended/used.

          Oh sure, there’s kubuntu which isn’t their flagship or similarly supported. So you would run into edge cases and lack of polish on the distro side. There was so much inertia for a while most major distros flagship was GNOME out of the box. Even if KDE, Mate, Budgie, or Cinnamon were avalible from repos or community maintained forks. Your vanilla user was always going to go with the defaults.

          I didn’t like it and haven’t touched gnome in years and Ubuntu even longer. But I’m definitely not a Normy.

        • Buffalox@lemmy.world
          1·
          7 minutes ago

          Gnome lost a lot of popularity with Gnome shell, and for good reason. Gnome made the same mistake Microsoft did with Windows 8, which was also universally hated. By the same mistake I mean they changed EVERYTHING!

    • adarza@lemmy.ca
      English
      8·
      51 minutes ago

      yea, gnome is “more popular”. doesn’t mean it’s “better”, just that it’s the default environment for some of the most widely-used distributions.

  • saltesc@lemmy.world
    5·
    47 minutes ago

    Heh. My Linux started with Ubuntu like many others. I appreciated GNOME.

    Then I got confident enough to distro hop and with that cam DE hop. Can’t deny KCD is just so much better for the kind of user I am.

    It’s just kinda nice having your computer do what you want it to do, ya know?

  • Buffalox@lemmy.world
    2·
    10 minutes ago

    This must be about Gnome 2.8 when Gnome indeed was by far the most popular desktop environment on Linux.
    And then Gnome 2.8 was deprecated and no longer maintained, and for years after Gnome Shell was complete and utter shit.
    IMO it still is, because they have changed fundamentals like how virtual desktops work, that disrupt my workflow.

    I agree Gnome is more elegant, but that’s irrelevant when key fundamentals simply don’t work anymore.

    So to get the desktop I like to actually use, I use KDE instead.

    • TipRing@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      20 minutes ago

      I was going to mention that there’s probably a lot of people who don’t know what e621 is, but then I remembered what community I was in.

    • Bhaelfur@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      39 minutes ago

      The GNOME workflow works for me. I tried KDE recently and found I kept trying to make it like GNOME and kept failing. I do miss OpenBox, though… I’m tempted to try some Quick Shell set up using labwc.

  • [object Object]@lemmy.ca
    22·
    30 minutes ago

    I actually kind of hate both.

    KDE is an unopinionated Windows clone built of a shitty proprietary base. Stuff mostly works well though, I can’t deny that. It just looks and feels like crap.

    GNOME development is stupid. They have a binding for every language you can imagine, but the widgets leave you up shit creek and Gnome thinks it’s smarter than you. Gnome looks pretty good, but after trying in earnest I don’t want to work with it.