this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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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.
I just randomly tried KDE recently and made the swap from Linux Mint to Kubuntu a week ago. Definitely agree on the polish factor, everything just feels great with KDE and I've been pretty happy
The recent evolution is great and I've been a happy KDE user for many years, but my oh my is NetworkManager bad. It's not good on all systems that use it under the hood, but I find it especially unintuitive and so outdated. The applet thing is fine (still suffers from weird behaviour from NM's core), but actual settings screen drives me crazy... The Bluetooth one should also receive some love, but it's decent. NM needs serious revision.
Yes. There's definitely some UX jank in there. I saw something the other day at least about a new unified UX framework to replace the multiple ones they have now. Which hopefully should lead to much more consistency across applications and hopefully some updates and rewrites that will be better.
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.
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!
And unlike Windows, they didn't backtrack on it. Instead, they doubled down and said, "You'll use your computer our way, and you'll like it!"
IMO, the whole interface is a mess. It's designed as if it's supposed to be a tablet/moblie first DE, but the actual tablet/mobile features (like on-screen keyboard) are kind of crap. Everything about it seems to be designed with aesthetics first, functionality last.
I think that's a dumb way of looking at it, because you're not forced to use GNOME on Linux. Just because tiling window managers exist, or scrolling ones, and some even more specific ones (like gamescope, which doesn't even display multiple windows), doesn't mean they're trying to force you to use your computer their way.
Having diverse options is good, it doesn't lock you into doing things a specific way, it gives you more options of how things work. The only thing that sucks is that they made the change as an update, so previous users might be excluded, but even then it's opensource, the developers can (and should) change the software to fit their vision, and if you don't like it you can fork it (which people have done with gnome).
The whole "it's just one option and having lots of options is good" argument would make more sense if Gnome was a niche DE that you specifically have to look for and install if you want it.
But when it's the default DE for some of the biggest distros out there -- and especially when it's the default for some of the 'beginner-friendly' distros -- then that argument isn't quite as good. My biggest problem with that is the (pretty frequent) case of users new to Linux and deciding to try it out. So they pick one of the most popular 'beginner-friendly' distros ... it comes with Gnome by default ... the new user tries using it, and they have a hard time with it; it doesn't do the things they want it to, and it's difficult and complicated to work around those problems ... and then instead of coming to the conclusion that Gnome sucks and trying a different DE, they come to the conclusion that Linux sucks and go back to Windows/Mac ... because they don't know the difference between Gnome and Linux, and they may be unlikely to try multiple different flavors if the first one was 'bad'.
I don't have a problem with Gnome existing. In fact, I'm glad it does. I'm glad people who like it have the option to use it. I have a problem with it being the default DE of major distros, especially beginner-friendly distros. It's giving Linux as a whole a bad name.
That all sounds reasonably fair, but it seems like my point still stands, since nowhere do you actually put the blame with GNOME - it's the distros choosing it.
I'm also not sure if I'd agree with you in general, it might not be worth bothering too much with users who will immediately dismiss Linux because the distro they chose ships with a DE that has a slightly nonstandard workflow. That sounds like a person that refuses to try or research anything and will probably either make a nuisance of themselves or leave for other weird reasons anyways.
What a surprise that a DE created by a Microsoft fan does the same mistakes than Microsoft.
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.
Ah, right, Ubuntu uses gnome
I'm still stuck with unity in my head, because their gnome got modified to look that way - at least it was quite a few years ago, when I used it somewhere
I also thought, that currently KDE is more popular
It's picking up steam and could easily go that way. The GNOME team with their inflexibility is pushing many away. They even got pop to start their own DE. Because they were tired of writing addons that would break every few releases.