Honestly I can’t imagine why anyone would use either of these when there are lightweight DEs like XFCE and Cinnamon that are not only easier on the system resources, but also more stable, customizeable, user-friendly and more pleasant to look at. I stopped taking gnome seriously ever since they came up with GTK3. They had a chance to fix it with GTK4 but instead they somehow made it even worse (as if client-side decorations wasn’t bad enough, now theyre doing clientside shadows? Seriously!?!?). KDE is allegedly better because it gives the user more options, but anyone who’s actually used it will tell you that it suffers from the same kind of bloat and braindead design decisions as gnome.
To each their own though? I can’t imagine why anyone would want something other than i3 (or similar), because almost by definition the DE is not the program I fired up my computer to interact with, and i3 “gets out of the way better” than most others in my experience.
But…that’s just my use case. It’s a horrible UX for most people, just happens to work well for me.
My preferred DE is XFCE. However, over the past few months, I have moved most of my work to a new distro and made the jump to Wayland. Both of these have landed me on KDE.
KDE has by far the most complete, and therefore painless, Wayland support.
KDE has been great to use honestly. I mostly do not think about it which is what I want in a DE these days. The configurations I need are there when I need them and not in the way when I don’t. KDE uses more memory than XFCE but not nearly as much as Firefox or Chrome.
I dislike modern GNOME but KDE has been great and, at this point, I feel like it is the best option on Wayland.
Gonna talk from KDE positions here. GNOME, too, has its place, but I recognize it’s not for everybody.
More pleasant to look at
Certainly not for the average person. For a normie user, KDE looks way way nicer, and it’s certainly way more modern than either XFCE or Cinnamon. Sure, the latter can be made into something modernishly enough, but the customization options are way more limited here. Either way, out of the box, KDE is much more preferable to most.
User-friendly
Can hardly find anything that is more user-friendly than KDE. Everything you can possibly think of is available graphically, the interface is extremely sleek and ergonomic, and you can change anything at all to your liking. Which leads us to…
Customizable
Why would anyone say XFCE or Cinnamon are more cutomizable is beyond my comprehension. XFCE can be somewhat reasonably customized, but the anount of technical knowledge required to do anything more than resizing bars is beyond the scope of normal users. Cinnamon is outright rigid, and its customization options are extremely poor by any means. KDE is easily customizable and can be turned into anything through a what-you-see-is-what-you-get graphical editor that requires 0 technical knowledge. Still, if you really want to go the old school way because you’re used to it, want something not offered, or can’t imagine yourself descending into the GUI designed for plebs, you can do it too. KDE is king when it comes to this aspect.
Stable
As far as XFCE goes, this does hold quite some weight. It has a mature codebase, allowing it to have plenty of things figured out. For mission-critical systems, it might be preferable. Same can’t be said for Cinnamon, but either way, every popular DE is stable enough for home use without much worry - including KDE.
In any case, having used all four, I stopped exactly at KDE and GNOME - the former being perfect for casual multitasking and entertainment, the latter being nice for focused work.
From the top of my head I can think of a few reasons:
Better feature support (HDR, better fractional scaling etc)
Better integration (specifically Gnome)
More complete graphical settings
Quicker adoption rate
Wayland support (X11 is pretty much dead at this point)
Aside from RAM (of which most machines do have plenty by now) there isn’t really too much overhead these days. In fact battery usage on Gnome and KDE with Wayland is usually better than with X11.
KDE is allegedly better because it gives the user more options, but anyone who’s actually used it will tell you that it suffers from the same kind of bloat and braindead design decisions as gnome.
I have used it & can’t tell you this. What am I doing wrong?
KDE is allegedly better because it gives the user more options, but anyone who’s actually used it will tell you that it suffers from the same kind of bloat and braindead design decisions as gnome.
I’ve used KDE on and off for the past 20 years or so. These days I use KDE on my work laptop and Cinnamon on my personal one. Personally I think they both do their job just fine, but apparently I’m in the wrong.
Honestly I can’t imagine why anyone would use either of these when there are lightweight DEs like XFCE and Cinnamon that are not only easier on the system resources, but also more stable, customizeable, user-friendly and more pleasant to look at. I stopped taking gnome seriously ever since they came up with GTK3. They had a chance to fix it with GTK4 but instead they somehow made it even worse (as if client-side decorations wasn’t bad enough, now theyre doing clientside shadows? Seriously!?!?). KDE is allegedly better because it gives the user more options, but anyone who’s actually used it will tell you that it suffers from the same kind of bloat and braindead design decisions as gnome.
To each their own though? I can’t imagine why anyone would want something other than i3 (or similar), because almost by definition the DE is not the program I fired up my computer to interact with, and i3 “gets out of the way better” than most others in my experience.
But…that’s just my use case. It’s a horrible UX for most people, just happens to work well for me.
My preferred DE is XFCE. However, over the past few months, I have moved most of my work to a new distro and made the jump to Wayland. Both of these have landed me on KDE.
KDE has by far the most complete, and therefore painless, Wayland support.
KDE has been great to use honestly. I mostly do not think about it which is what I want in a DE these days. The configurations I need are there when I need them and not in the way when I don’t. KDE uses more memory than XFCE but not nearly as much as Firefox or Chrome.
I dislike modern GNOME but KDE has been great and, at this point, I feel like it is the best option on Wayland.
Gonna talk from KDE positions here. GNOME, too, has its place, but I recognize it’s not for everybody.
Certainly not for the average person. For a normie user, KDE looks way way nicer, and it’s certainly way more modern than either XFCE or Cinnamon. Sure, the latter can be made into something modernishly enough, but the customization options are way more limited here. Either way, out of the box, KDE is much more preferable to most.
Can hardly find anything that is more user-friendly than KDE. Everything you can possibly think of is available graphically, the interface is extremely sleek and ergonomic, and you can change anything at all to your liking. Which leads us to…
Why would anyone say XFCE or Cinnamon are more cutomizable is beyond my comprehension. XFCE can be somewhat reasonably customized, but the anount of technical knowledge required to do anything more than resizing bars is beyond the scope of normal users. Cinnamon is outright rigid, and its customization options are extremely poor by any means. KDE is easily customizable and can be turned into anything through a what-you-see-is-what-you-get graphical editor that requires 0 technical knowledge. Still, if you really want to go the old school way because you’re used to it, want something not offered, or can’t imagine yourself descending into the GUI designed for plebs, you can do it too. KDE is king when it comes to this aspect.
As far as XFCE goes, this does hold quite some weight. It has a mature codebase, allowing it to have plenty of things figured out. For mission-critical systems, it might be preferable. Same can’t be said for Cinnamon, but either way, every popular DE is stable enough for home use without much worry - including KDE.
In any case, having used all four, I stopped exactly at KDE and GNOME - the former being perfect for casual multitasking and entertainment, the latter being nice for focused work.
From the top of my head I can think of a few reasons:
Aside from RAM (of which most machines do have plenty by now) there isn’t really too much overhead these days. In fact battery usage on Gnome and KDE with Wayland is usually better than with X11.
I have used it & can’t tell you this. What am I doing wrong?
I’ve used KDE on and off for the past 20 years or so. These days I use KDE on my work laptop and Cinnamon on my personal one. Personally I think they both do their job just fine, but apparently I’m in the wrong.
You are not wrong.
However, at this moment in history, there is another consideration.
Today, Cinnamon means X11 and KDE means Wayland. Xorg is becoming a second class citizen in KDE. Cinnamon is not there yet on Wayland.
In two years, you can be back to using either one as you prefer (on Wayland).
I wanna go back to XFCE when support for Wayland is okay.
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