Linux

XFCE

KDE Plasma Wayland, I'm using it for gaming mainly and occasionally for VR.

Pros:

• supports DRM leasing mandatory for wired VR headsets
• supports tearing (also in windowed apps but requires an additional setting) which reduces input latency in games
• usually all the new fancy features, ex. HDR, appear quickly
• decent support for fractional scaling (handy on laptops)

Cons:

• you might encounter bugs. While Plasma 6 has been a much better experience as opposed to older versions of it, there are still some bugs here and there appearing between the updates. As of this writing thought I can't recall any bugs on my system.

KDE since I hand compiled a 2.0 beta.

I prefer GNOME on my Microsoft Surface because I fine it much better than KDE for touchscreens. And GNOME's dynamic workspaces are amazing to use for my screen.

I prefer KDE on my desktop and laptop. Highly customizable and works great. I wish it natively had dynamic workspaces though

I use GNOME and I enjoy it a lot. If you decide to go with GNOME, imho try to install as few extensions as possible so that you can experience the desktop environment the way it's intended by the developers. Of course, if it's not for you, then with the help of extensions you can adapt it to your liking.

Pros:

• Beautiful to look at and gets out of the way. GNOME scored great productivity gains for me.
• Fast, responsive and very stable (I'm on Fedora 40).
• Great experience with flatpaks.
• The best touchpad gestures in the world. Any DE, any OS.

Cons:

• Even though it is very stable, sometimes it crashes. Last time the crash was caused by Thunderbird; then I switched Thunderbird to flatpak too, so that if it crashes again it will not bring down the whole DE (applause to flatpak for delivering the tech 👏). Disclaimer: prior to the crash, I haven't shut down / restart my laptop for 20 days... it might not be Thunderbird alone that caused the problem.

🚧⚠️ That said, there's currently a really annoying bug in GNOME that causes HUGE (or even - INSANE!) disk I/O! I don't know when it is going to be fixed, but for the first time in two years this made me consider trying other desktop environments.

I love GNOME and the way you just open everything in a full screen window and just switch workspaces easily.

I find it so much better than just switching windows the way I have to do on Windows 10 at work.

I might be tempted to try to have the same workflow on KDE one day as personnalisation might a bit too limited on GNOME. Does anyone know if you can do it?

I use a window manager on my desktop, and gnome on my laptop. Gnome's gestures are amazing with a touchpad

I'm OK with GNOME.

KDE - Was Gnome, but I switched for a reason. I, uh, forgot the reason.

Five years of Mate (which is essentially Gnome 2 on life support) replaced by a couple years of KDE Plasma.

Mate treated me well enough, it was mostly stable, capable, and competent. But it was a bit crusty around the edges, and being so niche meant search-engine-visible help resources for anything than went wrong were virtually nonexistent. In hindsight, using it as a beginner's DE was probably a mistake. I suppose in being so austere and devoid of resources it taught me to develop more of a "get to the bottom of it yourself" attitude to debugging and have humbler expectations about form versus function, but that's a pretty rough sell to most people. Mate is definitely better as a drink than a desktop environment.

I don't need to talk about KDE Plasma at all because the rest of the thread already has. I have nothing new to add beyond the comment that I like their mascot character.

I have no informed opinion on Gnome 3. All I've gleaned about it is that it's supposedly "my way or the highway" by design, and the "my way" in question is controversially counter-grain to a lot of established expectations (e.g. it's literally why Mate exists). Which is neither here nor there to me, objectively. But I will say I have no interest learning a new way of doing things, even if it's theoretically superior, when a conventional system still exists, is viable, is highly polished, and is kept sharp-edged. Hence, KDE Plasma.

I started on gnome. Used gnome for most of my linux life. However, after some memory and performance issues, I decided to try KDE. That was about 3 years ago and everything that handles it well and I use a GUI with has been moved to KDE.

Gnome user here.

I'm using Cinnamon, I find it better when using a customized Cinnamenu applet (instead of the default app launcher).

Used to use GNOME on my workstation, switched to KDE and regretting it, now using GNOME on the laptops and will use GNOME on my new workstation once I get it

GNOME because it just works better with network shares. Really wanted to use KDE but I use a lot of network shares and it just annoyed me.

In KDE I open a network folder in the file browser, double click a video and VLC can’t see it because it uses a different sharing protocol.

On GNOME it just works seamlessly.

I know I can fix it in command line, but I don’t want to. I tried the KDE fuse plug in but that had other issues.

KDE. Historicaly I was using Gnome (1 then 2) but Gnome3 was just .... So I switched to KDE and never looked back since, it so customizable that I can set it just right for me. No shade to the great work made by the Gnome3 team but I am a KDE guy now...

I use KDE as I can set it up just how I like it. I never got on with Gnome at all. The truth of it is that the only way to know if you prefer Gnome to KDE is to give it a good try out. Don't forget Cinnamon, Xfce, and Mate also!

KDE with Polonium for Window Management because I want tiling but still looking for a better way to get tiling into KDE. If someone knows.

I recommend GNOME from a purely security perspective. Currently, "GNOME is the only desktop that secures privileged wayland protocols like screencopy." It also has a nice permission system for (dis)allowing microphone, camera, and location access. I wish the developers were more open to encouraging customization of the certain GUI elements, like KDE. KDE Plasma does not protect against screen capture, though it is on their radar.

I tried a lot of desktop environments and I think KDE is the best one, games runs much better than GNOME while the desktop is so smart and many features... I really tried so hard GNOME but the UI sucks, it is slower running games, there are missing options very important for me that KDE has, so for me GNOME is a NO for working/gaming purposes.

Yes

Both KDE and GNOME are good DEs (and there are many other great ones, and you don't even need to use a DE; a mismash of applications with your compositor of choice works just aswell - but I digress), you can't really go wrong with either.

For someone new to Linux, I would likely recommend GNOME, because it is more opinionated. While KDE is a lot more configurable, that also has a huge downside: configuration fatigue. GNOME is more restrictive, yes, but that has the advantage of not overwhelming you right out of the box.

If you like and wish to tinker, though, go with KDE. If you want to gently ease into Linux, go with GNOME first, and once you're comfortable, you can still experiment with KDE. You can install both, and switch between them simply by logging out of one and into the other.

No, I don't

To be clear, these are not the only two options, just the biggest and most new-user-friendly.

I got started in gnome, but am currently using Hyprland (and QTile if I need X)

Plasma on the desktop with the 40" 4K screen with lotsa windows and desktops. Gnome on the laptop, each app full-screen and swipe left-right to switch between them.

Been using KDE for 2 years and love it. Only weird issue is my old desktop i am running Arch with KDE headless to stream to the steam link in the kids room and plasma shell crashes a bunch. Still haven't figured out why.

I use KDE Plasma on my desktop and GNOME on my laptop — though, by my experience, GNOME has been mildly annoying. I just find it too "restrictive" when compared with KDE. I'm also not super fond of how some apps seem to integrate rather poorly with GNOME. I do think that GNOME's interface works well with a laptop, but the UX hasn't been the best for me. I have few, if any, complaints regarding KDE.

I don't really like Gnome as I like to tinker with everything, so I use KDE. I also have a laptop with Cinnamon, which is also pretty good.

Gnome on my work notebook, KDE Plasma on my own machines.

I like KDE Plasma better overall but Gnome was a little bit more stable for me so far. I don't mind UI differences that much, I'm not very much reliant on the GUI and can deal with pretty much any UI paradigm.

If you're new, IMHO you should be looking at the distro as a whole, not the DE specifically. Yeah, if you find one you mostly like but want to try other similar distros, it's probably a good thing to stay with the same DE. However, it's not something to get hung up on as distros often tweak the DE.

And to answer your question, Cinnamon. After years of distro-hopping, I've spent most of the past decade on Linux Mint.