In your experience, what is more stable, faster, safer for you and what do you use? I used to use Gnome and often had the problem of extensions breaking when I had to replace some extensions, disable something, inconvenience, and also encountered some bugs on Gnome that are not present on KDE. I have a bug on Gnome with Wayland where the keyboard layout doesn’t switch 1 time, that’s a bug.
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There’s a thread open about this already…
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I use and have used GNOME for years. And I’ve rarely had any issues with it. I also only use very few extensions and all of them are popular enough such that they don’t break between OS upgrades as they are well maintained and made for the DE.
Both are great options, you can’t go wrong with either. It really comes down to personal preference. Also, there are no objective metrics against which to evaluate which is more stable, faster, and safer like you ask.
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Along the lines of gnome-extensions, I only use a few of what is provided by the official fedora repo maintainers. It still occasionally breaks and it mostly gets fixed. So far so good.
Its probably best to say away from the extensions.gnome.org ecosystem. They give out AUR vibes, Its not out of fear of malicious intent though, more like irresponsible coding practices and such. Use at your own risk.
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GNOME, by far.
For me, it’s KDE. I find GNOME unusable.
There easiest way to switch between windows remains Alt+Tab as they refuse to have a taskbar or dock and last time I checked Alt+Tab default to switching apps not windows. Virtual desktops can be nice but I think the intended workflow is a bit like on a phone where you have one full-screen app at a time. Which makes it very annoying for me personally without an extension.
The file manager is also complete crap, you can’t even do type-ahead find like in any other file manager.
But these are deliberate UI decisions rather than bugs and maybe it’s just me who can’t deal with it. If you can somehow cope with vanilla GNOME without extensions then it is otherwise a secure and mature desktop environment.
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Why?
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Without extensions, I certainly wouldn’t use Gnome
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I agree.
GNOME is very opiniated and if you can adapt to “the vision” and the intended workflow of the developers, it’s great. No obstacles, minimal and iOS like.
However, I’ve spent almost ten years using it and after GNOME 40, it just feels wrong and I’m spending my valuable time fighting it instead of being productive. Therefore, I jumped to KDE Plasma and it has been awesome. Especially since 6.2.
Currently, default vanilla GNOME is more secure that others. Add 3rd party extensions to the mix and it’s the same as others. I would even argue that a Plasma install with no 3rd party theming is more secure that a GNOME install with 3rd party extensions.
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I can’t stress enough how important minimalism is to a secure setup. There goes the folks back in r/unixporn who love their extensions!
There’s a part of me that wonders whether this matters in the first place. Yes, theme extensions can increase the attack surface of your DE regardless of if it’s KDE or GNOME. Random extensions with nonaudited permissions are even worst. But at the end of the day, at least someone gets to enjoy a bit of eye candy when they turn on the computer.
Something I would love to see is a proof-of-concept or write up on potential attack vectors though.
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Plasma has everything I need for desktop usage and when using GNOME I also need a lot of extensions, and there’s the issue of each extension being updated on different schedule (like devs with more time will update always to new version and the ones with less time will just support LTS only)
It’s the normal issue of what’s your usage and what ya need/want to see on desktop, GNOME is used a lot as default by main distros… yeah
It is not a surprise people having opinions here, as main distros use GNOME, a lot of devs and resources going to GTK programs expecting that the user is on GNOME and just be a mess outside
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The main “issue” with GNOME is that people expect it to be like Windows or something else that they’re used to. GNOME is GNOME, if you don’t want to use it the way it’s intended to be used then just pick a different DE.
It’s like buying a hoodie without a zypper and then complaining that it doesn’t have a zypper. If you want a zypper, just buy a different hoodie.
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I used both GNOME and KDE extensively for some weeks. And did some hopping around various distros and DEs.
I noticed KDE just need 100-200MB of additional memory compared to GNOME. Idk whether its due to my old pc or not, everything in system monitor cpu, memory and disk usage is within limits in KDE but I feel its sluggish many times. No such issues in GNOME.
KDE offers more granular controls whereas its counterpart keeps on being minimalist. Apart from its issues I liked KDE but settled with GNOME later. I can’t sacrifice the beautiful view of all windows GNOME gives when “super” key is pressed. I will boot into any distro/DE to try which has this feature. The things I miss are granular control for volume, brightness control for external displays and extensive dark mode support.
Budgie was nice too, its GNOME + KDE.
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I would argue that the main “issue” GNOME has are some of the developers and their hostile attitude. They have a “vision” and they are passionate - great! That is greatly appreciated and needed for any open source project. We need more of that.
However, as Linus Torvalds once said: No project is more important than the users of the project.
Here is an article that sums it up perfectly - I Don’t Care for GNOME.
I’m glad we have two major DE’s (GNOME and KDE Plasma) that are so good that people defend them and adore them. Competition is always good (have a look at Intel and AMD).
However, I truly believe that GNOME should not be the first DE to welcome new users into Linux.
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Good thing about Plasma is that it’s modular so you can trim down the stuff you don’t need.
For an example, Baloo is the file indexing and searching framework for KDE Plasma that has several flaws and is a memory hog. You can drop another 500-700MB of RAM usage just by disabling it.
GNOME has good defaults while Plasma not so much… I guess I need 5min after an install to adjust everything to my needs and the RAM usage is way lower than GNOME in my case.
But RAM is there to be used, so just find something you like (GNOME in your case) and stick with it while it makes you happy and productive 
Budgie is awesome! I really wish they get more developers on board because the pace is really slow at the moment.
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I’m looking forward to do fresh install in a month so before that I’m going to try both DE at the same time for short period. And if that works like with 100% ok then I’ll do it after fresh install too 
Else stick with GNOME and multiboot KDE to explore it occasionally.
There’s a saying “The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side” 
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It definently shouldn’t be KDE too. Maybe COSMIC will be the answer.
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I’m running COSMIC(Fedora Spin) on my backup laptop and I’m surprised on how fast it is. If they keep up the good work and try not to bloat it up, COSMIC could be “the DE”.
Being written in Rust is a huge plus, especially when there’s no legacy code lying around.
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KDE is nicer but GNOME with extensions is usable, though only on stable release distros, major DE updates tend to break things
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I’ve used Gnome for years but with each new update I became more and more frustrated with it, and ended up switching to KDE.
First it was performance issues, then extremely annoying bugs like not being able to switch keyboard layout. Crucial extensions with basic functionality like clipboard were breaking or the support for them being dropped altogether.
Also, Gnome was not interested whatsoever in optimizing performance for games, which was annoying too because Proton was becoming so good.
For a long time I quite disliked Plasma, I would install a new release in the 5 lifecycle and be put off by really clunky design with the same exact features present in 4 different places.
But then 6 came out, I tried it, and I quite liked it. They fixed the UI, it looked pretty (i especially liked the hovering taskbar when all windows are closed) and most importantly it worked reliably without any issues with everything available out of the box (well, besides the file indexer baloo, i had issues with it and needed to disable it). And it was working quite well with games too, in 6.2 they even added tearing on Wayland, which made me permanently switch to the Wayland session.
Can’t wait for their replacement for SDDM to come out because that piece of software is in desperate need of replacement.
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