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.
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 It’s not good on all systems that use it under the hood, but I find it especially unintuitive and so outdated.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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.