Just curious, but what exactly does gnome do that kde doesn’t to allow for a better workflow? What you using now anyway?
It’s the way it’s setup, the integration, mousing, keyboarding, etc. A few years back when @mandog and I were involved in a couple of Arch installer routines–TUIs, actually–I used GNOME w/Evolution, Contacts, etc., to keep a mail list of our users, and contact them via email several times.
Heck, at that time KMail was an impossibility–nobody had been able to install & use it for years–and Thunderbird didn’t look & feel right in Plasma. Ask anyone who was there.
You can call be old-fashioned and prejudiced–I am. But I also don’t use any OS for work anymore, so work-flow doesn’t matter to me, other than my hands are palsied and that precludes me being a keyboard commando like back when.
I’m a KDE fan too. Very pretty, loads of options, i can make it do what i want it to do, and i can turn off the crazy graphics on a low end laptop and get it to perform just as well as any of the other DE/WM out there.
KDE and a good shell. Now that i’ve used fish in garuda, i’m sold. When i was distrohopping last week to try to pick one for my (very low spec) laptop for note taking and data annotation for my classes/research, I saw zsh was the one used in manjaro, and i got my fill of it (I’VE HAD IT UP TO HERE) in mac. I want my natural scripting and interactivity. Sure i can script in bash, but when it’s not fish, it’s like being homesick. The shell is the more important part because i spend more time there. Even when i’m browsing files, i’d rather use the terminal attached in a file explorer.
I bet you can guess that i went back to garuda dragonized. It works fine on a core 2 duo and 4 gigs of ram (look up HP TouchSmart tm2 1090 from like… 2009 or 2010?). Works just fine!
It honestly depends what I'm doing.
If I just want the DE to be "out of the way" and focus on something, I think that's GNOME's strength. Yes it's less flexible unless you litter it with addons (which may or may not break with updates) but in a way that's the point, you don't get visual/cognitive overload from having a couple dozen icons in your file explorer toolbar or whatever. It's a similar design philosophy to MacOS - it tries to just not be thought about.
As a general daily driver I'm gravitating again to KDE. It just has so much you can do and customise, and the more you get used to where everything is and what every button does the more you get out of it. I've always found it a bit ugly and found it hard to make it look nice, but Garuda has done an amazing job making it not only the most attractive spin of the distro (IMHO) but even about the most attractive DE I've seen in general (again very much up to personal taste, I think you either love all the neon colours etc or hate them, I fall into the former camp). I do like what I'm constantly staring at to be attractive, and this helped renew my interest in KDE.
I hope it helps interest some more people in KDE also. Part of the "weakness" that isn't its fault is that all the top distros like Ubuntu, Mint etc all use GNOME or forks thereof so you have the benefit of popularity. Pretty much ever since Ubuntu first came out, KDE became more and more niche.
One achilles heel of KDE, Samba support. If you can get it to mount at all, the terminal path appears to be unpredictable... but worse, it just straight up doesn't work at the moment. At least not unless you include your password in the URL you use to connect e.g. smb://fred:mysecurepass@fileserver.local/stuff - which is insecure as heck as it includes your password in plaintext in the filesystem path. I can't find the link now but there was some upstream change that has caused a philosophical stalemate between the KDE team and the Samba team where they'd changed something that broke KDE and they're pointing at each other saying "no YOU should fix it". But it's not the end of the world if you find some other way of mounting samba shares.
How are you mounting your smb share? Mine's the same every time.
Use NFS, Samba sucks
Samba sucks until you get windows involved
This whole thread is why I love Linux.
It has competition in the Desktop Space.
While the masses are stuck with Apple or Microsoft foisting more craptastic features in their Desktops; constantly changing layout and flow; you'll get that less with Linux. And when its done in Linux, there's always a developer or two who will get angry and fork the original (GNOME3 anyone?).
So for me, who hates change for change's sake, I stick with those window managers that have the minimalist, "Keep it Simple, Stupid" philosophy, and allow maximum tinkering and tweaking.
So I've stuck with i3, knowing that no one will ever mess with dmenu!!!
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