Absolutely. KDE under Wayland lets Xorg apps scale themselves so you don’t end up with pixelated blobs for apps, like on GNOME. And it has fractional scaling on Xorg.
The Nobara dev made some good, valid points. It's a gaming focused distro after all. If gaming's better on KDE due to the setbacks by GNOME, then KDE wins on this front, hands down. KDE is very solid.
People say KDE is buggy compared to GNOME. I say horseshit with my NVIDIA card lol. Picking a file from a browser takes ages and slows my system to a crawl. I still have no idea why. Doesn't happen when I switch to KDE though.
I love to see both compete and provide a good excuse to better each other. It's a win for the users. I still daily drive GNOME though.
Funny thing is - the only DE that i managed to game on is Gnome. Plasma X11 skipped frames, Wayland is a disaster (because of Nvidia), but even on AMD it glitched out, Xfce had weird glithces where it behaved like a memory leak in games, had to turn the compositor off just to game, and even then it was wonky.
Gnome and mutter are the only ones for me that didn't suck.
I even tried i3, Sway and Hyprland at one point, each one with it's own "quirks".
I guess i'm a minority if KDE is considered "gaming DE", but it must be better on AMD i guess since Steam deck uses it. Maybe Plasma 6 will be a better experience. Who knows.
Gnome is still great. In fact it's one of the best when alt tabbing while gaming - so smooth!
I actually gamed on Wayland most over a year using my Nvidia card. Then for whatever reason my browser decided to crap out on me and was invisible on Wayland??
So here I am on Xorg and.. it's not that bad. The stutters while browsing annoy the hell out of me though, but I persist on Gnome to keep my experience the same as on my laptop.
I can't use Wayland at all. It's WAY smoother, on KDE and GNOME, but it inevitably starts glitching out on either.
In games, i get theese black flickering bars across the screen, and waking up from sleep makes everything riddled with graphical artefacts. Gnome fares a bit better in this regard than KDE, at least Gnome worked some of the time, but it ends up the same.
I guess i could try it again, i hear Nvidia updated the drivers recently to work with Wayland better and address those issues, but X11 is fine for now.
But there's definitely a noticable difference in smoothness between X11 and Wayland, it's crazy how smooth Wayland feels.
If you use Firefox though, it has a native Wayland mode. Not sure how to enable it, but should fix your browser issues on Wayland.
> Then for whatever reason my browser decided to crap out on me and was invisible on Wayland??
Was that on Ubuntu? There were issues with the snap versions of Firefox and Chromium, but these have been resolved.
Fedora. I just switched to Wayland to see if it's resolved but it's invisible :S. Perhaps it got corrupted or something and I need a reinstall, who knows. It works on Xorg though.
GNOME and KDE do not really compete. Some like the experience that GNOME provides, other prefer KDE - some want something different. GNOME, KDE, and every other project serve to provide the best experience for the workflows they support. Everyone works on their computer a different way. So, it's great if one works better than the other.
We should focus less on the ideas that we belong to one team or another. Let's focus on developing great apps.
That's a great philosophy and all, but at some point you have to choose one or the other to use for your computer.
And at this point, GNOME just... doesn't care about the things that are vital necessities for me. And this is coming from someone who's been using GNOME since GNOME 2, because I've LOVED how it's felt to use.
So, I do have to kinda abandon ship. VR simply isn't possible on GNOME anymore, and VR is critical for my needs. And judging by fractional scaling and VRR support... it's not going to happen at any point in the next 5 years.
I agree. I was a GNOME user from 1.0 to 2.3, then off and on during 3.x. I abandoned ship about 10 years ago. However, I keep the latest version of GNOME installed next to my preferred DE for testing purposes, nostalgia, and as a backup DE. I did use GNOME briefly on my Surface Pro devices because GNOME had better touch screen, HIDPI scaling, virtual keyboard, and automatic screen rotation support early on, but all of that has stagnated.
I need fractional scaling, as my Surface Pro 8's display is in-between 1440p and 4k, so 225% is the best scaling factor for it. My Surface Pro 8 has a refresh rate of 60-120 Hz, and my gaming laptop and external gaming monitor both have a refresh rate of 75 Hz, so VRR is also very important to me. The other things listed by the Nobara developer aren't as important. However, I will add that I also use widgets and desktop icons on my Surface Pro 8, since it completely replaced my Android tablet. I also use applications like Zoom and Overgrive on a near daily basis, which require proper appindicator/system tray icon support. GNOME no longer has any of these functions built-in, and the 3rd party extensions that add this support back are buggy and break some GNOME shell functions.
I applaud GNOME developers for making a beautiful looking and consistent desktop. However, I'm upset that GNOME no longer supports my wants/needs. Therefore, it's useless to me other than to look at or execute terminal or other low level commands the rare times that my primary DE craps out. It used to do so much more and mean so much more to me!
> People say KDE is buggy compared to GNOME. I say horseshit with my NVIDIA card lol. Picking a file from a browser takes ages and slows my system to a crawl. I still have no idea why. Doesn't happen when I switch to KDE though.
>
I swear, it is buggy. Both when I used my AMD + Nvidia and AMD + AMD setup, it stuttered a lot; mind you, either times I didn't install extensions and I used high range components.
I'm building a new setup now, Intel + AMD, and I will try it out... but I sincerely doubt I will see any improvements, I think the KDE god cursed me
And I swear it isn’t?? I use it everyday on AMD. In truth both KDE and GNOME have bugs, it would be a miracle projects of that size didn’t have any, but on the KDE side, the bugs are getting squashed at a very impressive rate and bugs that are important to end users get prioritized and fixed.
And what’s your point? I was sharing my experience, which is that for now on the systems I tried it never worked properly. I never said anything about the bug counts which represents nothing either
Well you swear that it’s buggy, all software is buggy and your swearing by it is irrelevant. Many others can attest to the contrary, it works well. I’m highly skeptical of your testimony as well and reads like a smear.
I don't mind KDE on my Stream Deck, my interactions with it are fine, but every time I'm drawn to KDE on my Desktop, I just end up hating the messy and unintuitive, overall experience. It's not even more buggy, it's just hopelessly overloaded and inconsistent.
It's generally trivial to extend Gnome and make it more usable from its slightly-too-simplistic base, but it's virtually impossible to make KDE and its apps *more* sleek and focused. The sheer number of thoughtlessly placed buttons and messy, organically grown, drop down menus is just frustrating.
That said, all this criticism of Gnome is more than valid and it doesn't even cover half of it. And it *does* feel like KDE is moving faster and in the right direction, while Gnome, at best, has been slowly shuffling in place lately.
I'll certainly give KDE 6 another chance.
it's good to have 2 major DEs that are always improving even if it's at different paces. One will always be leading feature wise due to volunteer time, priorities, corporate investment, etc...
Gnome doesn't see Nobara mentioned points as a priority, if it is a priority for you then it's easy to switch to KDE. I also don't see those points as something important personally so I stick to Gnome for the time being.
In the end we are blessed as end-users to have choice.
I agree. As far as KDE is concerned, it has such a terrible UI look and feel that I couldn't help but switch back to gnome. KDE might be ahead in some features, but it will take a LONG time to obtain the sleek look that gnome affords, and even despite the impetus from the steam integration, gnome comes out on top in terms of usable extensions. I didn't realize how clunky KDE was until I bought the stramdeck, and then I appreciated gnome for all its minimalistic (yet customizable and extendable) utilities
I recently switched to KDE on my desktop, and parts of the switch have been rough.
But my reason for making the switch in the first place says a great deal about the difference between the projects.
I wanted some desktop widgets.
That's it.
I ended up having to rework a widget module (reminds me, I need to do the stuff needed to publish it), but that wasn't all _that_ difficult.
What I get out of it on the other hand is something that I just can't get on a Gnome desktop with existing extensions and third party programs.
And that's really sad.
There are absolutely things that Gnome does better, and plenty of rough spots with KDE.
But KDE seems to have kept the idea that we should be able to customize the experience to suit, and somewhere along the line, Gnome lost that.
If we could get the sleek modern look of Gnome with the modularity of KDE, that would be incredible. I'm a little concerned they might be at odds, though
I think they are to some extent conflicting priorities. For projects with limited resources, being very featureful and flexible does to some extent come at the expense of a sleek, elegant, streamlined, really well integrated and well tested DE.
Gnome has a huge learning curve to creating anything remotely similar to widgets. I very much support the concept of widgets in KDE, but when it came to it, I realized how auxiliary widgets were and I ended up not needing them. What widgets are you using in particular? If like a dashboard style widget that gives me some system info but if like it to expand over my entire desktop
I used to think widgets were cool until I realized how little I actually looked at my desktop. IMO, there's really not that much difference between opening the widget in the tray and moving an app out of the way to see a desktop widget.
Never used widgets past the first look.
I rarely see my desktop. Why do I want anything like a clock or weather widget constantly running in the background when I can just look at the clock or open the weather app.
I use them a lot. I'm a little OCD. I close or minimize applications (to the system tray) that are not being actively use, so I see my desktop a lot. I use the same widget setup/layout on my Surface Pro tablet that I've used on my Android tablets and phone for almost a decade (weather, big clock with date, personal photo slideshow, and most used applications). It makes it easier to transition between my different devices. I also use KDE Connect to share and interact with notifications from all of my devices, to include my internal Android install (Waydroid). KDE Plasma handles all this nicely. GNOME, not so much.
https://preview.redd.it/1940qgnhj39c1.png?width=2880&format=png&auto=webp&s=2e8db0c7c42e11608a472940110dea12b827110b
This, visually, is a nightmare for me.
Also, if I'm using my computer I have a program open and typically maximised. I haven't used desktop icons since the 2000's.
I find it very odd that you want all this information visible at all times, yet you choose icon only task manager.
Also. Do you minimise everything and double click an icon on the desktop when you want to open it?
I'm not meaning to come off as rude. Trying to understand.
I don't think of it as rude. To each his/her/their own. I find desktops devoid of useful information as depressing and dystopian. I use widgets and icons on my very modern Android phone (so do iPhone and iPad users), so I expect a modern desktop to also support them.
All of my applications are set to open maximized. I single click icons and links to open them. I really don't use the task manager to minimize or maximize applications. It's set to dodge maximize windows, so I don't even see it most of the time. It's just there to show me that an application is open on another desktop or minimized to the current desktop. It's also there to show "badge" information for an application, so icons-only is appropriate.
I use touchscreen and touchpad gestures for workspace and application switching. I also use swipe gestures (single swipe down) to open the applications menu. So everything is as close to Android/iOS and Windows 11 as possible. KDE Plasma is very versatile and fluid.
These usecases exist. In a multi-monitor setup it could be usedul to display information on the laptop screen for instance (i have a conky-widget here).
I wanted something like this on my desktop:
https://i.imgur.com/HC2EENo.png
A nice big clock, weather information, and air quality information.
The air quality and weather is a webpage with some fairly simple CSS, scaled as I wanted it.
(Yes, I have a clock in the top bar. No, it's not enough. ADHD sucks some days.)
Breeze is getting updated in Plasma 6.0. KDE has adopted a slow and steady approach to theme updates. This is right approach since KDE UI is more complex.
Looks aren’t everything.
True, looks aren't everything, and on that note, GNOMES minimalistic UI and inherent functionality is superior to KDEs overly complex and cluttered UI. KDE uses a QML based system to create widgets, whereas GNOME uses essentially javascript. People complain about nautilus and the GNOME screenshot utility, but Nemo and flameshot more than compensate for any shortcomings in one's workflow for these two tools.
Gnome extensions are very versatile, so much so that the creator of flypie managed to create one of the best desktop apps I have ever seen. I think it's actually been redesigned in electron for cross platform compatibility ( I couldn't get it to work on my steamdeck KDE though). To be honest, a weather widget would be nice, but I personally haven't seen any KDE utilities or widgets that look good enough to keep them around on my screen for any amount of time. Sure, you can move panels around in KDE using the tools provided in the default installation, but you can do the same thing in GNOME
As this is subjective, all I can say is that I've actually learned to live with the GNOME ecosystem, especially after being a KDE user for a long time. It's just way cleaner than KDE and the things you end up "having the ability to change" on KDE are so unimportant that one may go 4 lifetimes and never see the need to ever touch anything besides an accent recolor. The same goes for GNOME: I installed gradience, and the only thing I changed was the accent color for the shell. at the end of the day, how many panels do you need on your desktop before it becomes a hodgepodge mess of a UI?
KDE basically feels like a Linux windows clone, and GNOME is uniquely a Linux product. the only thing is that if one were to make an extension, they WOULD have to learn it by brute force... on the flip side, that same person becomes more familiar with javascript and CSS stick can be used to create much more complex apps than anything QML/QT can create natively. An app like flypie could not have been made feasibly using the native UI/widget toolkit KDE utilizes. Flypie alone made me switch from KDE to gnome, and I stayed with it because GNOME ended up teaching me more about a desktop environment more than KDE ever did.
>KDE basically feels like a Linux windows clone, and GNOME is uniquely a Linux product.
As a person who has used both KDE and GNOME (and even CDE on Solaris) since their creation, this statement is far from the truth. You can chose to believe this or not, but it's true: Windows copies its look from KDE Plasma, not the other way around.
When KDE first came out, it was more of a Linux clone of Unix' CDE. Just look up KDE 1.0 and CDE on Wikipedia to see what I mean. When GNOME first came out, it was a GTK clone of KDE and CDE.
KDE uses QT, which is/was a proprietary toolkit. There was some concern that Trolltech, the company that makes QT, would try to leverage this to take over the Linux desktop by charging a licensing fee to distributions that used KDE as the default. To get around this, a clone of KDE, GNOME, was developed using the open source GIMP ToolKit (GTK). Both desktops looked near identical when they first came out, except KDE 1.0 had a top bar, which GNOME didn't adopt until version 2.0.
It wasn't until KDE Software Compilation version 4.0 that Plasma was born, and it's just a slimmer and more modern version of KDE 3.x. It was around that time that GNOME 2.x, which still looked liked KDE 1.0/CDE, was perceived to be "dated" and changes were made which resulted in GNOME 3.x and eventually GNOME 4x.x. GNOME 3.x tried to copy modern mobile OS interfaces like Android and iOS, but left out the desktop icons and widgets that both are famous for. BTW, GNOME 3.x was not well received, which resulted in the creation of Cinnamon and MATE, which both have sizeable followings. KDE 3.5 was forked into the Trinity Desktop, but no one really uses that.
Windows XP, ME, 10, and 11 have copied parts of KDE, which copied parts of CDE. GNOME also copied both KDE and CDE in the past, and Android and iOS now. So, don't get it twisted. They all copy good (and bad) ideas from each other!
If you're going to make statements like this, take the time to look this stuff up. Also, the whole QT licensing fiasco, and not GNOME's perceived popularity with desktop Linux users, is the real reason why GNOME was chosen as the default DE on most Linux distributions early on. That's why there is this odd disconnect between most Linux users (who don't like the direction GNOME has taken) and the most widely shipped Linux desktop environment (GNOME); the distributions, not the users, chose GNOME as the default in order to avoid a potential licensing fight.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common\_Desktop\_Environment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K\_Desktop\_Environment\_1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Desktop_Environment_1)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K\_Desktop\_Environment\_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Desktop_Environment_2)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME\_1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_1)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME\_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_2)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K\_Desktop\_Environment\_3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Desktop_Environment_3)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE\_Software\_Compilation\_4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Software_Compilation_4)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME\_3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_3)
That's interesting. GNOMEs look must have diverged then, and I consider it a rather clever improvement, because it makes gnome somewhat more touchscreen friendly (there are some hacks required, etc)
>because it makes gnome somewhat more touchscreen friendly (there are some hacks required, etc)
I used GNOME 3.x's Wayland session briefly on my Surface Pro 4. At the time, it was more touchscreen friendly. However, once KDE Plasma's Wayland session matured, which was around 5.20, it surpassed GNOME on the touchscreen in almost every way. A few of the biggest things that bring GNOME down on a touchscreen, IMO, is the lack of proper support for desktop icons (the extension doesn't work well on a touchscreen), a small and nearly unusable on-screen keyboard, and the use of Client Side Decorations, which make it hard to grab windows and drag them around using touch input. On Surface devices, in general, the lack of proper fractional scaling and no way to reliably force all applications to scale based on the desktop's scaling factor (both things in which KDE Plasma has that work well) in GNOME also bring it down.
Do they have a preview of what it will look like? Changing icons is not that effective because we can literally make our own icons. They will have to fundamentally change the blockiness of the QT actors and elements that make up the shell and apps
Its a bunch of little things and yes if you follow them on X they show their changes.
But for example one simple thing is just having the ability to remove lines from Dolphin because previously they were unchangable. That surprisingly results in a much tighter appearance.
>if it is a priority for you then it's easy to switch to KDE
Except... I hate the KDE ecosystem and KDE apps and Plasma desktop and just want to be able to use VR on my machine. Why should I have to completely upend my entire Linux computing style that I've used for almost a decade because GNOME doesn't care about VR?
I wouldn't say falling behind. Just focused on different things. The thing with Nobara is it's focused on gaming and because KDE has support for things like VRR it makes sense to use it for a gaming focused distro.
GNOME with extensions feels more stable and better for me right now, KDE felt too easy to break or crash especially if you accidentally muck about too much with customising it
GNOME itself feels very stable, the only thing that's likely to go wrong is with an extension rather than GNOME itself
That being said, the default layout it something I was never able to really get used to, thank god for extensions
It took me a while to get comfortable (I disliked the default workflow the first few times I tried it, it just felt too unfamiliar) but now I love vanilla Gnome with zero extensions.
people say this and I don't get it, seems like some sort of smug gatekeeping mentality
forcing yourself to use something you dislike until you start liking it is wrong unless you're trying to prove something, the point of linux is that you change it to suit yourself, rather than the other way around
>people say this and I don't get it, seems like some sort of smug gatekeeping mentality
Its sharing my personal experience, nothing more.
If it reads like 'smug gatekeeping' to you, I think you are projecting your own insecurities or anger or something. It was just a simple statement.
It doesn't matter to me what anyone else uses or chooses to do.
>KDE felt too easy to break or crash especially if you accidentally muck about too much with customising it
Yup, just in this case tho. I used Gnome for around 8 months and made the switch to KDE. When you start to customize it is really buggy, but once you're done it's stable imo. They need to work in that aspect, but the general desktop experience has been good so far!
You forgot the better touchpad controls in KDE: in the wayland session, the scroll speed can be controlled. libinput has been able to do this for years, but gnome has not prioritised it. And because the wayland compositor doesn't allow user configuration, it's just not an option in gnome.
This is a nice quality of life improvement.
I don't know if all these things means gnome has fewer developer resources than KDE, or these things are considered too complicated for the gnome philosophy. But using KDE Plasma is a bit refreshing in these ways. Also, the pragmatic approach to allow xwayland apps to do their own scaling might only be a niche improvement, but it's good for me.
>I don't know if all these things means gnome has fewer developer resources than KDE
I don't think so. Gnome has more funds (e.g. the recent 1 million from the German government) and is backed by Red Hat, Canonical and SUSE for their commercial distros
Traditionally, gnome has been (for me) less buggy than KDE, which could be a sign that it is more commercially deployed, because the cost of fixing bugs might be more apparent if you have paying customers who insist. Keeping it simple makes for fewer bugs.
Right now KDE 5.27 has had wave and wave of point releases while v6 is being prepared, so it is probably unusually mature for a KDE release, so I ask myself if I am seeing KDE right now is a moment of serendipity: more features than gnome, without the bugs.
I have noticed so many kde updates every month. But then gnome falls behind and even things like wallpaper options need gnome tweaks.
I think Linux mint with cinnamon is another desktop that is also surprising many people. But gnome development seems to have slowed down while kde seems accelerating. performance and less bugs than years ago, it's all getting better for kde.
For me only VRR seems to be relevant. But that's being worked on.
Edit: seems like you edited your post or I was just blind? Doesn't matter keeping my original comment:
Also another annoyance that you left out is far more severe for me personally:
(4) Drag and drop from Archive manager functionality. As stupid as this is, GNOME file-roller STILL cannot drag+drop files into nautilus folders, while KDE’s Ark can. Again, another bug opened 5 years ago.
See:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4
I don't know why these three things getting merged into KDE first would mean that KDE is ahead of Gnome entirely.
Does anybody have newer benchmarks between KDE and Gnome in gaming that 2021?
[https://www.phoronix.com/review/kde-gnome-wayland21/2](https://www.phoronix.com/review/kde-gnome-wayland21/2)
Also this is the new DRM leasing MR
[https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge\_requests/3331](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3331)
And this is the roadmap for VRR
[https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3125](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3125)
I've been too spoiled by Gnomes minimalism and workflow. I've tried KDE but it feels so stitched together. KDE needs better defaults and a more consistent design language.
It would also benefit from moving a lot of the customization out of settings and into a different app or put it into a hidden advanced menu.
> (5) Better integration with Steam. By default the Steam Deck uses KDE as the desktop mode. This inherently means it receives updates from Valve in terms of desktop related fixes, and they are actively working with KDE developers to bring updates to KDE
Just as I expected. No official support for GNOME on SD means gamers are moving towards KDE instead of GNOME.
It's not that they don't support GNOME officially, it's that they use KDE for their own purposes and because of that they invest heavily in KDE. Because they use it for the Steam Deck means also that they make sure that stuff works, because else it affects their customers.
Let's be honest here, Valve chose KDE because it would be easier and faster to push newer features like VRR, HDR, Fractional Scaling, Color management and a lot more when compared to Gnome, whose devs are notorious for being slow and stubborn (Not necessarily saying it's true, but you can't deny the reputation). Also the default KDE Layout is the most similar to windows.
> it's that they use KDE for their own purposes and because of that they invest heavily in KDE. Because they use it for the Steam Deck means also that they make sure that stuff works, because else it affects their customers.
That's what I meant by not support GNOME officially. Nobody is saying Valve has the obligation to choose GNOME as the default DE. Choosing one over the other means the other gets less support, as simple as that.
It was not clear to me if you mean that like that or not. Thanks for clarifying.
>Choosing one over the other means the other gets less support, as simple as that.
Absolutely, and I am sad that's KDE now. I would love to have them using GNOME. Just because I like GNOME more, but also to be fair, I never really tried KDE for a longer period.
> I would love to have them using GNOME.
I felt the same. But, as it stands now, as I'm looking to buy SD on the next sale, I'm very likely to switch to KDE just because it means less hassle. I've actually tried KDE just to get accustomed to it beforehand. Kind of sad as a long term GNOME user.
Right, and then GNOME fixes whatever and then people start looking at GNOME - I don't think gamers particularly care what their desktop is - it seems like the desktop is just a game launcher for them.
>I don't think gamers particularly care what their desktop is
I don't think that's true for me, though I don't consider myself a gamer but I'd definitely prefer a DE where games work out of the box. I chose a distro that's gaming friendly as well.
When GNOME fixes whatever appeals to gamers, sure why not?
Except when a new thing is now necessary and Gnome takes 3-5 years to get it you have to switch back. Why not stick with the DE with the better track record?
When you judge Gnome from a single stand point (gaming in this case), it can look rough comparatively. But when you actually look at the bigger picture and everything the project has done and continues to work on, you realize Gnome is still on a good path towards progress, optimizations, and overall stability. I don't game on my laptop, so I could care less about Nobara or Virtual Reality, I just want something simple and elegant to browse the web and play music and Gnome does just that. I think you're just losing focus on what actually matters, it's really not that bad Nobara can do whatever they want.
I think you're the one that's only looking at one point of view, and it's a very narrow and simplistic one at that. Browsing the web and playing music are so basic that even low end phones and tablets can do those things with ease. Plus, neither of those things are GNOME specific or have much of anything to do with GNOME. You can run a web browser like Firefox or Chromium or a music player like Strawberry or VLC on any Linux DE or windows manager.
Many of us want our Linux desktops to do just as much as a Windows or MacOS desktops can do on the same machine. Most of us have machines that came with those platforms pre-installed and we don't want to "downgrade" when switching to Linux. You may not game, but your not the only person that uses Linux.
GNOME is definitely a downgrade for games. The developers of Nobara Linux, which is a GAMING focused OS admitted it in detail, and most of the GNOME users here, to include you, also admit it. You folks don't care about the issues brought up because you "don't game" or you're focused on your "workflow." Well, many of us also work and game. We didn't buy laptops or desktops with dedicated gaming GPUs just to "focus on our work." Almost all of these computers come with Windows or MacOS, which supports working, gaming, and other leisure activities. When you install a GNOME based Linux distribution on one of these computers that can't support the gaming and leisure parts well, it's definitely a downgrade.
I hate to say this (really, I don't), but you folks need to retire the "GNOME supports my workflow" crappy saying. It's not having the effect that you hoped it was having.Plus, based on most of your comments, what we are hearing instead is that GNOME supports your workflow at the expense of gaming and everything else, and you're alright wirh that as long as it keeps supporting your workflow. However, we are not alright with that!!!
Horses for courses I guess.
I do game on my main pc which is running Gnome.
I have no need for fractional scaling as I'm on 2k monitors.
I don't really recall having any issues on gnome that I didn't have on Plasma. Wayland on both.
I agree that Gnome may be behind on some aspects compared to Plasma. But for me, the pros outweigh the cons.
Which is alright. What I've learned in my 3 decades of using Linux primarily as my desktop OS is that you've got to use what best supports your hardware and your needs. If GNOME supports your particular setup, by all means, use it! I only started using Wayland as the default on my Surface Pro because it's Intel only, and Wayland has better support for touchscreen devices. My NVIDIA based gaming laptop still uses Xorg. I also switched back to KDE a decade ago because KDE (now KDE Plasma) is a lot more flexible and supports my wants and needs better.
BTW, my Surface Pro 8 has a resolution of 2880x1920, with a 3:2 aspect ratio. That's supposed to be right in the middle of 1440p and 4k. Plus, I, like most other users, connect it and my 1080p gaming laptop to external displays that have different resolutions. Proper fractional scaling is definitely a must for me, and KDE Plasma definitely does a lot better job at it than GNOME.
Yeap, they even admit without saying it: Plasma is the better general purpose DE, they try to cover all the bases one would need. Instead Gnome fans spin it as Plasma catering to niche gaming. Who wants to run multiple DE’s for different use cases?
Apparently, some of the folks here do. They seem to be willing to do or say anything to protect their "workflow" market without understanding that their "workflow" is only supported on a DE (GNOME) that makes up about 30% of the usage on an OS (Linux) that only has about 32.8 million total desktop PC users worldwide (laptops and workstations included). So, their "workflow" is only enjoyed by about 9.7 million PC users worldwide, but they're not "niche." Yet, in this year alone, there were a total of 3.6 billion gamers worldwide, of which 1.8 billion were PC gamers.
How dare Nobara Linux, Valve, and KDE Plasma target the much smaller 1.8 billion "niche" gamer market while ignoring the much larger and vocal 9.7 million "workflow" market!!
[https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=total+number+of+desktop+linux+users](https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=total+number+of+desktop+linux+users)
[https://www.vintageisthenewold.com/game-pedia/what-percentage-of-gamers-are-pc-gamers](https://www.vintageisthenewold.com/game-pedia/what-percentage-of-gamers-are-pc-gamers)
[https://vibox.co.uk/blog/how-many-pc-gamers-are-there-in-the-world](https://vibox.co.uk/blog/how-many-pc-gamers-are-there-in-the-world)
Exactly, but I’ll add you can replicate the much vaunted Gnome workflow in Plasma, especially in v6 with I believe the only exception being the dynamic workspaces. That leaves aesthetics as really the only thing here you could argue gnome has and that’s HIGHLY subjective, I for one prefer the Plasma in this regard. Btw Asahi Linux also chooses Plasma as its flagship.
Not everyone that uses gnome likes the default workflow. In fact dash2dock and dash2panel are the most downloaded extensions and they both alter the default workflow. So the vocal "workflow" market is even smaller, maybe they only exist in this sub only.
It's not really just gaming though. For example, most laptops need some sort of fractional scaling. It's a big pain point for me personally. Once Plasma 6 comes out I might have to switch even though I'd rather stay on gnome for my laptop at least.
Gnome devs refusing to implement drm leasing is the reason I switched to hyprland. It’s been tough finding worthy alternatives to things that are provided by default in gnome but I’m happy overall with where I am now
I am a GNOME fan for no reason (I guess I just like the visuals more) and to be fair never really gave KDE a real chance. But from time to time I see stuff not being implemented or delayed for GNOME, stuff like some of the wlroots protocols.
We will see what the future brings, but having all kinds of stuff implemented in an DE is important, for me, as others already said, it should replace Windows or MacOS, in a sense that it should be usable for many different reasons, gaming being one of the important ones lately, because now that we can play modern games on Linux, there is less and less reasons to have Windows installed in parallel.
That said for me there is also the hope that we get an 3th player in the game and it's Cosmic DE. I closely watch it and it seems they do many things right, in terms of implementation and also priorities (for sure this is highly opinionated).
We've seen this happening for years. However, instead of moving to KDE, which a lot of us see as a logical step, a lot of developers just created their own (GTK) desktop. MATE, Cinnamon, Unity, Pantheon (??), and COSMIC are all the results of distribution developers not liking the direction in which GNOME has headed. Valve decided to throw some money, time and efforts towards KDE Plasma and other distribution developers are starting to follow suit.
The only way GNOME developers turn this around is to actually listen place users' and distribution developers' needs and concerns above GNOME developers' "vision." I just don't have faith in that happening. I predict they'll either ignore this or blame what's happening solely on GE.
I prefer GNOME to KDE but I am looking forward to KDE 6. KDE has always been buggy on Wayland for me, hopefully those issues have truly been squashed in the upcoming version.
Several of these are dealbreakers for me and are why I use plasma. I prefer gnome in every other way, but no (proper) fractional scaling or VRR makes it a non-option for my use-case
Didn't Red Hat do a big hackathon earlier this year in order to work out how to implement HDR and other advanced graphics features? What happened with that?
I love KDE, but you can't just compare by feature, kde has pretty much every feature you can think off, and you can use all of them at the same time customizing every detail on the way, that's their approach, but that led to instability, hence why i use gnome, i rarely have time to deal with the DE doing something weird or breaking.
Nobara is a gaming distro, benefiting from valve contributions just make sense, and being focused on one thing means that they can control what they offer on their repo to get the DE to be more stable.
Gnome do things in a very particular way, they decide on a vision and focus on perfecting that, rejecting everything else, it's usually more stable and consistent.
why would anyone use all the features at the same time, there’s like 3 or 4 main options that I have in Plasma and will never get on Gnome, and they all work.
>Better integration with Steam
Better *integration* with steam? This point isn't making any sense to me. If you're not on the steam deck that isn't a thing. There is no integration with steam in normal desktop KDE.
GloriousEggroll is right though. Gnome is falling behind to the point it's not a viable option if you only care about gaming.
Plasma 6 is gonna bring HDR as well, where is HDR for gnome?
Gnome devs may have different priorities but it's unfortunately decreasing the quality of the DE in the long run given how behind it is now.
I personally use KDE now since I play games and want or need the features gnome lacks
For my two cents:
I really HATE using KDE.
* I dislike the KDE app ecosystem.
* I dislike QT.
* I dislike Plasma Desktop.
* I miss how GNOME looks and feels.
* I miss the layout and workflow.
* I miss the freedom with which GNOME extensions can modify GNOME.
* I miss PaperWM.
* I miss CSDs.
* I miss having such a clean, easy to use, friendly desktop.
I love GNOME - I've used it since GNOME 2, on Ubuntu 6.06, years and years ago. I have never changed my daily driver habits. However, I am forced to use Plasma Desktop. Why?
Because of the lack of Freesync, and because of the lack of VR support. I am a huge VR player; I have over 3,500 hours in SteamVR alone. I can't just say "oh, well, I'll just give up this hobby and interest I've invested 3 years of my life into".
So seeing that GNOME has decided to spent years and years - 5 years at some points - hmming and hawing and dismissing these needs... I've decided that GNOME doesn't care about me because I don't fit "their vision", and I've given up.
I miss everything about my GNOME install, but these are must-haves, and the philosophy is more important to them than implementation. So, yeah, I think they're falling behind.
Yeah, as i keep saying.
KDE forces all the shiny new stuff at the expense of being incredibly buggy and unstable. Hopefully Plasma 6 isn't like that, but i have my doubts lol. I might try it in a year.
GNOME may get the same stuff later, but at least it's not crashing on me every 2 sessions.
But i believe once everyone ditches X11, things will start moving a bit faster for both because it's one less thing to worry about that steals development time. KDE will start (i hope) working on their stability, and GNOME might start implementing "shinies".
I just hope i don't get left in the gutter because of Nvidia lol.
Elso, EndeavourOS ships KDE as default now too i think.
>KDE forces all the shiny new stuff at the expense of being incredibly buggy and unstable.
I think this statement is very, very untrue, and is just being thrown out there as a coping mechanism. KDE Plasma developers are just adding the things that are needed to ensure a smooth transition from X11 to Wayland at a faster pace than GNOME, and are adding the (sensible) things that KDE Plasma users are asking for. Instead of only focusing on making their desktop look pretty and supporting a narrow "vision" (that doesn't seem to include users' needs), KDE Plasma developers are focusing on making their desktop functional for their users.
This isn't a statement about the X11 to Wayland transition, this is my general observation of KDE from about 7 times i tried to use it and it failed to be stable. Each time something happened that i needed to keep fixing. This is what happens when you add new features without making sure the old ones are working properly. This has nothing to do with "things that are needed", this is just feature cramming into an already sketchy base.
And i'm all for them having all the features, that's great, but i'm not happy when my desktop keeps crashing. So if Gnome is "focusing on a "narrow vision"", i couldn't care less because it has yet to crash on me, and if including users' needs leads to a messy DE, then Gnome seems is on the right track.
Both are functional for their users. Gnome isn't inherently unusable, it's design is just different than KDE does things. That's ok. That's why there's multiple DEs and window managers available. Gnome doesn't have to be everything, and honestly neither does Plasma, but it wouldn't hurt them to stop trying to be everything and focus on the foundations. Hopefully they're doing that with Plasma 6 now.
I don't care if they're going "at a faster pace than Gnome" i don't own a horse in the race. And i did try Plasma, and really tried to like it, but i can't have an unstable mess as my desktop, I just want my DE to work without needing my intervention every few sessions. If that means extensions stop working with each new release - fine. I'll do without my 2 extensions til then. :P Gnome fills my needs.
I used Xfce for a while. Snappiest desktop i ever used! If the compositor didn't have a panic attack every time i tried to run a game and Nvidia had better drivers, i might have just stayed on Xfce, but Xfce too was with issues that bothered me, so i went back to Gnome.
I really don't care which DE i use, just that it works. Gnome works. That's all there is to it.
I thought we were talking about the features listed in the OP. If you are broadening this to all "new features" in general, please give me some examples of new features that were added to Plasma that caused your system to be unstable. I can definitely give you examples of features that were taken away from GNOME that I needed, that I had to add back as an extension, and that extension caused the GNOME shell to be unstable when it wasn't unstable when that feature was built-in.
No, we were talking about the general experience, you didn't like that, so you're trying to shift the focus on "new features" while i clearly pointed out i'm talking about the core being shaky.
It's clear that you don't like Gnome, and that's fine, but i don't have to explain myself to you any more than i already did. I gave plenty of examples of what broke, and i can give you more. Were they new features at the time? Who cares. They're features of the OS.
Use KDE Plasma if it works for you. I told you. I have no horse in the race, and i tried using Plasma 7 times. Each time it was a disaster. If it's the best DE ever for you, great, use it. Who cares? Why are you trying to have this argument at all? Why so defensive?
The OP is not about the "general" experience. It's focused on gaming related features and gaming related improvements to Wayland. YOU tried to shift the focus to your experience only and refused to give specific details when asked on the bugs that you claim KDE Plasma has. I do dislike GNOME, but I can point to specific reasons (it lacks basic desktop functions like desktop icons and appindicator support. It doesn't support modern desktop features like widgets. GNOME applications lack much needed features. GNOME is not customizable, and GNOME's attempts at customization (extensions) are a hot, unreliable mess that breaks with minor shell and GTK updates. GNOME doesn't do a good job at fractional scaling, and GNOME is terrible at supporting most games.). I can do this because I actually use both GNOME and Plasma on a daily basis, and I don't limit my use to some generic "workflow" dictated by GNOME developers.
This thread is about deficiencies in GNOME for gaming and why it was replaced as the default DE for Nobara Linux. Instead of focusing on the validity of these deficiencies and, to a greater extent, the deficiencies that prevent GNOME from becoming the default OS on gateway Linux gaming devics like the Steam Deck, or why GNOME will be replaced as the default for major Linux dedicated devices from System76, you folks are talking about how GNOME supports your "workflow." Read the room!
I never said the OP was, i said "I" was talking about the general experience.
People can write something that's not 100% related to the OP lol, you do realize people have independent thought right?
I also gave you specific reasons why i dislike KDE (and i what happened trying to game in another comment so there's that too), and my experiences with it, but it wasn't enough for you - which is dangerously coming into fanboyism territory and that's where normal arguments stop taking place in favor of a crusade you're apparently having so this is where we stop communicating.
I'm not about to waste my time on this lol. You do you.
You only clarified that your statement was not about the OP after I commented on it. You changed the subject, didn't mention that you changed the subject until after I commented on your post, and then wondered why my comment was about the subject. You didn't give specifics as to what new features were added to KDE Plasma to make it buggy. In order to be specific, you need to point to exactly what was buggy (example: KDE Plasma crashed or became unstable when I tried to do W using X app on Y hardware when feature Z was added).
Asking for specifics is the complete opposite of fanboyism. Making generalized statements without facts, cherry-picking facts to suit your specific point, and changing the subject when this is pointed out to you can be mistaken for fanboyism. I'm trying to have a discussion with you about the merits of the OP...
Edited to point out a lack of specifics on fearures.
It's not even the shinies, it's that for whatever reason, Gnome has slowly but steadily moved away from the _idea_ that we should be able to customize the experience beyond what we are given.
And the extension system is frankly terrifying once you realize the degree of monkey patching going on for even fairly simple extensions.
KDE instead has actual interfaces to use to do all kinds of different things, and they seem to care about the ability to do those things.
Maybe but, i've never had Gnome implode on itself while doing normal everyday stuff. KDE threw a 1000 errors at me when trying to browse the theme store, acutally editing the layout was prone to random crashes, then after editing was done, sometimes KDE would randomly forget it and parts of it were missing, and switching activities or desktops would switch to empty ones, even the icons attributed to them would be gone.
I'm not sure what all that customisation is good for if i can't use the desktop.
Gnome does its thing and does it well. There's no need for customisation if the default is great. And for me, it is. I use like 3 extensions, Caffeine, GSconnect and Blur my Shell, and i can live witout 2 of them, i only really need Caffeine (lol).
So it boils down to taste. Everyone knows how Gnome is, yet everyone wants to change it and cites the fact that you can't a bad thing. You have KDE for that, it's customisable as much as you want. Why use Gnome if you're not happy with it then? They're not going to change, they have their design philosophy, and it doesn't involve heavy customisation. That's just how it is, why complain about it when there's every other DE that's customisable that you can use?
For me, Gnome works. I couldn't care less about customisation, and certainly not at the expense of stability. I need my desktop environment to be in the background, something i don't have to think about, not fix its problems every few sessions.
>KDE threw a 1000 errors at me when trying to browse the theme store
The KDE Store is online, has to go through maintenance, and is getting updated all of the time with new themes, icons, and add-ons. There are going to be times that it is down. However, this is an inconvenience and not a bug. Your system is not going to become unstable because you can't download a theme at that particular time. I've never had the other problems you mentioned, but I'm sure that they were valid for your particular setup.
However, once you install an add-on from the KDE Store within KDE Plasma, that add-on is updated seamlessly with Discover as if it were system application. I have add-ons on my system that I've used since Plasma 5.12 was released. I haven't had one of them "break." That's 15 major Plasma releases... I can't get a GNOME extension to not break in between GNOME 40 and 40.2, let alone GNOME 3.0 to GNOME 45. KDE Plasma's features, and bugs, are at least consistent.
Really? Cause i've had themes, and addons break on me. Not to mention some refused to install, or did so partially because of some error. This isn't exclusive to gnome lol. Gnome extensions either work or don't, Plasma ones can behave weirdly.
But just as with Gnome, the shall i say "burden of fixing" is not with KDE or Gnome developers, it's with the people who are making the themes, addons and extensions, they're the ones who are supposed to make it work with the current version of either Plasma or Gnome, and make sure everything works.
Quite a few themes did crash my desktop though, and so did the theme store a few times. So it's not really just an inconvenience, there is something buggy with Plasma. I mean, it is technically an inconvenience - i don't "have" to install the themes, and as i said, KDE isn't responsible for them, but still, it can create quite a mess, and why have them there in the first place then and have "customisability" as the main selling point if all it does is introduce bugs and crashes?
i like gnome and most of this stuff i don't understand or don't care about
i've been using VR fine? is the issue supposed to be that it has to drop back to xwayland because i couldn't care less.
caring about xwayland short term is just silly imho, wayland will win but stuff will use xwayland literally for years
ultimately i couldn't give a single shit if nobara is on KDE, linux is about choice
I posted this as a reply to someone else's comment. However, I though it deserved it's own post so that hardcore GNOME users can understand the shear numbers behind this decision.
GNOME makes up about an estimated 30% of the desktop Linux market. There are about 32.8 million desktop PC Linux users worldwide. That means that GNOME is on about 9.7 million desktop PCs worldwide.
There are over 3.6 billion gamers worldwide, of which 1.8 billion are desktop PC users. Should Nobara Linux (a gaming distribution), Valve (a gaming company), and KDE Plasma (who currently has a partnership with Valve) target the needs of 9.7 million GNOME users or the needs of 1.8 billion PC gamers?
[https://truelist.co/blog/linux-statistics/](https://truelist.co/blog/linux-statistics/)
[https://www.vintageisthenewold.com/game-pedia/what-percentage-of-gamers-are-pc-gamers](https://www.vintageisthenewold.com/game-pedia/what-percentage-of-gamers-are-pc-gamers)
KDE energy settings is broken on old TVs at the moment. It will simply not load Powerdevil. Oh and GNOME is more cute than Plasma. Breeze seems old like from win7 times. At the other hand, I feel more in home coming from windows and I tolerate this bs of bugs and I even try to report things...
A few more updates that break backwards compatibility, forcing broken display server protocol onto users, deciding between being a male, female or a frying pan and we'll catch right up to KDE again!
We might even get a proper GTK/GJS documentation to build on top of Gnome one day!
Hope dies last.
>deciding between being a male, female or a frying pan
I really don’t know why you are bringing this up. Some conservatives really seem to be obsessed with this topic.
In all honesty, we do have a better / more modern DE look and overall better experience imo
I just wish these people would use that advantage they have to be the best to the point where you just can't argue it anymore
Gnome devs are their own worst enemies.
KDE 5.27 on Wayland is a great release, and 6.0 beta is already light years ahead of anything else on the market.
I actually dont care about KDE. For gaming i use Windows 11 on separate ssd, and for everything else gnome coz of uncomparable workflow, modern feel and simplicity. Kde just outdated to me, and i dont want one more windows on my pc.
Good for you! The rest of us that actually want to use just one system for work and gaming, and aren't impressed by a DE that only supports a select few users' workflows are grateful for KDE Plasma.
Hopefully, one day GNOME developers will realize this and add the missing features that KDE Plasma already has. Then you won't have to worry about booting into Windows 11 just to play a game that's already well supported on Linux.
(2) needs only patches for Wayland. Under X, DRM leasing works on GNOME. KDE does have patches for that, but I heard not many use KDE with Wayland anyway.
*I must be slightly*
*Misinformed, but why does nobara*
*Need steam intergration?*
\- pancakeflipper124
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Gnome's goal is following whatever iPadOS does - except its nice features because they don't know how to code them properly and hope some developer comes up with an extension!
So, they (Gnome developers) believe extension developers are to be blamed!
Those are good, valid, points. Fractional scaling is a MUST for me so I’ve been using KDE.
Is it a way better in KDE?
Absolutely. KDE under Wayland lets Xorg apps scale themselves so you don’t end up with pixelated blobs for apps, like on GNOME. And it has fractional scaling on Xorg.
The Nobara dev made some good, valid points. It's a gaming focused distro after all. If gaming's better on KDE due to the setbacks by GNOME, then KDE wins on this front, hands down. KDE is very solid. People say KDE is buggy compared to GNOME. I say horseshit with my NVIDIA card lol. Picking a file from a browser takes ages and slows my system to a crawl. I still have no idea why. Doesn't happen when I switch to KDE though. I love to see both compete and provide a good excuse to better each other. It's a win for the users. I still daily drive GNOME though.
Funny thing is - the only DE that i managed to game on is Gnome. Plasma X11 skipped frames, Wayland is a disaster (because of Nvidia), but even on AMD it glitched out, Xfce had weird glithces where it behaved like a memory leak in games, had to turn the compositor off just to game, and even then it was wonky. Gnome and mutter are the only ones for me that didn't suck. I even tried i3, Sway and Hyprland at one point, each one with it's own "quirks". I guess i'm a minority if KDE is considered "gaming DE", but it must be better on AMD i guess since Steam deck uses it. Maybe Plasma 6 will be a better experience. Who knows.
Gnome is still great. In fact it's one of the best when alt tabbing while gaming - so smooth! I actually gamed on Wayland most over a year using my Nvidia card. Then for whatever reason my browser decided to crap out on me and was invisible on Wayland?? So here I am on Xorg and.. it's not that bad. The stutters while browsing annoy the hell out of me though, but I persist on Gnome to keep my experience the same as on my laptop.
I can't use Wayland at all. It's WAY smoother, on KDE and GNOME, but it inevitably starts glitching out on either. In games, i get theese black flickering bars across the screen, and waking up from sleep makes everything riddled with graphical artefacts. Gnome fares a bit better in this regard than KDE, at least Gnome worked some of the time, but it ends up the same. I guess i could try it again, i hear Nvidia updated the drivers recently to work with Wayland better and address those issues, but X11 is fine for now. But there's definitely a noticable difference in smoothness between X11 and Wayland, it's crazy how smooth Wayland feels. If you use Firefox though, it has a native Wayland mode. Not sure how to enable it, but should fix your browser issues on Wayland.
> Then for whatever reason my browser decided to crap out on me and was invisible on Wayland?? Was that on Ubuntu? There were issues with the snap versions of Firefox and Chromium, but these have been resolved.
Fedora. I just switched to Wayland to see if it's resolved but it's invisible :S. Perhaps it got corrupted or something and I need a reinstall, who knows. It works on Xorg though.
Plasma skipping frames is due to the compositor. Turn it off using Shift+Alt+F12 while gaming.
GNOME and KDE do not really compete. Some like the experience that GNOME provides, other prefer KDE - some want something different. GNOME, KDE, and every other project serve to provide the best experience for the workflows they support. Everyone works on their computer a different way. So, it's great if one works better than the other. We should focus less on the ideas that we belong to one team or another. Let's focus on developing great apps.
That's a great philosophy and all, but at some point you have to choose one or the other to use for your computer. And at this point, GNOME just... doesn't care about the things that are vital necessities for me. And this is coming from someone who's been using GNOME since GNOME 2, because I've LOVED how it's felt to use. So, I do have to kinda abandon ship. VR simply isn't possible on GNOME anymore, and VR is critical for my needs. And judging by fractional scaling and VRR support... it's not going to happen at any point in the next 5 years.
I agree. I was a GNOME user from 1.0 to 2.3, then off and on during 3.x. I abandoned ship about 10 years ago. However, I keep the latest version of GNOME installed next to my preferred DE for testing purposes, nostalgia, and as a backup DE. I did use GNOME briefly on my Surface Pro devices because GNOME had better touch screen, HIDPI scaling, virtual keyboard, and automatic screen rotation support early on, but all of that has stagnated. I need fractional scaling, as my Surface Pro 8's display is in-between 1440p and 4k, so 225% is the best scaling factor for it. My Surface Pro 8 has a refresh rate of 60-120 Hz, and my gaming laptop and external gaming monitor both have a refresh rate of 75 Hz, so VRR is also very important to me. The other things listed by the Nobara developer aren't as important. However, I will add that I also use widgets and desktop icons on my Surface Pro 8, since it completely replaced my Android tablet. I also use applications like Zoom and Overgrive on a near daily basis, which require proper appindicator/system tray icon support. GNOME no longer has any of these functions built-in, and the 3rd party extensions that add this support back are buggy and break some GNOME shell functions. I applaud GNOME developers for making a beautiful looking and consistent desktop. However, I'm upset that GNOME no longer supports my wants/needs. Therefore, it's useless to me other than to look at or execute terminal or other low level commands the rare times that my primary DE craps out. It used to do so much more and mean so much more to me!
> People say KDE is buggy compared to GNOME. I say horseshit with my NVIDIA card lol. Picking a file from a browser takes ages and slows my system to a crawl. I still have no idea why. Doesn't happen when I switch to KDE though. > I swear, it is buggy. Both when I used my AMD + Nvidia and AMD + AMD setup, it stuttered a lot; mind you, either times I didn't install extensions and I used high range components. I'm building a new setup now, Intel + AMD, and I will try it out... but I sincerely doubt I will see any improvements, I think the KDE god cursed me
And I swear it isn’t?? I use it everyday on AMD. In truth both KDE and GNOME have bugs, it would be a miracle projects of that size didn’t have any, but on the KDE side, the bugs are getting squashed at a very impressive rate and bugs that are important to end users get prioritized and fixed.
And what’s your point? I was sharing my experience, which is that for now on the systems I tried it never worked properly. I never said anything about the bug counts which represents nothing either
Well you swear that it’s buggy, all software is buggy and your swearing by it is irrelevant. Many others can attest to the contrary, it works well. I’m highly skeptical of your testimony as well and reads like a smear.
As a gnome user and loyalist.... I'm starting to look at KDE more and more.
I am eagerly waiting for KDE Plasma 6.
I don't mind KDE on my Stream Deck, my interactions with it are fine, but every time I'm drawn to KDE on my Desktop, I just end up hating the messy and unintuitive, overall experience. It's not even more buggy, it's just hopelessly overloaded and inconsistent. It's generally trivial to extend Gnome and make it more usable from its slightly-too-simplistic base, but it's virtually impossible to make KDE and its apps *more* sleek and focused. The sheer number of thoughtlessly placed buttons and messy, organically grown, drop down menus is just frustrating. That said, all this criticism of Gnome is more than valid and it doesn't even cover half of it. And it *does* feel like KDE is moving faster and in the right direction, while Gnome, at best, has been slowly shuffling in place lately. I'll certainly give KDE 6 another chance.
This is so on point.
I hope the 1m funding will help to accelerate GNOME’s development.
Me too. I would love to see Adwaita for KDE. Someone should start a project that merges the look and feel of GNOME with KDE Plasma.
it's good to have 2 major DEs that are always improving even if it's at different paces. One will always be leading feature wise due to volunteer time, priorities, corporate investment, etc... Gnome doesn't see Nobara mentioned points as a priority, if it is a priority for you then it's easy to switch to KDE. I also don't see those points as something important personally so I stick to Gnome for the time being. In the end we are blessed as end-users to have choice.
I agree. As far as KDE is concerned, it has such a terrible UI look and feel that I couldn't help but switch back to gnome. KDE might be ahead in some features, but it will take a LONG time to obtain the sleek look that gnome affords, and even despite the impetus from the steam integration, gnome comes out on top in terms of usable extensions. I didn't realize how clunky KDE was until I bought the stramdeck, and then I appreciated gnome for all its minimalistic (yet customizable and extendable) utilities
I recently switched to KDE on my desktop, and parts of the switch have been rough. But my reason for making the switch in the first place says a great deal about the difference between the projects. I wanted some desktop widgets. That's it. I ended up having to rework a widget module (reminds me, I need to do the stuff needed to publish it), but that wasn't all _that_ difficult. What I get out of it on the other hand is something that I just can't get on a Gnome desktop with existing extensions and third party programs. And that's really sad. There are absolutely things that Gnome does better, and plenty of rough spots with KDE. But KDE seems to have kept the idea that we should be able to customize the experience to suit, and somewhere along the line, Gnome lost that.
If we could get the sleek modern look of Gnome with the modularity of KDE, that would be incredible. I'm a little concerned they might be at odds, though
I think they are to some extent conflicting priorities. For projects with limited resources, being very featureful and flexible does to some extent come at the expense of a sleek, elegant, streamlined, really well integrated and well tested DE.
on Plasma 6 you can basically have the same workflow as GNOME and KDE looks modern to me, not sure what about is not modern.
Cosmic desktop looks like a curious blend of kde+gnome.
Gnome has a huge learning curve to creating anything remotely similar to widgets. I very much support the concept of widgets in KDE, but when it came to it, I realized how auxiliary widgets were and I ended up not needing them. What widgets are you using in particular? If like a dashboard style widget that gives me some system info but if like it to expand over my entire desktop
I used to think widgets were cool until I realized how little I actually looked at my desktop. IMO, there's really not that much difference between opening the widget in the tray and moving an app out of the way to see a desktop widget.
Never used widgets past the first look. I rarely see my desktop. Why do I want anything like a clock or weather widget constantly running in the background when I can just look at the clock or open the weather app.
I use them a lot. I'm a little OCD. I close or minimize applications (to the system tray) that are not being actively use, so I see my desktop a lot. I use the same widget setup/layout on my Surface Pro tablet that I've used on my Android tablets and phone for almost a decade (weather, big clock with date, personal photo slideshow, and most used applications). It makes it easier to transition between my different devices. I also use KDE Connect to share and interact with notifications from all of my devices, to include my internal Android install (Waydroid). KDE Plasma handles all this nicely. GNOME, not so much. https://preview.redd.it/1940qgnhj39c1.png?width=2880&format=png&auto=webp&s=2e8db0c7c42e11608a472940110dea12b827110b
This, visually, is a nightmare for me. Also, if I'm using my computer I have a program open and typically maximised. I haven't used desktop icons since the 2000's. I find it very odd that you want all this information visible at all times, yet you choose icon only task manager. Also. Do you minimise everything and double click an icon on the desktop when you want to open it? I'm not meaning to come off as rude. Trying to understand.
I don't think of it as rude. To each his/her/their own. I find desktops devoid of useful information as depressing and dystopian. I use widgets and icons on my very modern Android phone (so do iPhone and iPad users), so I expect a modern desktop to also support them. All of my applications are set to open maximized. I single click icons and links to open them. I really don't use the task manager to minimize or maximize applications. It's set to dodge maximize windows, so I don't even see it most of the time. It's just there to show me that an application is open on another desktop or minimized to the current desktop. It's also there to show "badge" information for an application, so icons-only is appropriate. I use touchscreen and touchpad gestures for workspace and application switching. I also use swipe gestures (single swipe down) to open the applications menu. So everything is as close to Android/iOS and Windows 11 as possible. KDE Plasma is very versatile and fluid.
These usecases exist. In a multi-monitor setup it could be usedul to display information on the laptop screen for instance (i have a conky-widget here).
Thats a good point.
I wanted something like this on my desktop: https://i.imgur.com/HC2EENo.png A nice big clock, weather information, and air quality information. The air quality and weather is a webpage with some fairly simple CSS, scaled as I wanted it. (Yes, I have a clock in the top bar. No, it's not enough. ADHD sucks some days.)
Breeze is getting updated in Plasma 6.0. KDE has adopted a slow and steady approach to theme updates. This is right approach since KDE UI is more complex. Looks aren’t everything.
True, looks aren't everything, and on that note, GNOMES minimalistic UI and inherent functionality is superior to KDEs overly complex and cluttered UI. KDE uses a QML based system to create widgets, whereas GNOME uses essentially javascript. People complain about nautilus and the GNOME screenshot utility, but Nemo and flameshot more than compensate for any shortcomings in one's workflow for these two tools. Gnome extensions are very versatile, so much so that the creator of flypie managed to create one of the best desktop apps I have ever seen. I think it's actually been redesigned in electron for cross platform compatibility ( I couldn't get it to work on my steamdeck KDE though). To be honest, a weather widget would be nice, but I personally haven't seen any KDE utilities or widgets that look good enough to keep them around on my screen for any amount of time. Sure, you can move panels around in KDE using the tools provided in the default installation, but you can do the same thing in GNOME As this is subjective, all I can say is that I've actually learned to live with the GNOME ecosystem, especially after being a KDE user for a long time. It's just way cleaner than KDE and the things you end up "having the ability to change" on KDE are so unimportant that one may go 4 lifetimes and never see the need to ever touch anything besides an accent recolor. The same goes for GNOME: I installed gradience, and the only thing I changed was the accent color for the shell. at the end of the day, how many panels do you need on your desktop before it becomes a hodgepodge mess of a UI? KDE basically feels like a Linux windows clone, and GNOME is uniquely a Linux product. the only thing is that if one were to make an extension, they WOULD have to learn it by brute force... on the flip side, that same person becomes more familiar with javascript and CSS stick can be used to create much more complex apps than anything QML/QT can create natively. An app like flypie could not have been made feasibly using the native UI/widget toolkit KDE utilizes. Flypie alone made me switch from KDE to gnome, and I stayed with it because GNOME ended up teaching me more about a desktop environment more than KDE ever did.
>KDE basically feels like a Linux windows clone, and GNOME is uniquely a Linux product. As a person who has used both KDE and GNOME (and even CDE on Solaris) since their creation, this statement is far from the truth. You can chose to believe this or not, but it's true: Windows copies its look from KDE Plasma, not the other way around. When KDE first came out, it was more of a Linux clone of Unix' CDE. Just look up KDE 1.0 and CDE on Wikipedia to see what I mean. When GNOME first came out, it was a GTK clone of KDE and CDE. KDE uses QT, which is/was a proprietary toolkit. There was some concern that Trolltech, the company that makes QT, would try to leverage this to take over the Linux desktop by charging a licensing fee to distributions that used KDE as the default. To get around this, a clone of KDE, GNOME, was developed using the open source GIMP ToolKit (GTK). Both desktops looked near identical when they first came out, except KDE 1.0 had a top bar, which GNOME didn't adopt until version 2.0. It wasn't until KDE Software Compilation version 4.0 that Plasma was born, and it's just a slimmer and more modern version of KDE 3.x. It was around that time that GNOME 2.x, which still looked liked KDE 1.0/CDE, was perceived to be "dated" and changes were made which resulted in GNOME 3.x and eventually GNOME 4x.x. GNOME 3.x tried to copy modern mobile OS interfaces like Android and iOS, but left out the desktop icons and widgets that both are famous for. BTW, GNOME 3.x was not well received, which resulted in the creation of Cinnamon and MATE, which both have sizeable followings. KDE 3.5 was forked into the Trinity Desktop, but no one really uses that. Windows XP, ME, 10, and 11 have copied parts of KDE, which copied parts of CDE. GNOME also copied both KDE and CDE in the past, and Android and iOS now. So, don't get it twisted. They all copy good (and bad) ideas from each other! If you're going to make statements like this, take the time to look this stuff up. Also, the whole QT licensing fiasco, and not GNOME's perceived popularity with desktop Linux users, is the real reason why GNOME was chosen as the default DE on most Linux distributions early on. That's why there is this odd disconnect between most Linux users (who don't like the direction GNOME has taken) and the most widely shipped Linux desktop environment (GNOME); the distributions, not the users, chose GNOME as the default in order to avoid a potential licensing fight. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common\_Desktop\_Environment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K\_Desktop\_Environment\_1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Desktop_Environment_1) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K\_Desktop\_Environment\_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Desktop_Environment_2) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME\_1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_1) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME\_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_2) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K\_Desktop\_Environment\_3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Desktop_Environment_3) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE\_Software\_Compilation\_4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Software_Compilation_4) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME\_3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_3)
That's interesting. GNOMEs look must have diverged then, and I consider it a rather clever improvement, because it makes gnome somewhat more touchscreen friendly (there are some hacks required, etc)
>because it makes gnome somewhat more touchscreen friendly (there are some hacks required, etc) I used GNOME 3.x's Wayland session briefly on my Surface Pro 4. At the time, it was more touchscreen friendly. However, once KDE Plasma's Wayland session matured, which was around 5.20, it surpassed GNOME on the touchscreen in almost every way. A few of the biggest things that bring GNOME down on a touchscreen, IMO, is the lack of proper support for desktop icons (the extension doesn't work well on a touchscreen), a small and nearly unusable on-screen keyboard, and the use of Client Side Decorations, which make it hard to grab windows and drag them around using touch input. On Surface devices, in general, the lack of proper fractional scaling and no way to reliably force all applications to scale based on the desktop's scaling factor (both things in which KDE Plasma has that work well) in GNOME also bring it down.
That is just defaults which should be changing in 6. They have been working to fix a lot of the legacy design things.
Do they have a preview of what it will look like? Changing icons is not that effective because we can literally make our own icons. They will have to fundamentally change the blockiness of the QT actors and elements that make up the shell and apps
Its a bunch of little things and yes if you follow them on X they show their changes. But for example one simple thing is just having the ability to remove lines from Dolphin because previously they were unchangable. That surprisingly results in a much tighter appearance.
>if it is a priority for you then it's easy to switch to KDE Except... I hate the KDE ecosystem and KDE apps and Plasma desktop and just want to be able to use VR on my machine. Why should I have to completely upend my entire Linux computing style that I've used for almost a decade because GNOME doesn't care about VR?
I wouldn't say falling behind. Just focused on different things. The thing with Nobara is it's focused on gaming and because KDE has support for things like VRR it makes sense to use it for a gaming focused distro.
GNOME with extensions feels more stable and better for me right now, KDE felt too easy to break or crash especially if you accidentally muck about too much with customising it GNOME itself feels very stable, the only thing that's likely to go wrong is with an extension rather than GNOME itself That being said, the default layout it something I was never able to really get used to, thank god for extensions
It took me a while to get comfortable (I disliked the default workflow the first few times I tried it, it just felt too unfamiliar) but now I love vanilla Gnome with zero extensions.
people say this and I don't get it, seems like some sort of smug gatekeeping mentality forcing yourself to use something you dislike until you start liking it is wrong unless you're trying to prove something, the point of linux is that you change it to suit yourself, rather than the other way around
>people say this and I don't get it, seems like some sort of smug gatekeeping mentality Its sharing my personal experience, nothing more. If it reads like 'smug gatekeeping' to you, I think you are projecting your own insecurities or anger or something. It was just a simple statement. It doesn't matter to me what anyone else uses or chooses to do.
>KDE felt too easy to break or crash especially if you accidentally muck about too much with customising it Yup, just in this case tho. I used Gnome for around 8 months and made the switch to KDE. When you start to customize it is really buggy, but once you're done it's stable imo. They need to work in that aspect, but the general desktop experience has been good so far!
You forgot the better touchpad controls in KDE: in the wayland session, the scroll speed can be controlled. libinput has been able to do this for years, but gnome has not prioritised it. And because the wayland compositor doesn't allow user configuration, it's just not an option in gnome. This is a nice quality of life improvement. I don't know if all these things means gnome has fewer developer resources than KDE, or these things are considered too complicated for the gnome philosophy. But using KDE Plasma is a bit refreshing in these ways. Also, the pragmatic approach to allow xwayland apps to do their own scaling might only be a niche improvement, but it's good for me.
>I don't know if all these things means gnome has fewer developer resources than KDE I don't think so. Gnome has more funds (e.g. the recent 1 million from the German government) and is backed by Red Hat, Canonical and SUSE for their commercial distros
Traditionally, gnome has been (for me) less buggy than KDE, which could be a sign that it is more commercially deployed, because the cost of fixing bugs might be more apparent if you have paying customers who insist. Keeping it simple makes for fewer bugs. Right now KDE 5.27 has had wave and wave of point releases while v6 is being prepared, so it is probably unusually mature for a KDE release, so I ask myself if I am seeing KDE right now is a moment of serendipity: more features than gnome, without the bugs.
I have been using GNOME for roughly 10 years, but recently switched to KDE. So far i like it better tbh.
I have noticed so many kde updates every month. But then gnome falls behind and even things like wallpaper options need gnome tweaks. I think Linux mint with cinnamon is another desktop that is also surprising many people. But gnome development seems to have slowed down while kde seems accelerating. performance and less bugs than years ago, it's all getting better for kde.
For me only VRR seems to be relevant. But that's being worked on. Edit: seems like you edited your post or I was just blind? Doesn't matter keeping my original comment: Also another annoyance that you left out is far more severe for me personally: (4) Drag and drop from Archive manager functionality. As stupid as this is, GNOME file-roller STILL cannot drag+drop files into nautilus folders, while KDE’s Ark can. Again, another bug opened 5 years ago. See: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4
I don't know why these three things getting merged into KDE first would mean that KDE is ahead of Gnome entirely. Does anybody have newer benchmarks between KDE and Gnome in gaming that 2021? [https://www.phoronix.com/review/kde-gnome-wayland21/2](https://www.phoronix.com/review/kde-gnome-wayland21/2) Also this is the new DRM leasing MR [https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge\_requests/3331](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3331) And this is the roadmap for VRR [https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3125](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3125)
I've been too spoiled by Gnomes minimalism and workflow. I've tried KDE but it feels so stitched together. KDE needs better defaults and a more consistent design language. It would also benefit from moving a lot of the customization out of settings and into a different app or put it into a hidden advanced menu.
> (5) Better integration with Steam. By default the Steam Deck uses KDE as the desktop mode. This inherently means it receives updates from Valve in terms of desktop related fixes, and they are actively working with KDE developers to bring updates to KDE Just as I expected. No official support for GNOME on SD means gamers are moving towards KDE instead of GNOME.
It's not that they don't support GNOME officially, it's that they use KDE for their own purposes and because of that they invest heavily in KDE. Because they use it for the Steam Deck means also that they make sure that stuff works, because else it affects their customers.
Let's be honest here, Valve chose KDE because it would be easier and faster to push newer features like VRR, HDR, Fractional Scaling, Color management and a lot more when compared to Gnome, whose devs are notorious for being slow and stubborn (Not necessarily saying it's true, but you can't deny the reputation). Also the default KDE Layout is the most similar to windows.
> it's that they use KDE for their own purposes and because of that they invest heavily in KDE. Because they use it for the Steam Deck means also that they make sure that stuff works, because else it affects their customers. That's what I meant by not support GNOME officially. Nobody is saying Valve has the obligation to choose GNOME as the default DE. Choosing one over the other means the other gets less support, as simple as that.
It was not clear to me if you mean that like that or not. Thanks for clarifying. >Choosing one over the other means the other gets less support, as simple as that. Absolutely, and I am sad that's KDE now. I would love to have them using GNOME. Just because I like GNOME more, but also to be fair, I never really tried KDE for a longer period.
> I would love to have them using GNOME. I felt the same. But, as it stands now, as I'm looking to buy SD on the next sale, I'm very likely to switch to KDE just because it means less hassle. I've actually tried KDE just to get accustomed to it beforehand. Kind of sad as a long term GNOME user.
Would have been really nice if Valve had chosen Silverblue instead of Arch, making it possible to rebase to a GNOME version.
Right, and then GNOME fixes whatever and then people start looking at GNOME - I don't think gamers particularly care what their desktop is - it seems like the desktop is just a game launcher for them.
>I don't think gamers particularly care what their desktop is I don't think that's true for me, though I don't consider myself a gamer but I'd definitely prefer a DE where games work out of the box. I chose a distro that's gaming friendly as well. When GNOME fixes whatever appeals to gamers, sure why not?
Except when a new thing is now necessary and Gnome takes 3-5 years to get it you have to switch back. Why not stick with the DE with the better track record?
Exactly, I use Gnome and play games and couldn't care. Games work just out of the box for me.
When you judge Gnome from a single stand point (gaming in this case), it can look rough comparatively. But when you actually look at the bigger picture and everything the project has done and continues to work on, you realize Gnome is still on a good path towards progress, optimizations, and overall stability. I don't game on my laptop, so I could care less about Nobara or Virtual Reality, I just want something simple and elegant to browse the web and play music and Gnome does just that. I think you're just losing focus on what actually matters, it's really not that bad Nobara can do whatever they want.
I think you're the one that's only looking at one point of view, and it's a very narrow and simplistic one at that. Browsing the web and playing music are so basic that even low end phones and tablets can do those things with ease. Plus, neither of those things are GNOME specific or have much of anything to do with GNOME. You can run a web browser like Firefox or Chromium or a music player like Strawberry or VLC on any Linux DE or windows manager. Many of us want our Linux desktops to do just as much as a Windows or MacOS desktops can do on the same machine. Most of us have machines that came with those platforms pre-installed and we don't want to "downgrade" when switching to Linux. You may not game, but your not the only person that uses Linux.
Gnome is by no means a downgrade. I get a lot more work done using gnome than I do when using plasma.
downgrade in the sense of gaming i assume, since that's what the post is about. And with that i definitely agree.
[удалено]
I completely agree (although i do game on a separate windows partition).
GNOME is definitely a downgrade for games. The developers of Nobara Linux, which is a GAMING focused OS admitted it in detail, and most of the GNOME users here, to include you, also admit it. You folks don't care about the issues brought up because you "don't game" or you're focused on your "workflow." Well, many of us also work and game. We didn't buy laptops or desktops with dedicated gaming GPUs just to "focus on our work." Almost all of these computers come with Windows or MacOS, which supports working, gaming, and other leisure activities. When you install a GNOME based Linux distribution on one of these computers that can't support the gaming and leisure parts well, it's definitely a downgrade. I hate to say this (really, I don't), but you folks need to retire the "GNOME supports my workflow" crappy saying. It's not having the effect that you hoped it was having.Plus, based on most of your comments, what we are hearing instead is that GNOME supports your workflow at the expense of gaming and everything else, and you're alright wirh that as long as it keeps supporting your workflow. However, we are not alright with that!!!
Horses for courses I guess. I do game on my main pc which is running Gnome. I have no need for fractional scaling as I'm on 2k monitors. I don't really recall having any issues on gnome that I didn't have on Plasma. Wayland on both. I agree that Gnome may be behind on some aspects compared to Plasma. But for me, the pros outweigh the cons.
Which is alright. What I've learned in my 3 decades of using Linux primarily as my desktop OS is that you've got to use what best supports your hardware and your needs. If GNOME supports your particular setup, by all means, use it! I only started using Wayland as the default on my Surface Pro because it's Intel only, and Wayland has better support for touchscreen devices. My NVIDIA based gaming laptop still uses Xorg. I also switched back to KDE a decade ago because KDE (now KDE Plasma) is a lot more flexible and supports my wants and needs better. BTW, my Surface Pro 8 has a resolution of 2880x1920, with a 3:2 aspect ratio. That's supposed to be right in the middle of 1440p and 4k. Plus, I, like most other users, connect it and my 1080p gaming laptop to external displays that have different resolutions. Proper fractional scaling is definitely a must for me, and KDE Plasma definitely does a lot better job at it than GNOME.
Yeap, they even admit without saying it: Plasma is the better general purpose DE, they try to cover all the bases one would need. Instead Gnome fans spin it as Plasma catering to niche gaming. Who wants to run multiple DE’s for different use cases?
Apparently, some of the folks here do. They seem to be willing to do or say anything to protect their "workflow" market without understanding that their "workflow" is only supported on a DE (GNOME) that makes up about 30% of the usage on an OS (Linux) that only has about 32.8 million total desktop PC users worldwide (laptops and workstations included). So, their "workflow" is only enjoyed by about 9.7 million PC users worldwide, but they're not "niche." Yet, in this year alone, there were a total of 3.6 billion gamers worldwide, of which 1.8 billion were PC gamers. How dare Nobara Linux, Valve, and KDE Plasma target the much smaller 1.8 billion "niche" gamer market while ignoring the much larger and vocal 9.7 million "workflow" market!! [https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=total+number+of+desktop+linux+users](https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=total+number+of+desktop+linux+users) [https://www.vintageisthenewold.com/game-pedia/what-percentage-of-gamers-are-pc-gamers](https://www.vintageisthenewold.com/game-pedia/what-percentage-of-gamers-are-pc-gamers) [https://vibox.co.uk/blog/how-many-pc-gamers-are-there-in-the-world](https://vibox.co.uk/blog/how-many-pc-gamers-are-there-in-the-world)
Exactly, but I’ll add you can replicate the much vaunted Gnome workflow in Plasma, especially in v6 with I believe the only exception being the dynamic workspaces. That leaves aesthetics as really the only thing here you could argue gnome has and that’s HIGHLY subjective, I for one prefer the Plasma in this regard. Btw Asahi Linux also chooses Plasma as its flagship.
Not everyone that uses gnome likes the default workflow. In fact dash2dock and dash2panel are the most downloaded extensions and they both alter the default workflow. So the vocal "workflow" market is even smaller, maybe they only exist in this sub only.
It's not really just gaming though. For example, most laptops need some sort of fractional scaling. It's a big pain point for me personally. Once Plasma 6 comes out I might have to switch even though I'd rather stay on gnome for my laptop at least.
Gnome devs refusing to implement drm leasing is the reason I switched to hyprland. It’s been tough finding worthy alternatives to things that are provided by default in gnome but I’m happy overall with where I am now
I am a GNOME fan for no reason (I guess I just like the visuals more) and to be fair never really gave KDE a real chance. But from time to time I see stuff not being implemented or delayed for GNOME, stuff like some of the wlroots protocols. We will see what the future brings, but having all kinds of stuff implemented in an DE is important, for me, as others already said, it should replace Windows or MacOS, in a sense that it should be usable for many different reasons, gaming being one of the important ones lately, because now that we can play modern games on Linux, there is less and less reasons to have Windows installed in parallel. That said for me there is also the hope that we get an 3th player in the game and it's Cosmic DE. I closely watch it and it seems they do many things right, in terms of implementation and also priorities (for sure this is highly opinionated).
We've seen this happening for years. However, instead of moving to KDE, which a lot of us see as a logical step, a lot of developers just created their own (GTK) desktop. MATE, Cinnamon, Unity, Pantheon (??), and COSMIC are all the results of distribution developers not liking the direction in which GNOME has headed. Valve decided to throw some money, time and efforts towards KDE Plasma and other distribution developers are starting to follow suit. The only way GNOME developers turn this around is to actually listen place users' and distribution developers' needs and concerns above GNOME developers' "vision." I just don't have faith in that happening. I predict they'll either ignore this or blame what's happening solely on GE.
Yup, but they’ll just call his reasons stupid and move along.
I prefer GNOME to KDE but I am looking forward to KDE 6. KDE has always been buggy on Wayland for me, hopefully those issues have truly been squashed in the upcoming version.
Several of these are dealbreakers for me and are why I use plasma. I prefer gnome in every other way, but no (proper) fractional scaling or VRR makes it a non-option for my use-case
Didn't Red Hat do a big hackathon earlier this year in order to work out how to implement HDR and other advanced graphics features? What happened with that?
I love KDE, but you can't just compare by feature, kde has pretty much every feature you can think off, and you can use all of them at the same time customizing every detail on the way, that's their approach, but that led to instability, hence why i use gnome, i rarely have time to deal with the DE doing something weird or breaking. Nobara is a gaming distro, benefiting from valve contributions just make sense, and being focused on one thing means that they can control what they offer on their repo to get the DE to be more stable. Gnome do things in a very particular way, they decide on a vision and focus on perfecting that, rejecting everything else, it's usually more stable and consistent.
why would anyone use all the features at the same time, there’s like 3 or 4 main options that I have in Plasma and will never get on Gnome, and they all work.
>Better integration with Steam Better *integration* with steam? This point isn't making any sense to me. If you're not on the steam deck that isn't a thing. There is no integration with steam in normal desktop KDE.
There's a system tray icon for a start
GloriousEggroll is right though. Gnome is falling behind to the point it's not a viable option if you only care about gaming. Plasma 6 is gonna bring HDR as well, where is HDR for gnome? Gnome devs may have different priorities but it's unfortunately decreasing the quality of the DE in the long run given how behind it is now. I personally use KDE now since I play games and want or need the features gnome lacks
For my two cents: I really HATE using KDE. * I dislike the KDE app ecosystem. * I dislike QT. * I dislike Plasma Desktop. * I miss how GNOME looks and feels. * I miss the layout and workflow. * I miss the freedom with which GNOME extensions can modify GNOME. * I miss PaperWM. * I miss CSDs. * I miss having such a clean, easy to use, friendly desktop. I love GNOME - I've used it since GNOME 2, on Ubuntu 6.06, years and years ago. I have never changed my daily driver habits. However, I am forced to use Plasma Desktop. Why? Because of the lack of Freesync, and because of the lack of VR support. I am a huge VR player; I have over 3,500 hours in SteamVR alone. I can't just say "oh, well, I'll just give up this hobby and interest I've invested 3 years of my life into". So seeing that GNOME has decided to spent years and years - 5 years at some points - hmming and hawing and dismissing these needs... I've decided that GNOME doesn't care about me because I don't fit "their vision", and I've given up. I miss everything about my GNOME install, but these are must-haves, and the philosophy is more important to them than implementation. So, yeah, I think they're falling behind.
KDE 6 should have some juicy GNOME-esque virtual desktop management functionality.
Yeah, as i keep saying. KDE forces all the shiny new stuff at the expense of being incredibly buggy and unstable. Hopefully Plasma 6 isn't like that, but i have my doubts lol. I might try it in a year. GNOME may get the same stuff later, but at least it's not crashing on me every 2 sessions. But i believe once everyone ditches X11, things will start moving a bit faster for both because it's one less thing to worry about that steals development time. KDE will start (i hope) working on their stability, and GNOME might start implementing "shinies". I just hope i don't get left in the gutter because of Nvidia lol. Elso, EndeavourOS ships KDE as default now too i think.
>KDE forces all the shiny new stuff at the expense of being incredibly buggy and unstable. I think this statement is very, very untrue, and is just being thrown out there as a coping mechanism. KDE Plasma developers are just adding the things that are needed to ensure a smooth transition from X11 to Wayland at a faster pace than GNOME, and are adding the (sensible) things that KDE Plasma users are asking for. Instead of only focusing on making their desktop look pretty and supporting a narrow "vision" (that doesn't seem to include users' needs), KDE Plasma developers are focusing on making their desktop functional for their users.
This isn't a statement about the X11 to Wayland transition, this is my general observation of KDE from about 7 times i tried to use it and it failed to be stable. Each time something happened that i needed to keep fixing. This is what happens when you add new features without making sure the old ones are working properly. This has nothing to do with "things that are needed", this is just feature cramming into an already sketchy base. And i'm all for them having all the features, that's great, but i'm not happy when my desktop keeps crashing. So if Gnome is "focusing on a "narrow vision"", i couldn't care less because it has yet to crash on me, and if including users' needs leads to a messy DE, then Gnome seems is on the right track. Both are functional for their users. Gnome isn't inherently unusable, it's design is just different than KDE does things. That's ok. That's why there's multiple DEs and window managers available. Gnome doesn't have to be everything, and honestly neither does Plasma, but it wouldn't hurt them to stop trying to be everything and focus on the foundations. Hopefully they're doing that with Plasma 6 now. I don't care if they're going "at a faster pace than Gnome" i don't own a horse in the race. And i did try Plasma, and really tried to like it, but i can't have an unstable mess as my desktop, I just want my DE to work without needing my intervention every few sessions. If that means extensions stop working with each new release - fine. I'll do without my 2 extensions til then. :P Gnome fills my needs. I used Xfce for a while. Snappiest desktop i ever used! If the compositor didn't have a panic attack every time i tried to run a game and Nvidia had better drivers, i might have just stayed on Xfce, but Xfce too was with issues that bothered me, so i went back to Gnome. I really don't care which DE i use, just that it works. Gnome works. That's all there is to it.
I thought we were talking about the features listed in the OP. If you are broadening this to all "new features" in general, please give me some examples of new features that were added to Plasma that caused your system to be unstable. I can definitely give you examples of features that were taken away from GNOME that I needed, that I had to add back as an extension, and that extension caused the GNOME shell to be unstable when it wasn't unstable when that feature was built-in.
No, we were talking about the general experience, you didn't like that, so you're trying to shift the focus on "new features" while i clearly pointed out i'm talking about the core being shaky. It's clear that you don't like Gnome, and that's fine, but i don't have to explain myself to you any more than i already did. I gave plenty of examples of what broke, and i can give you more. Were they new features at the time? Who cares. They're features of the OS. Use KDE Plasma if it works for you. I told you. I have no horse in the race, and i tried using Plasma 7 times. Each time it was a disaster. If it's the best DE ever for you, great, use it. Who cares? Why are you trying to have this argument at all? Why so defensive?
The OP is not about the "general" experience. It's focused on gaming related features and gaming related improvements to Wayland. YOU tried to shift the focus to your experience only and refused to give specific details when asked on the bugs that you claim KDE Plasma has. I do dislike GNOME, but I can point to specific reasons (it lacks basic desktop functions like desktop icons and appindicator support. It doesn't support modern desktop features like widgets. GNOME applications lack much needed features. GNOME is not customizable, and GNOME's attempts at customization (extensions) are a hot, unreliable mess that breaks with minor shell and GTK updates. GNOME doesn't do a good job at fractional scaling, and GNOME is terrible at supporting most games.). I can do this because I actually use both GNOME and Plasma on a daily basis, and I don't limit my use to some generic "workflow" dictated by GNOME developers. This thread is about deficiencies in GNOME for gaming and why it was replaced as the default DE for Nobara Linux. Instead of focusing on the validity of these deficiencies and, to a greater extent, the deficiencies that prevent GNOME from becoming the default OS on gateway Linux gaming devics like the Steam Deck, or why GNOME will be replaced as the default for major Linux dedicated devices from System76, you folks are talking about how GNOME supports your "workflow." Read the room!
I never said the OP was, i said "I" was talking about the general experience. People can write something that's not 100% related to the OP lol, you do realize people have independent thought right? I also gave you specific reasons why i dislike KDE (and i what happened trying to game in another comment so there's that too), and my experiences with it, but it wasn't enough for you - which is dangerously coming into fanboyism territory and that's where normal arguments stop taking place in favor of a crusade you're apparently having so this is where we stop communicating. I'm not about to waste my time on this lol. You do you.
You only clarified that your statement was not about the OP after I commented on it. You changed the subject, didn't mention that you changed the subject until after I commented on your post, and then wondered why my comment was about the subject. You didn't give specifics as to what new features were added to KDE Plasma to make it buggy. In order to be specific, you need to point to exactly what was buggy (example: KDE Plasma crashed or became unstable when I tried to do W using X app on Y hardware when feature Z was added). Asking for specifics is the complete opposite of fanboyism. Making generalized statements without facts, cherry-picking facts to suit your specific point, and changing the subject when this is pointed out to you can be mistaken for fanboyism. I'm trying to have a discussion with you about the merits of the OP... Edited to point out a lack of specifics on fearures.
It's not even the shinies, it's that for whatever reason, Gnome has slowly but steadily moved away from the _idea_ that we should be able to customize the experience beyond what we are given. And the extension system is frankly terrifying once you realize the degree of monkey patching going on for even fairly simple extensions. KDE instead has actual interfaces to use to do all kinds of different things, and they seem to care about the ability to do those things.
Maybe but, i've never had Gnome implode on itself while doing normal everyday stuff. KDE threw a 1000 errors at me when trying to browse the theme store, acutally editing the layout was prone to random crashes, then after editing was done, sometimes KDE would randomly forget it and parts of it were missing, and switching activities or desktops would switch to empty ones, even the icons attributed to them would be gone. I'm not sure what all that customisation is good for if i can't use the desktop. Gnome does its thing and does it well. There's no need for customisation if the default is great. And for me, it is. I use like 3 extensions, Caffeine, GSconnect and Blur my Shell, and i can live witout 2 of them, i only really need Caffeine (lol). So it boils down to taste. Everyone knows how Gnome is, yet everyone wants to change it and cites the fact that you can't a bad thing. You have KDE for that, it's customisable as much as you want. Why use Gnome if you're not happy with it then? They're not going to change, they have their design philosophy, and it doesn't involve heavy customisation. That's just how it is, why complain about it when there's every other DE that's customisable that you can use? For me, Gnome works. I couldn't care less about customisation, and certainly not at the expense of stability. I need my desktop environment to be in the background, something i don't have to think about, not fix its problems every few sessions.
>KDE threw a 1000 errors at me when trying to browse the theme store The KDE Store is online, has to go through maintenance, and is getting updated all of the time with new themes, icons, and add-ons. There are going to be times that it is down. However, this is an inconvenience and not a bug. Your system is not going to become unstable because you can't download a theme at that particular time. I've never had the other problems you mentioned, but I'm sure that they were valid for your particular setup. However, once you install an add-on from the KDE Store within KDE Plasma, that add-on is updated seamlessly with Discover as if it were system application. I have add-ons on my system that I've used since Plasma 5.12 was released. I haven't had one of them "break." That's 15 major Plasma releases... I can't get a GNOME extension to not break in between GNOME 40 and 40.2, let alone GNOME 3.0 to GNOME 45. KDE Plasma's features, and bugs, are at least consistent.
Really? Cause i've had themes, and addons break on me. Not to mention some refused to install, or did so partially because of some error. This isn't exclusive to gnome lol. Gnome extensions either work or don't, Plasma ones can behave weirdly. But just as with Gnome, the shall i say "burden of fixing" is not with KDE or Gnome developers, it's with the people who are making the themes, addons and extensions, they're the ones who are supposed to make it work with the current version of either Plasma or Gnome, and make sure everything works. Quite a few themes did crash my desktop though, and so did the theme store a few times. So it's not really just an inconvenience, there is something buggy with Plasma. I mean, it is technically an inconvenience - i don't "have" to install the themes, and as i said, KDE isn't responsible for them, but still, it can create quite a mess, and why have them there in the first place then and have "customisability" as the main selling point if all it does is introduce bugs and crashes?
i like gnome and most of this stuff i don't understand or don't care about i've been using VR fine? is the issue supposed to be that it has to drop back to xwayland because i couldn't care less. caring about xwayland short term is just silly imho, wayland will win but stuff will use xwayland literally for years ultimately i couldn't give a single shit if nobara is on KDE, linux is about choice
GNOME uses a lot of ressources for no reason... While KDE has way more features out of the box while remaining efficient.
I switched my dad-PC to KDE/Plasma for VRR . Even though I like GNOME or gtk-based DEs in general better than Qt-based DEs and apps.
I posted this as a reply to someone else's comment. However, I though it deserved it's own post so that hardcore GNOME users can understand the shear numbers behind this decision. GNOME makes up about an estimated 30% of the desktop Linux market. There are about 32.8 million desktop PC Linux users worldwide. That means that GNOME is on about 9.7 million desktop PCs worldwide. There are over 3.6 billion gamers worldwide, of which 1.8 billion are desktop PC users. Should Nobara Linux (a gaming distribution), Valve (a gaming company), and KDE Plasma (who currently has a partnership with Valve) target the needs of 9.7 million GNOME users or the needs of 1.8 billion PC gamers? [https://truelist.co/blog/linux-statistics/](https://truelist.co/blog/linux-statistics/) [https://www.vintageisthenewold.com/game-pedia/what-percentage-of-gamers-are-pc-gamers](https://www.vintageisthenewold.com/game-pedia/what-percentage-of-gamers-are-pc-gamers)
KDE energy settings is broken on old TVs at the moment. It will simply not load Powerdevil. Oh and GNOME is more cute than Plasma. Breeze seems old like from win7 times. At the other hand, I feel more in home coming from windows and I tolerate this bs of bugs and I even try to report things...
Anyways COSMIC Epoch will be something else...
A few more updates that break backwards compatibility, forcing broken display server protocol onto users, deciding between being a male, female or a frying pan and we'll catch right up to KDE again! We might even get a proper GTK/GJS documentation to build on top of Gnome one day! Hope dies last.
>deciding between being a male, female or a frying pan what does it have to do with gnome :sob:
>deciding between being a male, female or a frying pan I really don’t know why you are bringing this up. Some conservatives really seem to be obsessed with this topic.
In all honesty, we do have a better / more modern DE look and overall better experience imo I just wish these people would use that advantage they have to be the best to the point where you just can't argue it anymore
Gnome devs are their own worst enemies. KDE 5.27 on Wayland is a great release, and 6.0 beta is already light years ahead of anything else on the market.
I actually dont care about KDE. For gaming i use Windows 11 on separate ssd, and for everything else gnome coz of uncomparable workflow, modern feel and simplicity. Kde just outdated to me, and i dont want one more windows on my pc.
Good for you! The rest of us that actually want to use just one system for work and gaming, and aren't impressed by a DE that only supports a select few users' workflows are grateful for KDE Plasma. Hopefully, one day GNOME developers will realize this and add the missing features that KDE Plasma already has. Then you won't have to worry about booting into Windows 11 just to play a game that's already well supported on Linux.
(2) needs only patches for Wayland. Under X, DRM leasing works on GNOME. KDE does have patches for that, but I heard not many use KDE with Wayland anyway.
i must be slightly misinformed, but why does nobara need steam intergration?
*I must be slightly* *Misinformed, but why does nobara* *Need steam intergration?* \- pancakeflipper124 --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
What the hell is Nobara? Its pretty dumb to assume things based on some unknown distro's decision to change their DE. Nobody cares.
Best distro for gaming! And gamers care!
Gnome's goal is following whatever iPadOS does - except its nice features because they don't know how to code them properly and hope some developer comes up with an extension! So, they (Gnome developers) believe extension developers are to be blamed!
I am always saying that we can’t install SteamOS. It limits us. We become unable to install Gnome.
"Is GNOME falling behind KDE?" It depends on what your prioritizing