Personally I think both KDE and gnome go to two different extremes and I'd like them to both move towards a middle ground.
KDE's interface is still quite convoluted and janky, and its just massively overloaded with many features, many of which really aren't necessary. It is nice to have a very tweakable and customizable desktop, but its impossible to have a properly polished and not-super-buggy UI when you have a shitload of features to maintain. You run into issues where some features may interact poorly with each other, or features that are so rarely used/tested that they are broken and buggy and things like that. I really dislike KDE's plasma shell, its very customizable but very rough and "clunky", it still suffers from tons of padding and alignment issues too. There are a few things I really love about KDE, for example Kwin is by far the best compositing window manager on linux, very good performance, very customizable, and very stable (far less buggy than compiz too ). KDE is always a desktop I "want to like", but I always end up feeling its too convoluted and buggy when using it.
Now on the gnome side, I would say they went too far, they removed some very popular and pretty objectively useful features. Interacting with the gnome developers it can often seem that they are very much "in their own little world" and don't respond very well to critisism. However in the end I do still prefer gnome, I just find its interface to be much cleaner, polished and more usable. For the most part it still gives me the features I need, and anything else I've been able to easily add via the tweak tool or extensions.
When it comes to a balance of features and customization I actually prefer XFCE. It has a very simple and usable interface, that is sane and reasonably customizable. However I don't like how outdated XFCE is under the hood, its very slow development pace, and lack of opengl compositing (using 3rd party compositors always results in problems for me, compiz is extremely buggy and I don't like the way compton handles shadows, as far as I'm concerned proper opengl compositing is an absolute necessity, I loathe video-tearing and like the features an open gl compositing can provide, such as shadows, expose and nicer alt tab switching etc...)
In the end what I'd prefer is something simple, light and customizable like XFCE, but built on modern gnome 3/gnome-shell like technology (and no cinnamon does not fit this bill, its interface is a total mess and its quite sluggish and buggy. From a tech standpoint elementary's pantheon comes close, but its not very customizable)
KDE's interface is still quite convoluted and janky, and its just massively overloaded with many features, many of which really aren't necessary. It is nice to have a very tweakable and customizable desktop, but its impossible to have a properly polished and not-super-buggy UI when you have a shitload of features to maintain. You run into issues where some features may interact poorly with each other, or features that are so rarely used/tested that they are broken and buggy and things like that. I really dislike KDE's plasma shell, its very customizable but very rough and "clunky", it still suffers from tons of padding and alignment issues too. There are a few things I really love about KDE, for example Kwin is by far the best compositing window manager on linux, very good performance, very customizable, and very stable (far less buggy than compiz too ). KDE is always a desktop I "want to like", but I always end up feeling its too convoluted and buggy when using it.
Now on the gnome side, I would say they went too far, they removed some very popular and pretty objectively useful features. Interacting with the gnome developers it can often seem that they are very much "in their own little world" and don't respond very well to critisism. However in the end I do still prefer gnome, I just find its interface to be much cleaner, polished and more usable. For the most part it still gives me the features I need, and anything else I've been able to easily add via the tweak tool or extensions.
When it comes to a balance of features and customization I actually prefer XFCE. It has a very simple and usable interface, that is sane and reasonably customizable. However I don't like how outdated XFCE is under the hood, its very slow development pace, and lack of opengl compositing (using 3rd party compositors always results in problems for me, compiz is extremely buggy and I don't like the way compton handles shadows, as far as I'm concerned proper opengl compositing is an absolute necessity, I loathe video-tearing and like the features an open gl compositing can provide, such as shadows, expose and nicer alt tab switching etc...)
In the end what I'd prefer is something simple, light and customizable like XFCE, but built on modern gnome 3/gnome-shell like technology (and no cinnamon does not fit this bill, its interface is a total mess and its quite sluggish and buggy. From a tech standpoint elementary's pantheon comes close, but its not very customizable)
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