The GNOME Foundation is thrilled to announce the GNOME project is receiving €1M from the Sovereign Tech Fund to modernize the platform, improve tooling and accessibility, and support features that are in the public interest.
This investment will fund the following projects until the end of 2024:
- Improve the current state of accessibility
- Design and prototype a new accessibility stack
- Encrypt user home directories individually
- Modernize secrets storage
- Increase the range and quality of hardware support
- Invest in Quality Assurance and Developer Experience
- Expand and broaden freedesktop APIs
- Consolidate and improve platform components
GNOME is well deserving as the most polished and optimally performant DE. GNOME is so good, Windows 11 copied its workflow, layouts and even the taskbar right-click menu with 23H2.
Except it’s the worst DE in terms of performance. Using KDE instead of Gnome made a big difference in my weaker laptop.
GNOME is the best performing modern DE outside of lightweight nice DEs. KDE is by far the worst alongside Deepin. KDE is so crap, I had to turn off all the animations and compositor to bring CPU usage from 70 to 10-15%. This was a stock Debian 12 KDE setup on i5-7200U. GNOME in comparison idles at 1-2%, max 3%. XFCE and LXQt sit around 0.5-1%.
KDE is an absolute mess and is a hobbyist DE in comparison to the professional GNOME.
This is straight up not true, GNOME is a memory hog and uses almost twice as much as KDE. I’m idling ~4% CPU usage on an i5 7300HQ, which is just barely better than yours. There’s a reason the Steam Deck opted to use KDE and not Gnome.
As someone who used gnome for two years, hell no. Gnome is trying too hard to be minimalist and is lacking basic features that you have to use extensions for. Extensions which, by the way, break each update and have their own bugs. I also had to use gnome tweaks for basic crap like disabling mouse acceleration. KDE is a much more polished experience for people who actually use computers, but gnome is okay if you’re just looking for something simple that looks smooth.
It is unfortunate that every GNOME critic lives in 2015, and stick to those unhinged biases.
Steam Deck’s decision to use KDE has nothing to do with performance, but with customisation of UI, which is also why they use custom compiled Arch to modify every nook and corner of what Deck runs.
7300HQ has about 1.7-2x the performance of 7200U, according to PassMark. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/2922vs2865/Intel-i5-7300HQ-vs-Intel-i5-7200U
Its cool and hipster to be delusional, but when things get professional and you want stability and performance, GNOME is unbeatable. Nobody in the real world cares about the fancy one zillion features of KDE outside hipster hobbyists.