First of all, this post is not intended to offend anyone, just to comment on my personal experience.

During the time I’ve been using Linux I’ve mostly used KDE Plasma as DE, although when I started, I started with good old Ubuntu and Gnome and never had any problems using it.

But recently I tried Zorin OS (which I know uses an old version of Gnome, and in fact it was the second distro I used in my life) and other Gnome based distros and holy cow, I felt like I wanted to tear my skin off not even being able to resize windows to 1/4 when touching a corner of my screen.

And then, although this in general should be an easy thing to do and KDE Plasma does it indiscriminately, in Gnome there is no way to configure programs to open by default at startup, and I know, this is a very simple thing, but some of the programs that I installed I wanted them to start in the system tray (which in addition, Zorin’s Gnome does not have) and none obeyed the command “Start the program minimized”, they always started with the maximized window, and in fact adding commands to start minimized did not change anything.

Then, Files (Zorin’s default file manager) does not show in the sidebar the devices that are connected via SATA (having more than one hard disk) and having to navigate through different menus is a headache, for something that should be easy.

Then, as said, there is no tray, no clipboard, no decent sound selection tool and better not to mention the screenshot tool (the current Gnome one is very good) and a long etc that is solved by installing third party extensions that simply give me the feeling that the system becomes heavier, for something that should be by default.

Not to mention other extraneous and easy to fix problems, like Gnome not detecting my Bluetooth antenna (it did, but when I tried to activate it, it said my system was in airplane mode when it is a desktop).

I’ve tried different DE’s and WM but Plasma got my heart, besides, the KDE Gear programs are absolutely great (like Audiotube or Plasmatube).

I have nothing against Gnome or ZorinOS and I can use them without any problem, but I find it incredible that one of the most recommended distros for newbies lacks important features like a system tray, I hope ZorinOS will upgrade to a more modern version of Gnome and fix those bugs soon.

  • ReakDuck
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    2 years ago

    Well, I used Gnome for 3 years and always used a lot of Extensions either for better desktop usage or fun. But now on KDE for 1 year, damn. Idk. I kinda was stuck to Gnome because I wanted to have smooth animations and especially this smooth Overlay feature on Super button press is something I loved too much to not have it. Now with AMD on KDE its also possible to have such a smooth overlay feature but with less aestethics like Gnome.

    But the tons of features I have now on KDE are also making me wonder how people can use Gnome or Windows 10/11