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.
Gnome’s development is also slow imo. I don’t follow the progress but it has to catch KDE feature wise.
Lol. Gnome is taking huge leaps on VRR and fractional scaling. Highly hyped KDE6 doesn’t work “good enough” on Wayland to get released. Backend > UI
Try Manjaro Sway in live mode just to realize how lightweight a fully functional fully configured Wayland WM could be. The more xorg written stuff you have on UI, the harder the transition will be.
KDE, Gnome/Pop_OS! and XFCE/Cinnamon/LxQt etc. are all targeted for different audience. Most Gnome likers likes the simplicity and prefer less titles in the settings menu.
Just after I made the jump from GNOME to KDE late last year it felt like KDE development was lagging because that’s when GNOME decided to issue a flurry of feature updates what seemed like all at once and it made me question my choice to switch DEs. But then when that cooled off I saw that at “normal” times they really do update at about the same pace and there have been relatively big KDE updates since. Either way it’s not a competition, and what rivalry is there is more of a friendly one.