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.
KDE Plasma is pretty much my daily driver and I work with it all the time. Having looked at both Gnome and Plasma, it baffling to me why people still seems to think that Gnome is any better than Plasma especially when majority of the people jumping to Linux are likely more familiar with Windows and Plasma offers that familiarity out of the box.
Plasma was buggy back in the day, but it have become a lot more stable and reliable now that I use it professionally on Arch Linux. One of those cool feature of Plasma is accessibility, during a meeting, I have to use text to speech to talk out loud, because I can’t find an interpreter, so I used Natural Reader and do some complex audio setup to pipe Natural Reader audio to Mic. I needed the hotkey set up for tildes so I can easily type what I want to say and have it speak out from my entered text without having to move the mouse by pressing tilde key.
With extensions GNOME can become very Windows-like as well. This is how Nobara is set up by default, for example.