I don’t mean for this to become a KDE vs GNOME post. I’m looking at switching to Fedora (because Arch is a pain), and it seems that GNOME is more supported. I use KDE on Arch. What features would I be losing if I were to switch? (ex: toolbar management, KRunner, etc.)

  • ijhoo
    6·
    6 months ago

    The only thing i missed was some KDE apps since they look butt ugly on gnome so you have to find alternatives. Krita comes to mind.

    You don’t have Krunner, but when you press meta/start button, you get a text field in the overview that works similar. I used krunner only to start the apps and gnome overview gave me exactly the same functionality. So the thing that changed is keyboard shortcut: instead alt-f2, you would use meta/start and just start typing.

    Just try it out and see if there is something you miss.

    If you do switch, try to use it as meant by gnome ux, do not force it to be something it is not. This is what I did initially and after suffering for a while (I missed the start menu so used extensions etc) I dropped all extensions and tried to use it vanilla. After a month or two, workflow really stuck and I prefer it to windows and kde. Simplicity of it works for me since I don’t use it for anything but starting other apps: browser, terminal, files, vscode… Also, when you add apps to dock, you can start them with alt-number (this works in kde and windows as well), so even the dock I find irrelevant.

    You also get something more in functionality, apps and stability (not that you only lose stuff moving off kde). E.g. accessing Samba shares with smb:// works well in gnome, where you can open movies from the share directly. While you can open the share in dolphin, you cannot open the movie directly from the remote location, you need to copy it first. (At least my experience before plasma 6, maybe it changed…). Another example is gnome boxes for VMs which is great.

    Edit: one thing I do miss - systray.