I've always been a Gnome fanboy and couldn't imagine using something else.
I've dabbled into KDE every few months (by rebasing from Silverblue to Kinoite for example) and I've always switched back after a few weeks.
I always wished I liked KDE, because it's more powerful, but there always were show stoppers. Inconsistencies, bugs and crashes, too many options, cluttered UI, and more. My main argument to dislike it was that KDE tried to do everything all at once, but fails everywhere because nothing is polished and only 90% there.
Gnome on the other hand was simple and just worked, because every feature has been worked on thoroughly and integrated perfectly.
Still, there are just a few things I dislike on Gnome, especially the core problem of "sleeping" devs who decide against implementing stuff like fractional scaling or a good app tray.
The lack of modularity in Nautilus is also hugely annoying, especially when working with RAW pictures, where you don't see a picture. I had to install a photo viewer that is basically a second file manager just because of that. Dolphin does that out of the box.
Still, Gnome felt like the lesser evil for me.
This has changed now!
I rebased to the newest F40 beta (including KDE 6) and WOW!
Everything feels so polished and reworked.
I have the feeling, on Plasma 5 were a lot of innovations and new features, but they were just thrown into the room incoherently.
Now, those have been reorganized and finished.
- The design language is almost the same, but cleaned up and less cluttered,
- I don't feel the need to change my themes, only the accent colour and the GTK theme. Breeze looks very mature and good now.
- The gestures are pretty much on par with Gnome, which means A LOT.
- It works pretty reliable, even though it's a beta and I will report bugs if I can.
- Future stability should also be better now, due to the bundles release schedule like on Gnome. Devs had a hard time with that in the past, and I think many bugs were caused by that. Now, Plasma might ship as the default DE for some distros.
- The settings are way more legible now and everything is easier to find.
- I also liked KRunner more than Gnome's search and Dolphin is way better/ capable anyway.
- And much more!
To the developers, you did a fucking great job! Keep going!
KDE feels SO professional now and finally reached its potential in my eyes. The last days have been very pleasant and I can't wait to rebase my devices to the stable release in 1-2 months!
Oh dear, does this mean KDE6 has lost the characteristic Windowsy feel that I switched over from GNOME for?
Wait I though it was Windows that had a KDEy feel? Anyway it shouldn't matter whether UI's have some common features if they're good, only whether we like one regardless. You enjoy GNOME, great, that's a very slick desktop too.
Plasma has a lot of things that puts it above Windows in my book.
@ProtonBadger @SubArcticTundra technically windows hasn't had much of it's ui ideas change since 95 (8, 8.1 and 11 were major departures and part of the reason their so disliked).
I would say it's probably more kde copying aspects from windows then sorta going their own path with those ideas.
Visual style that was started with breeze and 10 is debatable, graphic design wise 10 was just a simplified 8 reflecting design trends of the time while Breeze was a massive departure from sqeumorphicism
Microsoft announced they'll have a floating panel days or weeks after KDE did it
It still has the same vibes and is the same KDE we love or hate, just better.
It definitely feels way more polished and now has some MacOS vibes to be fair.
Not as minimalist as Gnome, but the insane amount of features got "hidden" a bit user friendlier. I think that if you apply some icon themes and a top bar + dock, it will be indistinguishable from MacOS for many casual users.