Linux

Plasma has been pretty stable for the last several years I've been using it, especially X11. Wayland is buggier, but not terribly so, and it gets better all the time.

I've switched over to Wayland with Plasma now because it is stable enough for me now, I'm on Nobara.

I don't really use Gnome, so I can't speak to that experience.

If I were to vouch for a DE that is rock stable, it would be Cinnamon. I've never had any problems with Cinnamon. It's not super pretty, and it's a bit clunky, but if I want a DE that just works and gets out of my way, Cinnamon is my first choice.

It's what I use for my business laptop, LMDE with Cinnamon, rock solid.

I should also add that I've always used fully AMD hardware, CPU and GPUs, and never brand new. Always a year or two old, so the Linux kernel has time to address bleeding edge bugs and such.

Sure it has a couple of bugs but it has been super solid. I'm on KDE Neon which is the least stable Plasma distro and I barely notice bugs. Once a month Plasma crashes but it does a full recovery with windows in the exact same places.

Gnome is currently the least stable major desktop. By far. It's an absolute disaster crippled by tons of little bugs that creep in when you least expect them. Even if you don't add anything to it and use Gnome as vanilla as you can get it, it's still going to be problematic.

Plasma has some small bugs here and there -- and there was a point a few years ago when Plasma seemed like they didn't care about bugs and instead just threw out a ton of shiny new pointless features every release instead -- but recently it is incredibly solid in general and more usable than anything else in Linux, by far. One of the only things I find "buggy" about Plasma is when someone tries to over-rice the desktop with tons of widgets and other things everywhere.

I think we have to step back once in a while to get a wider perspective.

Both GNOME and Plasma are not just simply desktops. Oh no. They are entire stacks, complete with SDKs, for the user and desktop applications to use. They are orchestrated collections of libraries, services and apps, that together combine to make huge projects.

All of this requires contributions, all of this requires developer time. And in this economy? Open source is taking a kick to the pants.

You also got feature creep and tech debt galore, as well as needing to replace various bits and pieces when things become outdated, deprecated and unmaintainable.

Let's put it plainly though: there's a reason GNOME is reorganising, and why it's all about the money, dum-dum-didi-dum-dum. I think that it would be great if GNOME managed to restructure to facilitate more developer time, because the lofty goals they have set means having to put some elbow grease in it. The same goes for KDE.

Yes, it's the funding issue again. It's all about prioritization. With the economy being what it is, money doesn't stretch that far anymore either.

With all this in mind, I think we should all show some appreciation for the good work of the folks who make GNOME and Plasma. We are given two great options, with each their approaches, that show us what true competition looks like, and they are really giving it their all - despite what some people may be saying.

We should do better to remind ourselves this

ITT: people make up fake desktop war drama between gnome, KDE, and window managers

Listen, its FOSS. Gnome and KDE can have different design philosophys, if they didn't why even be different. You can mix and match what you want and need from both quit a bit. The devs do!

All software has bugs, if your not paying devs or summited merge requests all you can do is ask nicely and fill helpful bug reports.

If you want stability you can choose Xfce. You'll don't need extensions because of easy configurability.