[timlatim]

> It's simply that Gnome is too 'chaotic'.

Just to offer a different point of view, I see it as the opposite. I like a lot of things the KDE community is doing and I think it's particularly good at power user oriented apps like Krita and Kdenlive, which may be the best open-source tools in their respective areas and which don't really fit in the modern Gnome framework. As a desktop environment, however, I feel KDE is too visually chaotic to be usable. This post [1] illustrates some problems, but the lack of design cohesion permeates KDE and cannot be fixed without a long concerted effort. I imagine it's never been a priority because most users can shrug these inconsistencies off as something inconsequential, but for me (and I don't believe I'm alone in this) they're instantly noticeable and distracting eyesores.

Gnome has its own problems, but it is very visually consistent and clean, especially as of late when most of the standard apps are moved to GTK4/libadwaita. The GP's comparison of KDE being closer in spirit to Windows while Gnome to Mac is spot on IMO.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/tffr4l/some_kde_plasma...

[kuschku]

You and the previous poster are talking about different things.

Gnome has consistent UI. Every app looks the same.

KDE has consistent UX. Every app works the same.

If users can learn a paradigm once and apply it everywhere, your paradigm can be more complicated as the payoff is also larger.

But if every app is different, users won't spend any amount of time to learn how it works. Every possible option needs to be obvious immediately.