[ColonelPhantom]

Rumors of Gnome's demise seem greatly exaggerated to me. It's still the default DE in nearly all major distributions, and it doesn't seem to have incurred major mindshare or marketshare hits recently. I feel like most of the 'complainers' already abandoned the Gnome ship with the release of GNOME 3.

Really the only high-profile 'switch' in recent times I can think of is that Fedora promoted KDE to be first-class ('edition') alongside Gnome, instead of delegated to a more second-class spin. And while KDE is a bit more conservative in this regard, I believe that in the long term KDE also wants to go Wayland-only at some point.

Personally I did switch from Gnome to KDE some time after Gnome 40, since I quite liked 3.x but the UI overhaul 40 did wasn't really my thing. It also helps that KDE got a lot better in recent years.

[cout]

KDE got better some ways, but I would really like to be able to write an applet without learning QML and everything that goes with it. The learning curve feels higher than when I wrote my first Android app.