I'm a long time KDE user. I recently switched to Gnome. I liked gnome-shell when I first laid eyes on it, even years ago, but Gnome in general is still alien and confusing to me, and I still like a lot of the technical vision of KDE. But now that I've switched, the investments of Canonical and Red Hat in Gnome really make themselves apparent in terms of polish.
What I mainly like about Gnome is that it works very well with Wayland out of the box, and seems to work with Firefox better. The browser is the primary tool, and that experience needs to be perfect. On Gnome, I can even run Firefox natively on Wayland with WebRender without a single noticeable problem.
In Wayland, KDE would forget my screen configuration everytime I reboot or resume from a suspended state. And this bug existed for multiple years, without improvement. And copy-paste on Firefox wouldn't work on Wayland under KDE.
I especially want to use Wayland because with KDE you still can't log into a rootless X environment via SDDM, and I don't want to give up SDDM, nor do I want the reduced security of X running as root.
Gnome works perfectly there. I also like that the Windows/Super key is configured to do what you expect right out of the box. Animations are snappy, and everything feels fast. And unlike plasma, I've never seen it crash.
Using the .pam_environment file to export user environment variables was awkward, and took some digging to figure out. That was new to me, and I don't like it but it doesn't matter too much.
Main problems, however, involve Qt apps... like KeepassXC. Editing entries causes the app to crash, on Gnome under wayland.
Haven't tried VLC yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if I run into issues. I will probably seek alternatives to these. I will try Firefox Lockwise and mpv. Surprising how easy it is to ditch most of these apps, since for me Firefox practically is my desktop. The browser is the main thing I care about, and the shell the second most important. Gnome is the obvious choice for me now.
What I mainly like about Gnome is that it works very well with Wayland out of the box, and seems to work with Firefox better. The browser is the primary tool, and that experience needs to be perfect. On Gnome, I can even run Firefox natively on Wayland with WebRender without a single noticeable problem.
In Wayland, KDE would forget my screen configuration everytime I reboot or resume from a suspended state. And this bug existed for multiple years, without improvement. And copy-paste on Firefox wouldn't work on Wayland under KDE.
I especially want to use Wayland because with KDE you still can't log into a rootless X environment via SDDM, and I don't want to give up SDDM, nor do I want the reduced security of X running as root.
Gnome works perfectly there. I also like that the Windows/Super key is configured to do what you expect right out of the box. Animations are snappy, and everything feels fast. And unlike plasma, I've never seen it crash.
Using the .pam_environment file to export user environment variables was awkward, and took some digging to figure out. That was new to me, and I don't like it but it doesn't matter too much.
Main problems, however, involve Qt apps... like KeepassXC. Editing entries causes the app to crash, on Gnome under wayland.
Haven't tried VLC yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if I run into issues. I will probably seek alternatives to these. I will try Firefox Lockwise and mpv. Surprising how easy it is to ditch most of these apps, since for me Firefox practically is my desktop. The browser is the main thing I care about, and the shell the second most important. Gnome is the obvious choice for me now.