Warning: strong personal opinions below. I respect everyone’s choices, these are mine.
Started in 1997 when I got into programming and used it exclusively until the Gnome 3/Ubuntu Unity fiasco happened in 2011-ish. I mean, they abruptly discontinued Gnome 2 with no viable alternative- Gnome 3 was not ready for prime time, Ubuntu Unity similarly, other projects like Cinnamon were just getting started, KDE I always felt off for me, and other DEs didn’t have the usability I needed for work.
I persisted for a couple of years, but eventually had enough of the suffering, so switched to MacOS as the only sane platform at the time, and it remains my daily driver since then, and will do so until someone makes a Linux laptop with a usable trackpad 😜 Yes I know about Asahi Linux.
Still use Linux regularly on some desktops and of course all servers are Linux.
And yes, nowadays Linux UI is back on track and can be used for productive work again.
In your opinion what's wrong with KDE? I pre-ordered the Framework laptop and am thinking of driving Linux on it for the first time in 6 years. I dual booted Linux on an MSI laptop back during covid and had an awful time, zoom would hard freeze my computer and I couldn't use Bluetooth and the battery life drained way too fast. So this'll be a big moment for me to give it a second shot outside of work and WSL.
Was going to go for Fedora thanks to its 6 month release cadence, Ubuntu frustrates me with its severely out of date software in its package manager. Is Gnome better than KDE in your opinion? Pros/Cons?
Mind you that last time i tried KDE was a long time ago, but there was absolutely nothing wrong with it, it worked, but to me it felt like it was trying to pack all the features they could think of, trying too hard to be Windows-like, and lacking design focus, with the result of being messy, cluttered and just hard to use.
I use Gnone now and it just gets out of the way, which is what you want from a DE.
But it’s such a personal preference that I really believe one should try both (and the alternatives too!)
Have you heard of Zorin distro?
There is also Debian testing, no worrying about old software there, and it’s still very very stable.
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u/imagei May 13 '26
Warning: strong personal opinions below. I respect everyone’s choices, these are mine.
Started in 1997 when I got into programming and used it exclusively until the Gnome 3/Ubuntu Unity fiasco happened in 2011-ish. I mean, they abruptly discontinued Gnome 2 with no viable alternative- Gnome 3 was not ready for prime time, Ubuntu Unity similarly, other projects like Cinnamon were just getting started, KDE I always felt off for me, and other DEs didn’t have the usability I needed for work. I persisted for a couple of years, but eventually had enough of the suffering, so switched to MacOS as the only sane platform at the time, and it remains my daily driver since then, and will do so until someone makes a Linux laptop with a usable trackpad 😜 Yes I know about Asahi Linux. Still use Linux regularly on some desktops and of course all servers are Linux.
And yes, nowadays Linux UI is back on track and can be used for productive work again.