I recently installed KDE Plasma to my Debian system after using Gnome my entire life. I still quite enjoy gnome, but I think that its workflow is better suited to a mobile system like my laptop (though to be honest this is also questionable to me at this point).
Using Plasma on my desktop system has been revolutionary - there is a stupid amount of functionality in here. In particular, widgets, themes, and activities are just so well implemented for the most part - I really feel like I can tailor the GUI to my needs and wants, and I think this is an enormous part of what is making Linux a truly modern OS when compared to proprietary alternatives.
The more I tweak things, the more the system feels truly like MY system - something that you won’t ever get in proprietary software, or even Gnome in it’s current state I feel (unless you jump through a tonne of hoops and write a lot of stuff yourself).
I was not a big fan of the splash screen until I found out that, of course, it can be disabled or customized as well.
My only real regret is that having been on Gnome originally, some Gnome stuff can get in the way (though I do still kind of like using GDM instead of SDDM). Whenever I should do some big update/upgrade I am for sure installing plasma from the get go.
As someone who is new to KDE overall, and particularly with a system that has Gnome still partially installed, if there is anything I should know, I would appreciate it. Furthermore if anyone has any favorite widgets and whatnot, I would love to hear about them as well.
Thank you
I use Plasma now, but I miss the cohesiveness provided to developer by Gnome’s Human Interface Guidelines, the result is a vastly unified design language across core, circle and some other 3rd party apps. Plus, I appreciate that their design language is very simplistic and easy on the eyes. While Plasma tends to be more condensed and explicit even for non primary features, while on GNOME, secondary features tend to be hidden from plain sight.
That said, Plasma has been faster to adopt some gaming and design related features due to their collaboration with Valve and from what I’ve read in the fediverse, they are more open to other people’s opinions.
There were a few Figma mockup leaks that looked FREAKING amazing in these regards, but that mockup has been taken down by KDE and is no longer public. I can’t even find screenshots now. If that mockup ever becomes real, I won’t miss GNOME at all.
That said, GNOME is freaking amazing, I had an awesome time with it, and it’s a perfectly valid option.
I feel the same way about Gnome. But I really hate the path they took for the change in the desktop paradigm. It feels very much limiting and empty. More fit for a tablet, as others mentioned.