Always a reminder for people who are frustrated with the state of Gnome... I've found KDE to be _very good_ for people who want to see options up and center. In a way KDE is definitely more Windows-like and Gnome more Mac-like in its approaches, and you can see this very directly with the screenshotter tools packed into the various environments.
Definitely worth it for people frustrated at Gnome's cleanliness-to-a-fault.
(Full disclosure: I donate to both and apprecaite them both existing)
The key is that KDE offers such easy and flexible customization by default. In my case with the taskbar like Windows7 with non-grouped open programs and so on. One just have to right-click on the taskbar, set, and done, because the options are available, those configuration options exist, they cared about making it easy to use and to get.
In the same way, I think Dolphin v24 should be seen as a starting point for the minimal features and easy customization included by default that a file browser needs.
> Definitely worth it for people frustrated at Gnome's cleanliness-to-a-fault.
I think the problem looks more like Gnome is trying to target only tactile pads with very basic needs? not desktop users with keyboards and mouse.
This is very unfortunate, with capital letters, because if Gnome had preserved the features instead of cropping and going the pads-only route, they would have avoided the obvious result, a split in resources and developers (Mate and Homologous continuations of Gnome v2), which even ended up with two kinds of distros under Gnome. A division in resources (disaster/catastrophe).
> Definitely worth it for people frustrated at Gnome's cleanliness-to-a-fault.
For me it's not that. I don't mind white space, and I don't mind flat design. It's simply that Gnome is too 'chaotic'. If Gnome would simply copy macOS instead of trying to invent their own UI paradigms it would mostly be fine (not that macOS is perfect though, it has been regressing massively too in the last decade, and some things never were great - most notably the OSX Finder).
But yeah, on my Linux laptop I switched to KDE a couple of months ago and it's great. Also much snappier than Gnome.
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.
Definitely worth it for people frustrated at Gnome's cleanliness-to-a-fault.
(Full disclosure: I donate to both and apprecaite them both existing)