I agree, and what really sold me was Plasma Desktop, as someone that couldn't stand KDE 3 & 4. It used to be that GNOME was the desktop environment you could turn into a Windows or macOS clone, but it looks like that switched with GNOME 3 and KDE 5.
I have Plasma Desktop set up[1] to take advantage of my macOS muscle memory when it comes to the GUI and keyboard short cuts, and I couldn't imagine going back.
> Linux is rocking the desktop hard, if you haven't tried it in a few years or just maintain a Windows installation to play games-- seriously give it a try. It's wonderful.
It's not just developers or power users that Linux shines for, either. I'm of the opinion that if ChromeOS would suit a person's needs, so would a polished distribution like Ubuntu along with a browser like Firefox or Chrome. Ubuntu has an app store-like interface to install Zoom, Slack, and other work apps.
Looks good, allows me some tweaking, runs surprisingly light. Although, still some annoying bugs, the most annoying being when I open an application on my 1440p screen, KDE often opens it on my second monitor for no real reason.
This here is my most hated thing about KDE. I run it on Debian so my version is pretty old compared, has it been fixed in newer versions? I have been thinking about switching to Neon, but I don't care for the Ubuntu base verses vanilla Debian.
I've found XFCE and cinnamon are the most stable/reliable DE's. I'm rocking Manjaro cinnamon right now.
That said I do hope endeavouros or others can fill Manjaro's immense boots.
It's really hard not to have some bias, but I used OSX for work for about five years, currently been using Windows at work for about two years, and I still find Gnome to be the most usable and aesthetically pleasing desktop by far.
After helping my friend setting up KDE I discovered the level of polish and customizability that KDE now offers. That same day I installed KDE on my own machine and soon after removed every GNOME component from my system. I have been using it the last few weeks and really feel at home!
That's Linux empowering your computer. So that simple.
This was my reason for not using KDE for years. The UI these days is cleaner and leaner, rivaling XFCE in resource usage.
> I still find Gnome to be the most usable and aesthetically pleasing desktop by far.
This was my initial impression, as well. But if you want to do something that the GNOME team feels is superfluous, you're either out of luck or depending on some plugin that will break your DE if you upgrade GNOME.
On Plasma Desktop, almost everything is configurable, but it isn't overwhelming and disorganized like it was in KDE 3 & 4. There's a considerable amount of polish. Plugin bugs don't take down the entire desktop environment, either.
Note when I say "written for" I'm not even really speaking very technically - lots of programs written nowadays won't really have any particular dependency on a library that's only available on a certain OS. But if you're using an application that's written in a platform-agnostic way but the programmer only develops it and uses it on a Mac, it's usually easy to tell. Both in terms of system interop/integration and how bugs are prioritized.
So, even if people do things you don't like on their linux install, it's still far better to have as many people on linux as we can get.
For a good number of people it's just better than Windows and macOS.
