KDE vs. Gnome Design Philosophies (2017)

My preferences aren't religious-strong, but I have enough of a preference that I installed KDE Plasma on Pop! OS instead of the Gnome-base default. And I've struggled to get the network manager working in KDE which has been a nuisance and never a problem on distros who ship KDE as the default - so there's at least some importance in a distro's default, even if others are available. I've been known to pull up a Gnome version of some application in KDE and vice-versa because of individual preferences. But as a desktop / window manager yeah I actually have a strong preference.

The article actually isn't loading for me, so I'm not sure if these are the same design philosophies addressed, but some of the key things are:

* I find Gnome's dock-like things very annoying. I find it easier to get KDE's task bar to take up a very small number of pixels and I feel it stays out of my way more while I'm focusing on other applications. It feels like Gnome takes after Mac and KDE takes after Windows, and I just prefer the latter, UI-wise.

* KDE is far more configurable for keyboard shortcuts. I use the ability to pin a window to the left / right half, or one of the quadrants using they key-binding of my choice all the time. I hadn't been using KDE for very long when I would miss that every time I was on another machine. Even after being back on Gnome for a couple of years I wanted it. There are some third-party add-ons that do it, but they were buggy for me. I'd rather just have KDE out-of-the-box. This is one example, but keyboard shortcuts in general are for more widely used and configurable on KDE.

edit: Clarified a few things, but also have now read the article: yes I like this "completist" philosophy, especially since much of the complexity is hidden away in drop-down menus. I think it's the best of both worlds.

I am opinionated. To each their own, here are my opinions:

KDE is near Windows defaults, maximum configuration (you can even emulate Mac OS X if you want.)

Gnome 2 was Windows-like and somewhat customizable.

Gnome 3 is Mac-like and harder to customize.

Unity is Mac-like and unnecessary hard to customize.

Elementary looks Mac-like but isn't rage-inducing in the same way for me as they have a working application switcher.

For HN terminal app comparison would be nice. I am only familiar with Konsole and I am happy with it.

I've used both Gnome and KDE based UI's, and yeah, I don't feel strongly about the differences, but also I've never felt like either one was actually good. They both get the job done, but they both feel designed by developers for developers, on the assumption that anything you can't figure out in the UI you'll Google or open a terminal and text editor to deal with it. Compared to, say, the iPad 2 which felt clearly designed for lay users down to the settings UI. (I feel like the later versions of iOS got more complex and harder to parse, so I'm picking the iteration I liked the most.)

But then again, it's Linux, I'm a developer, I'm used to Googling how to do things, and I play my video games on Windows, so 90%+ of my time in Linux is in the terminal, text editor (or IDE), and browser anyway. So no complaints - the presence of a fully featured UI isn't why I use Linux.

This is quite old. I think Amarok's Qt5 port didn't get finished, and I think Elisa is the new KDE music player:

https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/elisa

Also CD Burning? I think even in 2017 PCs and Laptops didn't come with CD drives.

Personally, I like KDE for the small touches. Like the file browser having an integrated terminal that follows the directories you're browsing.

If you want to see what the KDE's Design Guidelines are look here:

https://develop.kde.org/hig/

And GNOME's is here:

https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/

Perhaps it's worth doing a 2021 comparison?