Is it just me? Do other people feel strongly about any of these differences?
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.
Also KDE Connect is awesome for integration with android phones. It's available in non-KDE distros too. Available on Fdroid too.
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.
As a developer, I disagree.
KDE's interface is often broken and/or unintuitive for what I want to do. At least it usually provides the levers if they're hard to use or find.
Gnome's interface is almost always too simplified and doesn't present the powerful levers at all unless you go digging behind the scenes and hope that an update doesn't break some "private" implementation detail.
I'm not so sure that we're saying different things. I didn't mean it as a compliment, more as an explanation. In general developers aren't good at designing UX (not their job), and in general developers are used to often byzantine UX, including falling back to terminal rituals, and both UI's feel (to me) like they're 80% of the way there and left that way because of the tacit understanding that there's always the terminal and text configs.
https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.21.0/
If anyone want to try the latest KDE Plasma, KDE Neon has it on top of a stable Ubuntu LTS base.
The goal is something like "a unified Mac-like system space," but as people here have correctly noted, I don't think its possible to bring a bunch of developers together to create a universally "nice" space unless one of them is named Steve Jobs.
What makes it worse is that we have these two large projects with a lot of good history behind them that nonetheless have not really done anything good (in terms of a unified experience, many of the individual apps are great) recently. They have a lot of the mindshare and very little to show for it.
Obviously, developers are free to run their projects how they wish, but my wish is that they'd wake up and realize they're not Apple; but there is something they could do that would actually be helpful. Not try to work on carving out their own space -- but the opposite -- try to figure out how to create modular parts of a workspace that really work well together and across WMs and platforms.
Until then, I'll do what I've been doing, which is Openbox plus the things I need and like. I see cool things in Gnome and KDE that I'd love to have, but then they bring the rest of their baggage that just gets in the way, so no.
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.
I would be interested to hear if there is a major difference between GTK apps that are not part of GNOME and GNOME first apps .
Gnome seems to combine the worst aspects of OSX and windows with some things in side panel, some persistent menu bars, some applications with double menu bars... it's annoying is all.
KDE tends to stick to what i understand and what i want is usually where i expect it to be.
I would disagree with you in that the differences are substantive.
Overall, Desktop Linux works well enough for me to live with it. A few years earlier, that was not an option if you wanted to live a relatively normal computing life without missing out on too much or spending an inordinate amount of time on keeping your system alive.
I mean, I'm using Linux to work, so as long as I can pull up a terminal, run Zoom, run my browser, and run IDEA, I'm sorted, I'm not overly fussed about what the MP3 players look like, I can just open Spotify in a browser if I need tunes.
If you switch between KDE and Gnome apps (kedit vs gnome-edit, kmail vs gnome evolution, KDE dolphin vs. Gnome nautilus, kmines vs. Gnome mines game ...) you see more of the differences in App Design principles.
Web browser. Check
They're the same