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Comment by ralmidani | Hacker News Reader

I use the latest Ubuntu with Gnome and it seems… OK? I’m not super picky, I can find my way around - and tolerate - anything as long as it’s not Windows.

That said, I have a Framework laptop for my personal use (my company gives us Mac devices), and they say Fedora has the best driver support. Since I’ll be evaluating a new distro, I’m also considering taking another serious look at KDE after a long time using Ubuntu’s Unity and Gnome. Concretely, what would I gain, and what might I lose?

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I still miss Unity sometimes :( One thing I don't particularly like about the "new" Gnome is that it makes the searchable launcher[0] fullscreen. So whatever context you're in is completely covered up by the launcher when you simply want to search for something to open. Remember when Windows 8 did the same thing? Microsoft moved away from that pattern since then. For all of the issues people had with Unity (the Amazon integration circa 16.04), at least it got the launcher somewhat right[1]

[0] Gnome launcher: https://imgur.com/l422pxK

[1] Unity launcher: https://imgur.com/sfw76Et

I have the same attitude as you do. When I was younger I spent so much time tweaking and changing Linux distros and desktops. Now I just install any Debian based distro and enable the dark theme. I pretty much leave everything as default. I spent most of my time in the apps I use, DBeaver for database work, Firefox and whatever editor I am using. I am bemused by the passionate partisan comments in this thread. I am long past that but thankful to all developers working on Open Source desktops.

Yeah, I have a hard time justifying hyper-customization. I understand that folks want to work efficiently, but as a dev, I need to stop and think about what I’m doing. I also have a tendency to rabbit-hole (actual feedback from my peers and manager), and if I leave myself unchecked I’ll probably spend more time “optimizing my workflow” than doing actually useful stuff.

These days, the only real changes I tend to make are installing oh-my-zsh (thereby outsourcing the low-level tweaks to someone else) and Sublime with a handful of plugins (does that count?).

Fedora is excellent, and I find stock Gnome to be preferable to whatever it is Ubuntu does to it. Your mileage may vary, etc.

I’m the same way, not picky as long as I can figure out where to click. I just did the reverse of KDE -> Gnome, I miss KDE here and there but I’ve been able to take the pieces I miss and replace them with gnome extensions.

Gnome was faster to get started with but KDE felt deeper. KDEs UI is denser, which imo makes it feel less “modern” but both KDE and Gnome are usable.

Best thing you can do is to spin up a VM and try it out yourself! Everyone’s different.

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