I am seriously considering a look at KDE 6. I've kind of settled on Gnome plus some extensions (arc menu and dash to panel) over years, but they don't really give me exactly the feel I want, and the extensions I use may or may not work the way I expect them to at the time Gnome releases.
Every time I look at the release notes for Gnome, I continually find myself either not excited or disappointed in different decisions, additions and removals that were made.
I've tried i3/sway and hyperland recently. The problem is they don't work well with all the applications I need to support (zoom, slack). Gnome typically "just works" and is why I wind up continuing to use it.
GNOME is somewhat frustrating to me because there’s a number of things that I feel it gets more “right” than KDE, at least for me, but there’s about as many things that it doesn’t. KDE gets a lot of things “somewhat right” but also gets more less wrong, making it maybe better overall but still not leaving me satisfied.
I appreciate that both exist free of charge as the result of a lot of time that people didn’t have to volunteer and shouldn’t be taken for granted. I’m glad both exist and continue to be maintained, but regardless, the situation leaves me much less jazzed about the Linux desktop than I’d like to be.
Window manager setups might be a solution, but they take a lot of effort to make as polished as any of the major DEs, requiring the user to hunt down daemons to get tray items and the like. They also have a strong disposition towards hyper-minimal tiling which isn’t my thing, something along the lines of openbox is probably the most minimal I’d want to go but WMs like that don’t see much fanfare.
You might want to wait a little while, or look at 5 instead, because Plasma 6 was only just released and is still shaking out early bugs.
> Every time I look at the release notes for Gnome, I continually find myself either not excited or disappointed in different decisions, additions and removals that were made.
This extends into the toolkit as well. I was happily using XFCE until it adopted Gtk 3, at which point it quickly went downhill. The GNOME maintainers' insistence on designs that I find frustrating, the frequent removal of common desktop features that I use, and the general fragility imposed on applications that surfaces whenever the toolkit gets minor updates, all conspired to drive me away.
It took some time and effort to migrate to KDE Plasma, but it was worth it. I'm pretty happy with my desktop again.
KDE is truly a great DE. I am still on 5.27, have not upgraded to 6 yet (Debian woes, lol) but considering all the praise I have heard - it is probably even better than the experience I have now which is solid. I am running Debian 12 with Wayland on AMD hardware. Everything "just works". I can record stuff with OBS studio, loom recording works, slack calls/screensharing works great, vscode, 1pass, spotify. I have been a macOS user since Tiger (10.4, intel transition) and have dabbled on and off with desktop Linux over the last decade but lately it is truly solid and quite polished.
If you're interested in i3/sway but want something that "just works"- have you checked out Regolith?
I used to daily drive it and was a big fan- it's basically i3 + gnome for stuff like settings etc. So you get a nice simple tiling window manager, but don't have to install something new whenever you want to (eg) get Bluetooth working.
Every time I look at the release notes for Gnome, I continually find myself either not excited or disappointed in different decisions, additions and removals that were made.
I've tried i3/sway and hyperland recently. The problem is they don't work well with all the applications I need to support (zoom, slack). Gnome typically "just works" and is why I wind up continuing to use it.