 It's the age-old debate, Ganon versus KDE. Which desktop environment is right for you? Well, the answer to this question has changed many times over the years because both Ganon and KDE, they often undergo radical changes. Many people back in the day, they loved Ganon 2, that particular desktop environment. And then when Ganon moved from Ganon 2 to Ganon 3, a lot of people that loved Ganon 2 hated Ganon 3. And then a lot of the people that hated Ganon 3 now love the new Ganon 40 series. And the same thing with KDE, a lot of people loved KDE 3.5. When KDE moved to 4.0, a lot of people hated the 4 series. And then once the 5 series, KDE Plasma came about, a lot of people really loved KDE Plasma. So everything is cyclical, there's waxes and wanes, right? But today I want to focus on Ganon and KDE, those desktop environments in their current versions. Right now, we're on Ganon 43 is the new release, and KDE Plasma is on 5.26. So I'm talking about the Ganon 40 series, and with KDE Plasma, we're talking about the 5 series. Now, which one of these desktop environments is right for you is going to depend on a lot of things. For one thing, it's going to depend on your workflow, how you use your computer. A lot of it is also going to depend on your personality type. What kind of computer user are you in general? For example, are you one of these people that is a tinkerer? You love to hack on things and move things around. You love to theme your desktop. You love to build your desktop environment into something more than it was out of the box. If you really love customization, KDE Plasma is definitely the desktop for you because it has almost infinite possibilities of what you can do with it. You can make it look and function exactly like Windows. You can make it look and function exactly like Mac OS. You can make it look and function exactly like the Ganon desktop environment or the old Unity desktop environment that Ubuntu used. You can make it almost Chrome OS-like if you want to. You can do practically anything you can imagine with KDE Plasma. If customization is your thing, KDE Plasma is perfect for you. If you're one of these people that you just want something that works out of the box, it doesn't have a lot of customization options, which for some people is a good thing. A lot of people get overwhelmed with possibilities. If you can do anything with a particular piece of software, that confuses a lot of people. There's too many buttons, too many options, too many things I can check on and off. I just want something that works as is as it came to me and that's it. If you're one of those kinds of people, which I think a lot of the MacBook crowd is, you go buy a MacBook, you love the Mac OS, typically Mac OS, you can't really customize that much either and it's just, it works out of the box. That's kind of what Ganon is. It's that desktop environment at least right now, the Ganon 40 series, which is fantastic, works kind of out of the box. You can extend it, you can customize it. There's plugins you can install, so it's not like you can't theme it at all. But it's certainly not to the level of KDE Plasma. So again, depending on which user you are, what your personality is, that really affects your choice here. Now let's talk about aesthetics. Which one of these desktop environments looks good, Ganon versus KDE? Well, in the looks department, I've got to say, it's a tie. Both Ganon and KDE look great. They look beautiful. The desktop environments look gorgeous. They look fresh. They look modern. They look much better than the Windows desktop. They look much better than the Mac OS desktop because Windows and Mac OS, those operating systems are still stuck in their old school paradigms, their old school look and feels where, you know, Ganon and KDE are not afraid to change things up. And I mentioned how radically they change, sometimes going from major version to major version, Ganon 2 looked nothing like Ganon 3, which looked really nothing like Ganon 40. Same thing with KDE, KDE 3 looked different than KDE 4, KDE 5 looks completely different than KDE 4, right? They change and that change is both a positive and a negative. But for many of us in the Linux community, we see that as a positive. These desktop environments are not afraid to grow and change and to evolve. And I think what they're currently evolved into looks, I think you're going to be happy on either one. Now let's talk about the Ganon suite of applications versus the KDE suite of applications because really the app ecosystem is a major difference between these two desktop environments. And for me, I think there's a clear winner here. I much prefer the KDE suite of applications versus the Ganon suite of applications just because KDE, the KDE programs, they're more numerous. There's a lot more official KDE programs than there are Ganon programs and the KDE programs. There's some really high level professional programs that are part of the KDE suite of applications. Things like Krita and Cayden Live. Those are really professional level graphics programs in the case of Krita or professional level video editor in the case of Cayden Live, where Ganon really doesn't have anything that I would call professional level. There's nothing that is part of the Ganon suite of applications that I would say is a killer app. I don't care about their file manager. I think their file manager is rather limited and it's kind of neutered and functionality is not nearly as full-featured. For example, as Dolphin in KDE. Let's talk about web browsers because both KDE and Ganon do have their own web browsers. KDE has the Falcon browser, Ganon has the Epiphany browser. Both of those are garbage and the Epiphany browser is a web kit based browser and I believe Falcon is based on the Blink engine, but both of them are practically unusable. KDE really uses those and most distributions that ship either Ganon or KDE out of the box do not ship Epiphany or Falcon typically. They almost always replace that with some other free and open source alternative, typically Firefox. Both Ganon and KDE ship with a plain text editor. Ganon ships with G-Edit and of course KDE ships with Kate. Both of those plain text editors I actually quite like. They're not the greatest plain text editors in the world, but they're certainly okay. I needed a plain text editor and I had to either use G-Edit or Kate. Yeah, I'd be okay with either one. Which one is the best of the two? Probably Kate. Both of the Ganon and KDE desktop environment ship with a terminal emulator. The Ganon terminal, quite good, very fully featured. I've got no problems with Ganon's terminal. I also have no problems with console with a K, which is KDE's terminal. Some of the other applications I much prefer KDE's screenshot utility compared to the Ganon screenshot utility, which seems rather limiting and that's really the case with a lot of like the system utilities and the preference utilities. I just find the KDE suite of applications a little better than Ganon's. Let's talk about plugins and extensions because both Ganon and KDE have the ability to have you install plugins that, you know, extend some extra functionality to their desktop environments. Although they do this in very different ways. Ganon, you typically install these extensions, these plugins from the browser. You go to the Ganon extension website, right? And you click on the install button and it just magically installs the plugin for you from the browser. KDE does this. Typically you go and install plugins through their discover software center and both are fine. I don't mind either one. The only thing with the plugin system, Ganon's plugin system is a little flaky in that from one version of Ganon to the next. A lot of times these third party plugins, they tend to break. If you're one of these people that use Ganon and you install a lot of extensions, you are going to have extensions that break on you. That's just a fact of life where things seem to be a little bit more stable on KDE. We should talk a little bit about accessibility because accessibility is one of the areas where we kind of lag behind as far as desktop Linux because we have so many desktop environments to choose from on Linux. But as far as people with disabilities that need some of these accessibility options like screen readers and things like that, there's really only two desktop environments that do a good job with accessibility. And thankfully, those two desktop environments are Ganon and KDE Plasma. So both are excellent options for those that have these accessibility needs. I would say of the two, which one is the better choice? Not having a disability myself. I will say this is just from what I've seen on the internet. Most people that have accessibility issues that need some of these options, they seem to gravitate toward Ganon because Ganon does seem to focus more on some of those accessibility options, much more so than KDE. What about system resource usage? Which one is going to use the least amount of my CPU, the least amount of my RAM? Well, in this department, there's a clear winner. KDE Plasma has actually become a very lightweight desktop environment. Typically, when I boot a fresh install of KDE Plasma, a cold boot of most Plasma distributions, I'm only going to use about 600 megs, maybe 700 megs of RAM, where typically when I boot into a Ganon distribution, typically I'm going to use 1 gig of RAM, 1.1 gig of RAM on a cold boot. So KDE Plasma tends to be much lighter than Ganon. Another thing to consider is which one of these desktop environments is the most popular? Which one has the most users? Which one has the most distributions that actually ship a customized Ganon or a customized KDE Plasma? Well, in this, I would say Ganon is the clear winner because Ganon is probably the most commonly used desktop environment that ships on the most distributions. It's definitely the desktop environment of choice for the really big desktop Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, such as Fedora. Ganon is also the default desktop environment for Debian. Now, that's not to say that there's not plenty of KDE Plasma distributions. There's actually a lot of KDE Plasma distributions out there as well, maybe not as many as the Ganon distributions, but we have a lot more variety with the KDE Plasma distributions because of those customization options with KDE. Each of the Plasma distributions look radically different from each other. And that's good. We have diversity. We have real choice. Manjaro puts out a fantastic KDE Plasma distribution. Garuda puts out just a gorgeous KDE Plasma desktop. If you're into aesthetics, check out Garuda. Vastly different Manjaro and Garuda. They don't really look alike, but two very good KDE Plasma distributions. ZeroLinux puts out a fantastic KDE Plasma distribution. Kubuntu puts out a really solid KDE distribution. But if popularity is important to you and you want to be a part of the majority, you want to be where all the cool kids are, yes, most Linux desktop users are using the Ganon desktop environment. So having said all this, which one of these is the right desktop environment for you? Well, I can't make that choice for you. I've given you plenty information to consider. What you can always do is you can try both of them out. You can install both KDE and Ganon, both desktop environments on any distribution. So if you're running a distribution that shipped with Ganon out of the box, you can also install KDE Plasma alongside it and try out KDE and vice versa. If you installed a KDE Plasma distribution and you want to give Ganon a try, just install Ganon and now you'll also have Ganon on your system. So you can try both out. You can weigh each option. Ultimately, I can't tell you which one's going to be right for you. You have to make that decision yourself. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course, I'm talking about Gabe James, Matt Maxim, Emmett Mitchell, Paul West, William Ball, homie, Alex, Armoredragon, Chuck, Commander, AngryDioKai, George, Lee, Mars, Drum, Nader, Yon, Alexander, Paul, Peace, Arch, and Fedora, Polytech, Realities4less, Redprofit, Roland, Stephen, Tools, Devler, and Willie, these guys. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode that you just watched would not have been possible. I'd also like to thank each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace.