 Okay so a little bit of introduction first because many people will think that I'm trying to convince you to switch to KDE or that I think that everybody should switch to KDE and that is not the case at all. I've actually used GNOME for quite a while if you follow my channel you know that and I do think that GNOME is a great option. I do think that both projects are worth using and you should use one depending on your personal preferences. However at the same times I think there are a lot of people that are coming into the Linux world and that are maybe not too sure whether they should use one over another. So here's what I think should be like the convincing factor when you're trying to decide whether to use KDE Plasma or GNOME and the fact is that these two projects are both really good in my opinion but also both very different. So if you recognize yourself into this distinction that I'm going to talk about then you should use like KDE Plasma. If you don't then you should use GNOME because that's also an awesome project don't get me wrong. So as a basis to start talking about this together with my knowledge of KDE Plasma because that's what I mostly use. I'm also using a Reddit thread under KDE subreddit which actually asked why are you using KDE Plasma over GNOME to KDE Plasma users. I think that also provides some insight and the first and major reason is customization and in customization extensions in particular. So let me give a quick overview of the differences when you're talking about customizations in KDE Plasma and GNOME because you do you can customize both but it's very different how you do it. So in KDE Plasma you have the concept of themes and each and every thing can be can kind of have its own theme. Like as an example you have the Plasma theme to customize how the desktop itself looks. You have application themes to customize how applications look. Then you have an icon set to customize the icons. You have a cursor set to customize your mouse. These kind of things for each of these you have this little theme that you can just download and apply via UI. Nothing you don't have to install anything. At the same time you also have the concept of plasmoids and of containers. So take the panel as an example. Inside of the panel you have lots of icons and those are called plasmoids. The fact is that KDE Plasma is pretty much the only desktop where you can actually actively customize those plasmoids apart from more niche Linux desktops like XFC that kind of things but talking about KDE Plasma you can change the position of the icons. You can change also the size and position of the container which is the panel itself. You can also place those widgets on the desktop because the desktop is also a container. So it is very customizable. Also all applications you can customize them. You do have all of this range of customizability which is built-in and KDE Plasma is designed to be customized. GNOME takes a very different approach. By itself GNOME is not meant to be customized I think. Like it doesn't have any UI that addresses customizations that is beyond what the GNOME developers wanted and that is usually a very conservative take. And for many people that is fine. They are fine with the default of GNOME. Other people would like to change some aspect. Myself when I tried GNOME I did want to change a couple of things. So GNOME actually addresses that through the use of extensions. Now to install extensions personally I installed the extension manager which is a third-party application I think. You can also do that via GNOME integration with a browser using the GNOME store. It is not as well integrated I think as the KDE store. So you can already see that extensions are slightly less first-party compared to what you have with themes in KDE Plasma. Nonetheless you have extensions and the fact is that extension can customize pretty much anything. So you want to have a different order of icons than you have to have an extension for that. You want to have blur on the background. You have to use extension. Everything falls underneath these extensions. You do not have this modularity that KDE has like having distinct themes for different things. You just have extensions. Now here's the issue which is actually the first comment in the ready thread. That is I'm tired of extensions and shell themes getting hosed every update. Extensions use the GNOME API and it seems like at each update some changes in how GNOME works might break extensions and that seems to happen frequently. So every time you update you don't have the certainty of everything still working whereas if you use KDE Plasma yes there might be some new bugs introduced by the update obviously but your themes are supported in any release like unless you're going from Plasma 5 to Plasma 6 any other kind of release will your themes will still work because they are designed to work whereas extensions it's more again it's a bit less first party it seems. They are very nicely integrated with GNOME but sometimes they feel more of a hack that is added to try to deal with customization rather than what KDE does which is actually implementing like customization from the start with thinking about customization how to do it these kind of things. Of course this comes with a downside that is KDE Plasma is extremely complex. Even code wise like I'm a developer and I can tell you that if we didn't have themes it would be so much easier to do everything and I can understand why GNOME might not want to add themes for everything like it takes time to actually do that stuff and that is time that could be used elsewhere and the fact that you have so many customizations to test possible different setups means that it's harder to actually catch bugs because maybe some bugs only happen if you have that setting enabled and that setting enabled so KDE Plasma I think in my opinion is less stable compared to GNOME also because it has so many customizations and options so it is a very good thing that you can customize out of the box very nicely it works it has the downside of being less stable overall in my opinion but again GNOME's extensions break every update so that's not very stable either you could make an argument for both. The second thing that is very very often said is that I like the traditional traditional desktop and I do not like this Android D thing that GNOME is doing. Now I actually strongly disagree with this one I do not think that GNOME is doing a bad thing at all going for this Android D if you want to call it that way design however I do realize that it's very personal and although for me it works for you it might not so KDE Plasma and GNOME are very different in its layout you can just look at them they're completely different so KDE Plasma is more of a traditional design again so if you've used a Windows in the past at any time KDE Plasma layout by default is much more similar to that compared to GNOME that is very much doing their own thing and KDE Plasma really just works like a desktop like you would expect if you have ever used a traditional desktop it's nothing surprising GNOME is very different and you see that even from the fact that a you don't have files on your desktop you cannot put files on your desktop unless you use an extension again but that is already a very opinionated workflow and if you like that you will like that if you don't you don't personally I never use files on my desktop so it's fine to me but other people might want them and might not want to use an extension for that another example you don't have any minimize button unless you install in an extension again why don't you have any minimize button so the idea is that instead of minimizing application you should use multiple virtual desktops so whenever you're done with a task or you want to just pose it for a second instead of minimizing the applications that you use for that task you switch to a new virtual desktops you open more application there and if you need a previous one instead of re-maximizing them you just switch to the previous virtual desktops again that is something that I personally really like that is how I also work on KDE Plasma however it's very opinionated again and if you're not into that sort of workflow you might not like GNOME and you might prefer KDE Plasma that offers a more traditional approach with minimizing application and minimize button files on your desktop all of that you can also you know customize it so that it works more like GNOME of course it won't be GNOME because GNOME is GNOME and that's it but it kind of offers both kind of workflows just what you prefer then there is the KDE ecosystem KDE if you just count the number of applications in KDE ecosystem and GNOME ecosystem I think that actually GNOME wins they have a lot of applications especially if you count a GNOME circle which is this onboarding thing that they do for a third-party application which is super nice they have lots of applications either for niche use cases however the strength of the KDE ecosystem of applications is that those applications that are meant for KDE are extremely powerful and can do a variety of tasks and they do it really well so much so that I often hear about people who would like to use KDE applications on other desktops or even other operating systems as well and the cool thing is that you can you just can't do that they they are designed to work not just in KDE Plasma but wherever so why am I saying that so take a text editor as an example KDE Simple Text Editor is called KDE GNOME Simple Text Editor is I forgot the name it was J edit but now it's different right this the GNOME text editor I don't know so KDE is actually like hundreds of times more powerful than the GNOME text editor it has so many features that you would normally expect only from like a powerful IDE but it's actually all packed nicely to a normal text editor that is still very simple to use if you don't want any super customizable thing so you have stuff like block mode that allows you to select a lot of things at the same time you have multiple cursors you have v mode you have you know what I've done an entire two videos actually about all the KDE features you can just go check those out believe me it's extremely powerful and it's not just KDE it's also Dolphin it's not just an application to see files it's an application to see file done right like terribly right so personally I think that the core KDE applications KDE Dolphin and so on beat the GNOME applications anytime that is my personal preference but of course if you prefer something that is again simple and that that just does your task without offering any additional option that you might need but maybe you don't then GNOME's applications are very fine too and remember that you can always use KDE applications on GNOME if you're for any reason you know undecided on which one you should use another reason that is often said is that KDE Plasma is lighter on resources however for this one I don't really want to take it as an argument because I have no hard data to prove this and actually when I try to use GNOME on very low-hand devices such as the Pinebook yes it was a bit slower compared to KDE Plasma but with the very recent developments and help with Ubuntu it seems like GNOME improved a lot so this situation might have changed so keep in mind that in the past GNOME was struggling with resources but right now the situation might be completely different test if test with really you should test which desktop works best on your machine it's very easy to just try them out without installing them I've talked about customization I also want to mention that KDE has this philosophy of having a lot of options which is a different thing like customization is having themes and staffing being able to customize the appearance mostly of stuff options are like how things behave in practice and that is a different topic and KDE again has lots of options trying to work for as many people as possible so if you're looking for some sort of more niche use case you should totally check out KDE because it tries to offer as much as possible whereas GNOME again has that open unit workflow that if it works for you it will work super nicely but if it doesn't it just won't again I'm not saying that it's wrong I love it actually but it really depends on you to make a simple example say that you are used to some this making touch is making touchish I think behavior where if you click the active task on your text manager well usually in most desktops doing that will just minimize the application but in making touch actually nothing happened so in KDE Plasma you can actually customize what happens if you click on the active window in your text manager that's such a niche use case right but it's still covered by KDE Plasma and you can choose a couple of options and let me check them out again yeah you can choose whether it should minimize or not you can also customize stuff as how much space should there be between one task manager icon and the next one again that's up to you you can choose between small normal large and if you don't like those values there are third-party plasma themes that can customize that there's a lot of stuff but again this means that there's more configuration to test there's more stuff to maintain there's more code there's more stuff to there's more stuff that can go wrong and it's harder to find the bugs each time there's a lot of effort in KDE to try to address all the bugs and all the issues don't get me wrong but if you have a simple opinionated workflow like GNOME does I think it's much easier to have it more stable and bug-free when I used GNOME I actually didn't notice any bug at all almost but I think some of the bugs that I saw was caused by extensions because again extensions could cause bugs KDE Plasma sometimes I do meet KDE Plasma bugs I try to fix them whenever possible but you know if you want something that works out of the box for sure and that will never annoy you in any way then GNOME is more likely to be what you're looking for but if you're looking for something that will adapt you and your workflow KDE Plasma is probably more for you to summarize it up there's a lot of people saying that GNOME is missing a lot of features and although you could argue for that the thing is not that they're missing the features is that they don't want them they have their idea of how the desktop should work like whereas KDE doesn't try to force you to any particular workflow it tries to make sure that a default one is as good as possible but it allows you to customize it in various ways and of course it that has benefits and downsides so that is it for this video thanks everybody for following along and see you tomorrow with yet another one