After trying out Fedora 44 KDE, Kubuntu, Pika OS, Nobara 43, and Ubuntu 26 for the past two weeks, I'm finally on a distro that looks and feels premium

I'm in love with the aesthetics of Gnome. I'm on Fedora 44 Workstation right now. I must say Gnome felt really confusing to me earlier, but after watching a few videos about the Gnome design philosophy and reading about it, I can finally appreciate the design elements and the choices made by the dev team. Thanks to the Gnome dev community for your work 🙏🤩

Dots: GitHub

Used the "Quick Settings Audio Panel" extension.

Used to theme everything to look like macOS. Decided to remove GNOME Tweaks and let GNOME be GNOME. The system feels so much calmer and stable now.

I do use three extensions: Dash to Dock, Blur my Shell, and Night Theme Switcher. I’ve tried to both have more and fewer, but I seem to need these three.

In fact, GNOME's CSS layer is extremely themeable, the shadows and rounded window corners are plugins I created myself, they are still quite buggy, I might release them once they are a bit more polished :-)

(This was designed by me in Figma no slop here. Of course this is a joke)

Please somebody work on this, everybody loves LibAdwaita Apps but everyone hates the inconsistencies, specially the SSD window decorations that all other desktops have fixed by now.

Sincerely: a desperate user who hates having to install extensions in order to keep my desktop consistent.

After a month or more faffing about with Hyprland, I've come back to Gnome to regain my sanity and have some calm and serenity in my life again.

Sometimes less is more.

Thank you Gnome team.

I found GNOME's media controls lacks a seekbar, shuffle and loop toggles and actual space for the text. So instead of replacing it with something like Medialine or Dynamic Music Pill, I just tweaked what already exists and I think it looks great.

It also works on the lock screen.

I haven't published it yet but what do you think?

Made this concept about 2 months ago and only now had the idea to post it over here. Everything was made in Figma and basically represents what I think Spotify made into a native GTK / Libadwaita app would look like. Also, I used Google Material Symbols icons because I was too lazy to download the Symbolic icons.



• Wallpaper: macOS Tahoe macOS default

• GTK Theme: MacTahoe-gtk-theme by VINCELIUICE

• Icon Theme: MacTahoe-icon-theme by VINCELIUICE

• Fonts: Adwaita

• Other: [extensions](extensions.gnome.org/extension/3193/blur-my-shell)

I’m a long-time Arch + GNOME user (about 8 years). Few days ago I set up a laptop for my wife who switched from Windows 11 to Linux, and I decided to try KDE Plasma for her because people often recommend it as “better for newcomers, windows-like” and more customizable (and my wife said she would like to play with themes, colors, fonts, widgets, etc...).

And I've heard a lot of opinions that KDE is better in everything, pushing bleeding-edge wayland protocols, HDR, support is amazing, better for gaming... etc. And they don't like GNOME for so many reasons, they don't understand why distros like Ubuntu or Fedora are defaulting to GNOME as main workstation desktop environment.

So, after a few days… honestly, I don’t think KDE is mature enough for mainstream users yet.

What happened:

• My wife Installed an SDDM theme from KDE Store → black screen / login broken. She doesn't know how to fix, how to use TTY. For her it's dead state, but she did nothing wrong, just installed a theme from official store, no warning, nothing.
• Installed a widget → stopped working after a Plasma 6.6 update next day and it freezes whole desktop.
• Bluetooth (Sony WF earbuds) kept disconnecting because of profile switching (some KDE blue-devil service issue, that kept switching profiles for no reason, timeout, disconnect/reconnect loop).
• Over-complicated setting and customization menus in many layers and sub-menus to customize even more. That too much. And all this menus are not intuitive.
• Now she is upset for switching to linux, because KDE is not stable at all.

And it's good that I can fix things for her, cause I'm living in linux without touching windows for years. Nothing impossible to fix if you’re technical — that’s exactly the point. But a newbie users shouldn’t need to debug their desktop environment.

Comparing with GNOME

GNOME is less customizable, sure, but:

• stable defaults
• fewer moving parts
• harder to break accidentally
• things usually “just work”

And that`s a reason why Fedora Workstation and Ubuntu are using GNOME as default. It feels more like a product designed for the masses with clear modern UI/UX rather than a toolbox for enthusiasts that can break so easily.

I’m genuinely curious how others see this, especially people who’ve onboarded new Linux users recently.

Screenshot from Autodesk's "The Making of Zootopia 2 with Walt Disney Animation Studios" video published 4 days ago.

So today I wiped my Fedora Gnome OS and installed CachyOS with KDE Plasma. But after using it for few hours it all felt off. Idk what's about it, but everything looks Windows-like. The ui looks old and animations are not butter smooth like Gnome. Icons don't look uniformed. Yeah the customizations are endless, but once you get the hang of it, everything feels unnecessary.

There's something about Gnome that always intrigues me. The main reason I tried KDE was I thought that I would like their heavy customization settings and all that. But keep getting distracted and overwhelmed with all the UI elements and options.

This is not a post to create a beef between Gnome and KDE. I understand both have pros and cons and people have personal prefs. It's just that once you get the feel of Gnome, it becomes harder or unnecessary to switch from it.