I prefer the customization and vibrancy of KDE. KDE is just so thoughtful and rich with features that I find really useful, the ease of use makes me not want to ever leave it. You can get it heavy or light, customize that install to your delight. Plasma just speaks to me. I can literally leave it alone and it still looks very appealing or go hard on it and make it truly customized with little effort. The quirks are mostly ironed out these days with the latest 6.7 update and that makes me really happy, it’s starting to really feel like a mature DE.

GNOME is just there, breaking extensions with every major update, not doing much of anything (except recently they seem mildly concerned with adding QOL features in an upcoming major update). Still won’t get me to use that DE though, I’d use feature rich WMs before GNOME. That is simply the way it is. GNOME just doesn’t capture me based on its design, but this does not mean it is absolutely bad. Just a bit too minimal, bland, and inflexible for my tastes. I’ve used it for about 6 months (a fallback distro used GNOME) at a time during my distro-hopping days (doing my due diligence and figuring out was next for my machine). Not a good time for me, but I endured. ROFL At least until I landed on Garuda Linux and haven’t left their KDE based editions.