You should really try out KDE Neon, it is by far the best and most consistent DE available for Linux, and is so far ahead of Win10 it's sort of embarrassing for MS.

The default settings are very sensible, I only change one or two things myself, most noticably focus follows mouse, which requires a silly gconf tweak and is considered "broken" by the devs.

That last bit should have read "requires a silly gconf tweak in Gnome/Cinnamon", of course.

> KDE has some nice features but under the shiny screenshot it's still a disorganised and inconsistent jumble.

I'm not too deep into GNOME's architecture, but I don't see that at all.

KDE is the KF5 Frameworks on top of Qt on top of QML and C++. Desktop widgets, panel widgets etc. are all architecturally the same thing, "Plasmoids". Settings screens are all isolated and also architecturally the same thing, "KCMs".

On the other hand, GNOME is GTK on top of GObject on top of C, Vala, JS, Python, Rust and a few other languages still, because they still haven't really decided what they want to go with. The extensions are written in JavaScript, but run in the same process as the entire Shell, meaning that if anything locks up or just takes longer in an extension, then your Shell does the same.

I don't want to argue that GNOME is horrible in this aspect, but in my opinion KDE is better at it.

Yes, I agree that GNOME under the hood isn't the most sensible or consistent of designs. But 'over the hood' that's all hidden away, if you use it as-intended it works just fine. KDE/Plasma has a much better design and is built on more stable technologies, but there are just too many options and too much configuration.

Also Gnome is keyboard driven to a large degree. I used dwm/dmenu for quite a time then went back to the default DE which was Gnome and it felt similar (small screen by the way so not too many tiled windows in dwm)

Yes that’s what attracts me to Gnome too. The keyboard shortcuts are enough for me to be productive without being fully tile based.

If I could just get terminal shortcuts like ctrl-w for delete word or Ctrl-m for return to work in Firefox text fields it would be perfect for me.

Open Tweaks, "Keyboard & Mouse" tab, enable Emacs Input. Now you get Ctrl-W in text fields and other shortcuts from Emacs. Doesn't quite work in Firefox though, which has a lot of conflicting shortcuts.

I have done exactly that... except it doesn’t work in Firefox, as you mentioned. There Ctrl-w always closes tabs, except in pinned tabs when it jumps to another tab without closing.

It does work as expected in Chrom(e|ium) and most other apps. In Chrome you can still close tabs with ctrl-w, you just have tab out of a text box first.

Ctrl+Backspace is delete word.

I’m aware of that but I don’t really like it. I’d much prefer the shorter movement of Ctrl-w.

It puts less stress on my right wrist, which suffers RSI a bit and is consistent with terminals on every (unix-like) OS.

On macOS I get this behaviour via Karabiner Elements; on Gnome I mostly get it via Tweaks. Except in Firefox, as mentioned, where I put up with ctrl-backspace and curse.