KDE is kinda junky/bloated, even if you tweak it and rip stuff out of the default in distros... not that it stops me from using KDE, especially since it seems to run smoother than a more "minimal" GNOME.

It has the lowest RAM usage of the big DEs.

And you need that 100MB of RAM that dearly? Hope you use dwm or something like that, but maybe the xserver is also too big.

TBH I do, ML stuff is making me barely swap doing conversions and such.

Are you sure? The cold boot RAM usage is not of significant importance. You should check the RAM usage after using your system extensively and then closing all apps. My personal experience have been that after using KDE for few hours the RAM usage of plasmashell, krunner and kwin is way too much and it keep increasing. This is on stock KDE without any plugins etc.

I really dislike GNOME >= 3 UI especially this fascination with putting everything in the fat title bar and using hamburger menus like I'm using a mobile website. KDE does make more sense to me but I personally use xfce everywhere.

I am glad GNOME exists but its a DE I try to avoid.

You aren't alone.

In my opinion everybody has a right to an opinion. It saddens me that you feel like the entire linux community is gaslighting you, I sure ain't and do not intend to.

I suspect this is the silent majority at work. The vocal folks who have opinions don't like how GNOME largely just sits there and manages windows. People who do care show up on hacker news to complain about it being default.

I, as a technically inclined person who has many people in their life who are not, love GNOME as an opinionated desktop that works reasonably well for average users with no tweaking. I can install it, explain how the windows key works and then walk away from the computer for a decent amount of time.

Is it my daily driver? No. But I'm not going to inflict i3 on my loved ones. There's nothing gaslighting about not being the target demographic for something. Unlike macOS or Windows, if you don't like Gnome, use something else. Damn I'm getting tired of people acting like whatever Fedora or Ubuntu choose as the default is them trying to poison the FOSS well. They just need something that works by default and isn't a Windows clone (cough, KDE, cough). That's largely GNOME in 2023.

BUT, there are plenty of distros that do not use GNOME by default and there's always a way to remove it or install something else, because this is linux, after all. I wish we could objectively argue about desktop environments, but I think it may be like objectively discussing our favorite brand of underwear.

It is my daily driver as a quite technical person, for what it’s worth. It is really great on laptop especially, with its multi-finger gestures, but I also like it on desktop with Super+scroll wheel.

Use what you like. It's Linux. It's what you make it. This is why there's options.

Why would your ideal config look anything like the next person's? Everybody has different needs, and everybody has different taste, different hardware, different workflows. What I'd recommend to one person isn't what I'd recommend to the next. I wouldn't even necessarily use the same DE between a laptop and desktop.

I see the value in both GNOME and KDE. I use KDE, but I miss certain things from GNOME like GNOME Sushi, which gives you a preview of a file with the spacebar similar to macOS' Finder's Quick Look. If you're a Mac user, GNOME will seem relatively familiar in the default OOBE.

You know how you hear a lot of very positive Mac users but very few people ever really talk about Windows machines in a positive light? Macs attract a certain user with a certain mindset, and GNOME is just like that too. You hear about their enjoyment of it. KDE users tend to be a bit more utilitarian in my experiences and just pick the thing that works and gets the task done, seldom ever discussing it, because it's just a DE.

That doesn't mean that either GNOME or KDE are the best or only way to do things though.

In terms of gaslighting, you're probably just chasing your tail. You want to understand what others see in it, that's cool of you, but maybe it just makes more sense to enjoy KDE, which it sounds like you already are. You can observe a similar thing in choice of DAW for audio, some people prefer x, others prefers y, z users are very vocal about enjoying their DAW (hello Reaper fanboys), but what ultimately counts is your ability to do the things you want to do with the tool at hand.

GNOME seems to be built for the lowest-common denominator of user. They go out of their way to make sure there is only one possible way to do something and almost nothing can be customized without writing an extension. I imagine their devs go to sleep every night, only to be shaken awake at 3 AM by a horrific nightmare wherein some 85 year-old grandma was mildly confused by a setting in the control panel that she didn't understand.

I consider myself a "power user." I know what the computer can do, I know what works for me, and I want software that can be bent to my will, especially if I will be spending the majority of my day working with it. I tried to like GNOME for a long time, but KDE with all of its functionality and flexibility fits me a whole lot better.