No, it makes me sad that I wish more people learned about how awesome kde is.

I used KDE and absolutely loathed it.

Admittedly this was fifteen years ago, but I was blown away by the developers’ inability to make any actual design decisions, instead punting literally everything to a mountain of configuration options.

Case in point, the taskbar system clock. There were no fewer than six full tabs of options to customize its behavior, including the ability to use Swatch Internet Time. Everything else bought into this philosophy too, to the point where I have to believe its users spend more time configuring it than actually doing anything useful or productive.

Hard pass.

KDE still has this mentality, though they try to somewhat sweep it under the rug. Toolbars aren't overflowing anymore... usually. But the menus and dialogs still have those hundreds of options and it definitely gives a feeling that the developers can't commit to decisions themselves.

Really, KDE just has a maximalist philosophy. Shove everything into users' faces all at once because of all possible opinion variations.

Part of why I like GNOME is that it's the exact opposite: minimalism. The options it does offer tend to be the options you actually might want to tweak, and there's not many of them. (In the GUI anyway; GNOME still has lots of options available via dconf-editor/gsettings, basically the GNOME equivalent of the Windows Registry)

A lot of the last few years of releases has been about tweaking defaults and providing a smoother experience for first time users. This is very subjective obviously, but I find KDE Ddefaults to be a lot closer to what I like, and I appreciate having all the options be built-in as opposed to having to hunt a dozen or so random gnome shell extensions to get that last 5%.

KDE 3 and 4 were a dumpster fire. Even the first release of Plasma was very rough. But I switched to KDE maybe 5 years ago and never really looked back. If your experience with KDE is from 15 years, give it a shot with an open mind. It’s pretty great imo

Kids today will never know the awesomeness and terribleness of Swatch Internet Time. I remember when they gave a bunch of money to CNN and for a brief period the time listed on articles was Swatch Internet Time.

Late 90s and early 2000s were strange.

I wish we had remote meetings, even annoucements, and other such stuff still noted in an "internet time" like that.

What’s wrong with UTC?

That aside from the tz name, it looks like regular time in a regular timezone (where you or the other person recides), so it's equally easy to confuse.

"Oh, you meant 11:00 UTC, not 11:00 Berlin time, ooops!".

Well, it's a matter of taste. But I find the latest version quite pleasant when using Krita's dark orange color scheme.

I really, really, love how much I can customise though.

I also try GNOME, Xfce, and Cinnamon every new relatively big release. And, as far as I'm concerned, really like all those projects.

I must say though, I hate how GNOME locks you in to their apps. I understand their commitment, but for instance I would appreciate if they let me choose which terminal I could launch from Nautilus.

I use KDE, but it's just a matter of preferring their development tools.

you can, with "gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.default-applications.terminal exec foot" for instance.

GNOME is just as configurable as KDE; the difference is KDE bothers to make any of these settings discoverable.

Thanks for the tip!

Konsole terminal widget is fine but the context menu is a literal mess and command line less useful than gnome, if that is possible.

Why wouldn't it? Obviously when you chose a way to do things you also believe it's the best, which is why you chose it.

I don’t think that all my choices are always the best choices for everyone.

Sometimes I don’t even think they’re the best for me, but I try anyway.