I agree. Significatly better than Gnome. I don't know why so many distros use Gnome by default. The only thing I can think is that it looks a bit nicer. They definitely have better artists.
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Gnome looks nicer, is more coherent, and in my experience, absolutely rock solid. Everything works out of the box. Trackpad gestures, touch, touch gestures, multi monitor support, HDR now; everything you could think of.
Gnome also is opinionated, whereas KDE still feels like the ghost of Windows XP combined with random things Linux nerds claim to want...
Qt is LGPL and has been for literally decades. LGPL is fine.
> and drama with the commercial entity that does a lot of KDE development.
Kdab? I have no idea what you're talking about here.
> Everything works out of the box. Trackpad gestures, touch, touch gestures, multi monitor support, HDR now; everything you could think of.
Hasn't been my experience, and also "everything" is simply a lot less than KDE. For example most of the network settings are not available - you have to use some third party app that isn't installed by default (`nm-connection-edit` or something).
Notifications are also awful in Gnome. They are the same colour as the background so difficult to notice (I had to end up editing some random CSS to fix this), and they disappear if you just mouse-over them. No history. I missed so many meetings.
I'll give you that Gnome looks nicer. KDE has improved a lot but it still has some amateur looking parts. But it's just so incomplete!
In my recurring experiences, GNOME Settings's interaction with CUPS printing support is very far from rock solid -- as in, do yourself a favor and go around it straight to the command line tools.
> ... they disappear if you just mouse-over them. No history.
Spot on. Wonder if it's any better in latest versions?
There is a lot of history there. Back in the day, Linux and the open source BSDs had a plethora of different window managers and DEs. Everything from simple and old-fashioned MWM to the happy chaos of Enlightenment. By the late 90's KDE emerged from among all of this as a popular, if not dominant, choice. However, there was a serious problem. The Qt toolkit license was not GPL compatible. GNOME was founded, in part, as a true open source alternative to KDE.
Linux got big enough that the major distros felt the need to pick a standard DE. GNOME was solid by then, with no license issues by design, and there was a strong preference for GNOME among the open source thought leaders at the time. KDE had actually solved its license problem by then, but there were some strong feelings about the license controversy. So GNOME became the "standard."
But not really. SUSE, for instance, stuck with KDE.
Though it's accessed by clicking the clock so perhaps it's not very intuitive.