I’ll keep my answer short… I find KDE neon a better system than kubuntu out of the box, though for both, I wish that the application bar with its global menu was turned on by default.

KDE does however need a ‘reset all’ button when it comes to tweaking the settings.

Budgie is bae! With Plank it can be anything you want!

Personally, this is just what I’d recommend to someone very average coming in from Windows day to day.

“In the 20 years I’ve been using Linux, KDE and GNOME have always been separate, competing DEs. The two DEs that did diverge from GNOME are Cinnamon and Mate.”

They have, but I meant to say that a lot of people writing KDE’s codebase right now came out of the GNOME community. KDE has a lot of good ideas that came out of GNOME, but I do agree with the fact that GNOME’s development philosophy doesn’t always align with the distros with ambitions beyond simply being a glorified init system on top of a kernel that runs GNOME. That’s what’s driving Pop to make COSMIC and get out of the GNOME ecosystem.

“Why do tech writers and pundits insist on “pushing” Ubuntu and its respins (Pop_os, Mint, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, elementary, etc)?”

I personally like Arch the best, and use my own little packaged version of it for all my daily driver systems (would be weird to have 15 VMs running Arch instead of the distros I test code and packages on :D ).

The problem with other distros that don’t follow Canonical at least tangentially is that everyone else is writing instructions for Ubuntu/Debian. It’s frustrating but nonetheless a fact of life that almost every tutorial/support forum/thing you google with “linux” as a keyword will have some “sudo apt whatever” command but won’t include many instructions for other distros, if at all.

Then again, every Linux distro I encounter regularly has some GUI option (except Arch which doesn’t even come with a DE or DM unless you install it yourself, but that’s besides the point) for software management. So “Get in your software manager and look for this package” is viable, but even that doesn’t always work. Frankly, some software manager applications absolutely suck, while others are more invasive than I’d like them to be (Ubuntu, Deepin both run APT commands in the background, putting a lockfile up that makes using the terminal frustrating unless you manually just chuck out the SM or set it up not to do that).

Until there’s some more universal “goodness” to GUI, most people are just going to shoot terminal commands at each other in forums/articles to fix problems or get things set up. Most of those will be Debian commands (dpkg, apt, etc.).

This feedback loop between forum dwellers, people at stackexchange, askubuntu, and tech writers is why Ubuntu is so dominant. I try my best to kind of ease up on that trend by including instructions for Fedora and Arch (dunno how many people use Void or Gentoo but I think those people read the Wiki to solve their issues anyway). The former is something I consider quite solid for beginners, too (a shame, because Fedora has done A LOT to hand-hold the user and provide an experience that also suits power users, accomplishing a lot of things where Canonical fails). The latter is amazing for people looking for a super-powerful package manager to nerd out with and the almighty AUR.

“Granted that Plasma is flashy but as KDE progressed from 3 to 4 to 5, some options were taken away from the users and the configuration of the desktop became more and more convoluted.”

I think there was a bit of give-and-take there. The way they tried to give granular configuration in 5 made it convoluted. It looks like the development was going in a few directions at the same time and they kind of collided a bit. Hopefully that can be consolidated in future versions. The settings GUI really needs a bit of rework.

Funny! Does anyone like Gnome?

I also tried GNOME3 a few times, just can’t stand it. GNOME2 was my DE of choice when I started with GNU/Linux in 2008. When that was dropped for G3, I moved to Xfce for a while and then jumped to MATE when it was usable.

No one will ever convince me the “Gnome Shell” is the best desktop. I tried it on Ubuntu and on Pop for a couple of months each time and found it unusable. I was a long time Gnome 2 user, but when Gnome 3 came out I moved on.

It seems Linux writers cannot be objective but only wish to push their preferred OS’s Desktop’s and software. Better words would be “popular”, “useful” or “my favorite(s)”. There is no way to qualify best, so it should not be used. I know it can seem a bit nit-picky, but it also excludes or diminishes what other people find what works “best” for them.

I agree there, James. 👍🏻

Some comments in no particular order:
From what I have been reading in various forums and articles, I get the impression that GNOME developers are unresponsive to their users’ input. The developers’ attitude seems to be “WE know better. You WILL like what we develop for you. If you don’t like it, you can use something else.”

“KDE’s developers diverged their desktop away from GNOME several years ago”
In the 20 years I’ve been using Linux, KDE and GNOME have always been separate, competing DEs. The two DEs that did diverge from GNOME are Cinnamon and Mate.

“KDE Plasma”
Each to his own. Personally I found KDE 3 & 4 easier to configure than Plasma. Granted that Plasma is flashy but as KDE progressed from 3 to 4 to 5, some options were taken away from the users and the configuration of the desktop became more and more convoluted.

Why do tech writers and pundits insist on “pushing” Ubuntu and its respins (Pop_os, Mint, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, elementary, etc)? It’s as if *buntus were the alpha and omega of Linux distros. There are literally hundreds of other distros that people can use, many as easy, if not easier, to use. I usually recommend either PCLinuxOS or MX Linux instead of *buntu knockoffs.

Of all of these, I like Budgie the best. Sort of a cross between Windows and Mac interfaces, with a dock that actually works!

Number two would be XFCE. Similar to other Windows-like desktops with a launch menu that can be resized, a nice feature.