I haven’t tried Linux in a while and only really played around with XFCE and Cinnamon and reviving my old laptops, but I’ve just tried KDE Plasma and GNOME for a bit and DAMN they look good. Modern looking and not the weird Mica effect that Windows has. Very clean!
They both look great and I wouldn’t say one looks better than the other, just preference probably, just that GNOME looks more bubbly + rounded + bit like MacOS in a good way and Plasma looks more blocky + similar to Win10 taskbar
The touchscreen buts still appear to need a bit of work, on both Plasma and GNOME I made it freeze. For Plasma I opened the launcher button and tried to use the onscreen keyboard, and it kept on opening and closing very quickly, for GNOME I did the three finger swipe up gesture and everything became unresponsive. Also, Bluetooth weirdly doesn’t work on KDE but does on GNOME. Huh. Maybe just my device?
I really want to switch soon, maybe during the holidays I’ll get round to it :D
edit: I think it’s pretty crazy that a relatively small team (compared to the likes of Microsoft) can offer such a good UI and overall user experience! That’s insane! The people who help make the distros are doing very good work and I wish them the best of luck! Hopefully the weird quirks and compatibility issues will iron out and Linux becomes mainsteam :D
That’s actually a common misconception. Gnome is just as customizable as Plasma (I like both for different reasons, so this is not a “reeee gnome best” critique). It all comes as extensions, which can be off-putting to people, but it has the benefit of having more consistency than Plasma, in my experience. It also works better for atomic distros, generally.
If ricing is your jam, you really can’t go wrong with either one. Plasma is much easier to grasp for theming, though, and I think that’s a pretty big benefit when it comes to helping people get over the different learning curves.