Fedora out-of-the-box defaults to the Gnome desktop environment. I’ve pretty much accepted the current Gnome desktop because it’s also the default desktop environment for Ubuntu. Recently, while checking out other Linux distributions, I sampled several that had KDE as their default desktop environment. After positive experiences with KDE in those distributions I decided to install KDE on my Fedora 36 system.

There’s no denying that Gnome has evolved away from the older classical windowing philosophy. I am personally not enamored with that evolution of the Gnome desktop and the Gnome development communities’ design choices. There is no denying Gnome has a strong following that supports the environment and the direction it’s moving in, but I’m not part of that movement. That’s why I installed KDE (a good set of directions are here: https://www.linuxcapable.com/how-to-install-kde-plasma-desktop-on-fedora-36-linux/ ). In the process of installing KDE I also installed and used Timeshift. I now understand its popularity and why Linux Mint has stepped up to maintain it.

Right now my favorite KDE application is Konsole. Konsole has a very neat feature I’ve taken to instantly, Split View. Split View allows me to open two separate terminals, side-by-side, in the same tab. The example above has btop on the left and neofetch  on the right. A more practical example I use all the time is to perform tasks in one window while tailing a log file in the other. I love the way I can organize everything. As my wife would say, it appeals to my OCD.

A favorite overall feature is the thinner window chrome, especially at the top. Gnome insists on wasting tremendous screen space with these oversize upper window borders. Here’s an example of thinner upper window border while using Visual Studio Code.

I like this because I can be in the coding moment and not distracted by all the excessive wasted space on my editor’s window under Gnome (which also triggers my OCD, I suppose).

As surely as the sun rises in the east I’ll come across some KDE feature that will annoy me excessively. But until that moment, I’m enjoying this combination. And if I should reach a point where I’m too annoyed to continue using KDE? Gnome is still installed, so I can log out of KDE and back into Gnome, or I can go looking for yet another desktop environment to install and try out. This is Linux after all, and it is incredibly configurable.