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Which Distro? Which Desktop Environment?

During my switch from Windows to GNU+Linux I tried many distros and desktop environments along the way. As far as desktop environments I like KDE and Gnome3 the best. Sure they are probably polar opposites of each other, but both stood out to me as different enough to get me to like them.

Gnome with Gnome Tweaks and Gnome Extensions allows you to change it to what you feel more comfortable with. Sure it isn't very advanced but I like what I have right now. I went with Dash to Panel which is much like KDE's UI. A little old school as compared to the vanilla Gnome, but I've been around in computers since the late 1980s. I like having a taskbar with non-grouped applications that are running and a system tray. Sure, probably from my Windows days.

KDE being the other side of it can be extremely customized and that also appeals to me. I did try Kubuntu but had problems with it on my system. I tried others too, LinuxMint Mate, LinuxMint Cinnamon, Manjaro, OpenSuse, and all the flavors of Ubuntu were thrown in there too, but nothing worked as well as Pop!_OS on my current desktop which has an Nvidia card with AMD Threadripper CPU, and so here I am with Pop!_OS and Gnome3.

If Fedora would have worked as well as Pop!_OS does for me I would have gone with it. I believe it only had Gnome at the time. I see now it has KDE as a flavor too. If I would ever fall off the fence, Fedora with KDE would probably be where I would fall. However, I don't think I want to mess with something that is working very well for me right now. This is my work computer and my personal computer.

You can choose any distro and install any desktop environment on it. That doesn't matter, it just needs to be something you can work with. Just because something comes with KDE or Gnome, shouldn't mean you can't choose it. A distro is more than the desktop environment it comes with. In the end, it is whatever works for you at the time for what you need to do with it.

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