[olliej]

Last time I tried gnome it was in an Ubuntu install I think which had a weird launcher that imo didn’t work particularly well.

I’m not sure what you are meaning by a launcher here - to me there’s a fairly reasonable ambiguity about what is meant. On windows people still seem to use shortcuts on the desktop as a primary launcher (especially given the current start menu abomination, sheesh talk about destroying one of the most effective bits of UI MS ever produced), on Mac I actually mostly use spotlight (though that usage is subject to the “secret chord” problem), but most normal users use the dock for common apps and the applications folder for everything else.

I keep meaning to retry kde at some point but I’m waiting for more asahi work to support my desktop (they are reasonable to focus on the laptops but my laptop is my work machine so less willing to surrender disk space when llvm builds already consume half a TB).

It’s weird to me that back when I was a primarily Linux user gnome was The(tm) commercial Linux desktop and kde was the clunky also-ran, I assumed the gnome was destined to win in the long term due to gtk APIs, commercial support, and at the time seemingly more polish and completeness. I guess things can change given a decade or so of development :D