[ahartmetz]

Disclaimer: I'm a KDE user and mostly-inactive developer.

KDE has always been about the same size as Gnome in LOC and performance has been +/- the same as well, KDE just has more exposed settings which confuses people to think it's "bigger". At the time of Gnome shell in JS, KDE had much less performance trouble than Gnome, now they are about the same again.

There is a thing that Gnome has going for it regarding Wayland, which is that Wayland has been the default on Gnome for much longer, so yes, for the time being it has fewer problems there. KDE is improving rather quickly, but it has not caught up yet.

So Gnome is the showcase for Wayland right now and it should be used to evaluate what Wayland can and cannot do.

As a KDE user, I am personally holding out on X11 for a little longer because I don't need great fractional scaling and multi-monitor support, so Wayland buys me little.