Inertia is a hell of a drug. The US failed to break up Microsoft in the 90s, and never took antitrust action against them again after that. So the world built its entire tech infrastructure on top of Windows (as far as endpoints go, web facing servers are another matter).

But,

> When primary school students are given Windows laptops instead of Linux ones,

At least this is changing, although not true "desktop linux," students are mostly given Chromebooks, and grow up on google docs/g workspace so that early familiarity with Windows + Office is dissapearing.

It's not going to be a good thing long term though, I already see it with employees where I work (I'm in IT). We have plenty of younger employees that don't even have computers at home if they aren't gamers. They are familiar with iOS/iPad OS only. Windows + Office is a mystical black box, and file management/file systems are a foreign concept.

That, IMO, makes Linux desktop adoption that much more difficult. At least Windows->Linux you can take a lot of basic concepts with you. MobileOS->Not mobile OS is much more difficult.

First and biggest challenge is that there's no single default desktop Linux, and even one distro could have different DEs, window servers, etc.

Imagine asking for tech support as a newbie, and giving your laptop model and OS and version is still not enough info.

Gnome UI sucks. It is ugly and non-customizable without plugins, or whatever you call that addon that enables you to put your clock on the right... I'm sure the UI makes more sense on a tablet or a phone with touch controls, but I just want to use it on my laptop with a regular monitor and with a mouse (or touchpad).

KDE has sane defaults and looks and feels like Windows UI from the best era. It just works.

I guess because the defaults suits me better, and the configurability is exposed well and I don't have to load special tools or commands to change stuff.

I used to run complicated setups back in the days, with black/flux/openbox or even enlightenment (16), but now I don't really have the interest or time for tweaking DEs.

> Anyone want to share why you currently choose KDE over Gnome?

Just to give you an opposite perspective...I was a long time Kubuntu / KDE Neon user (almost 10 years) and shifted to Gnome couple of years back (Ubuntu 22.04), now running 24.04. It's been very stable and out of the way. I am not sure why people are complaining about UI, for me it's barely visible on my two screens. All open-source and proprietary apps I use run well and without glitch. It took me an hour to get used to the "Gnome" way when I shifted.

KDE is a wonderful desktop environment. It's been a while since I've used it but from what I've seen it grows and improves every year.

Gnome is more opinionated. There are fewer options overall, the core apps are generally much simpler, and it assumes a specific way of interacting with your computer. You can change this with extensions, but if you are dead set on a specific workflow and need to venture beyond a small set of widely-used and well-supported extensions then it may feel like you're swimming upstream.

I personally prefer Gnome because I don't mind trying out new workflows and it ended up being a good fit. But I understand why many "hacker types" would prefer KDE, and (assuming they've ironed out stability and release scheduling issues) I agree with other comments that KDE would make for a better default experience, especially for people coming from Windows.

Thankfully, both exist and you can try them and see what works for you!

I don't want to install an extension which will break next time there's a new GNOME release just to be able to set my clock to '%A %F %R' format.

I find that Gnome opiniated workflow can easily get in my way. KDE feels more natural and it really grew on me after using it for quite some times.

>Anyone want to share why you currently choose KDE over Gnome?

GNOME is like a tool that was designed to fit the average user so if you are not the average user (like you know the joke where the average person has 1 testicle) then you have to mold yourself to fit into GNOME (or try to hack it with unsuported extensions that might make it more tolerable) in KDE you have nobs to tweak it to fit you smoothly (like for example with one checkbox I can make the Left Alt to be a Ctrl button so i do not bend my hand and fingers to use my many Ctrl+keys shortcuts).

IMO use GNOME only if you are the typical GNOME user, that prefer to bend themselves over and not to adapt the tool to fit . Avoid KDE if too many options cause you some anxiety or buffer overflow.

I switched from Gnome to KDE Plasma because I find it more stable and more integrated since many of the features I otherwise miss are out of the box in KDE Plasma, and you do not need third party extensions which are quite unstable. Also later found out Plasma is much more configurable and personalizable so I xan really fit it best to my orefered workflow. I also find KDE developers listen to their users much more.

Yes, if you choose to go off the happy path into the weeds, then you will be off the happy path in the weeds. The only desktop environments where that isn't true are the ones that forbid customization.