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I personally believe that GNOME is hands down, with little to no doubt - the best designed DE, not only for Linux but for the general user on an operating system in general. Designed with user friendliness, ease of use and seemingly intelligent design behind it, taking inspiration mainly from macOS.

Oh, but Amilie, what about my Hyprland? What about my sway? Sure - that can work for you. That’s fine if it works for you even, everybody’s workflow differs. It’s not as plain cut and simple as “USE GNOME, ITS THE BEST” or “USE HYPRLAND, ITS THE MOST EFFICIENT”. But for a beginner Linux user - I believe GNOME is the easiest, and most effective way to get them into the community.

As YouTuber “Switch and Click” stated in the video “I Tried Linux Fedora (And It’s Amazing)” - “I got used to my entire setup with my laptop, it got natural and easy.” And while yes, it was attributed to Fedora - I believe a large part of this attributation to also be to GNOME. GNOME is a powerful tool if used correctly, and with Fedora packaging it it really feels like it is the premiere desktop of choice. Who realistically is going to know what a GNOME or a KDE is coming into Linux? I Sure as hell didn’t. All I know is that I wanted a working system and GNOME gave me exactly that. Especially on my Arch Linux setup that I daily drive now. (Big up Archcord).

GNOME feels intuative, easy, powerful and most importantly - it gets out of my way. It’s ridiculously easy, effective and helpful. I have little to no issue with GNOME - and when I do have an issue it’s only ever my fault, and I can diagnose this simply by disabling the broken extension.

Screenshot of Amilie’s GNOME desktop, showing Spotify, Visual Studio Code and Files.

At current, I run this desktop. It works for me, following an evergreen/everforest theme and I’ve run this theme for about a month now. It feels comfortable, and cozy. And most importantly, it works for me.

A few observations are to be made - including the lack of blur included by default. Blur My Shell takes GNOME to an entire new level - and I feel that if this extension was to be included in a base theme of GNOME, say Adwaita, it could make GNOME feel more welcoming to new users. Of course, it’s got it’s rough edges but I feel those could be polished. I’m sure your thinking though - won’t it be more taxing on older hardware? The simple answer: Make it toggleable in settings. Make it possible to go to Settings > Appearance > Blur Settings.

A screenshot showing the appearance settings on gnome, where the settings could be placed.

Additionally, GNOME’s simplified layout makes it optimal for people in a work environment, especially those coming from macOS as it highly resembles it. I’m very sure that KDE users probably come from Windows, and that’s fine - it’s familiarity, but for most new users who just want to get up and running - GNOME is the primary option.