I like KDE because it is super customisable out of the box, and I personally prefer the more contrasty, colourful look of KDE over the more minimal and padded GNOME.

However, if you like GNOME, that's perfectly fine! With GNOME Extensions, you can also customise a lot, far more than Windows or MacOS lets you without sketchy third-party tools. And of course, Cinnamon, XFCE, Cosmic, etc. are all great too.

First, I haven't used gnome in probably 15 years, so I can't give a fair comparison, but I've grown with kde over the last 3.

My opinion is that it's always worked for me, and is decently customizable. I couldn't use Wayland for the first 4+ months due to conflicts with my Nvidia card, but kde 6 (I think 6) fixed all of my issues.

On new Linux serious, I don't install the full kde suite, because I have other apps I prefer like alacrity instead on konsole. This keeps it lighter but with all of the other DE controls.

Also, I've not heard a bad thing of the kde dev team, but I have about gnome. I can't cite specifics, but I know I've read some bad stuff.

You can always install both DEs and try both out and determine which is best for you.

A couple of years ago, I used both of them briefly and GNOME simply provided the more polished experience back then.

In time, I came to dislike the look/design of KDE apps.

So when the time came I wanted to ditch GNOME because I was sick of its extensions ecosystem, I didn't even consider KDE Plasma. Instead, I tried out Sway and eventually settled on COSMIC.

Gnome lost a lot of functions when streamlining, just compare Dolphin to Nautilus, and instead of fighting their vision I went for a DE that works the way I want.
I love information density and easily get hooked on spreadsheet games, I feel as if that is the exact opposite of the Gnome vision.

edit: I prefer Gnome for touch only devices like Microsoft Surface Pro 7 without physical kbm.

GNOME expects the user to adapt to the workflow its developers have in mind. The desktop environment should adapt to me, not the other way around.

Plus, I love customization and themes. But GTK app developers create angry websites where they try to shame me for it.

When I got back to Linux some years back, I tried using GNOME because I had had good experiences with GNOME 2. Modern GNOME is awful, terribly opinionated and - in my view - has actual usability issues. Every interaction with the DE felt like pulling teeth and I didn't enjoy it one bit. GNOME Classic was better, but even that never felt quite right. At the time I wanted to use Wayland and therefore had limited options, so for the first time ever I tried Plasma, and I immediately found it to my liking. With only a few small cosmetic tweaks it felt like home. Things made sense to me and everything was where it should be - more or less; nothing's perfect. Since then I've looked at other options, but Plasma usually has one feature or another that alternative desktops lack or struggle with. So for now I'm sticking with Plasma, and I have no real reason to look elsewhere.

To be sure, I don't hate on anyone who prefers GNOME, it's just not my cup of tea. Not by a long shot. Use what works for your use case.

Mostly for the shallow reason of the fact that out of the box KDE looks good enough and since it's big enough I can easily find a theme I like alongside things like cursors and icon sets that just look good. All without the headache of having to make my own sets. I like aesthetics moreso than I should sometimes.

I also like having a fair bit of settings to tweak and don't know if any other DE has integrated a "jiggle the mouse to make the pointer bigger" feature yet. That feature is absolutely something I love, as someone who occasionally loses his cursor.

One adapts to me.

The other requires me to adapt to it.

I like gnome, but, switched back to kde because the extensions I needed broke last fedora update.

I love cosmic, but the keyboard focus doesn't always follow into the correct tab, which was also a deal breaker

The only real issue I have with kde, is Google drive integration isn't baked in at the moment. But, I just use the website, and there were plenty of other solutions I could use too

I tried Gnome a few times, last time maybe 3 years ago, but it just is not the right environment for me. It feels strange and everything is so complicated (most likely because I'm not used to it) and it is so limited when it comes to features and customization.

My first graphic OS was GEOS on the C64 back then, followed by Amiga Workbench, then different flavours of Windows. Using Linux with KDE just feels natural, it has the same usage paradigms and flows as all the OS/Environments I used before.

I had to use MacOSX for some time at work and I had the same issues with it that I had with Gnome, everything was a fight, nothing felt right or was at the place where it has to be.

I test KDE each couple of years: install it on my current OS or in VM, trying to change theme/move panel, get a crash shortly after, then delete it. Even "kde neon" that was supposedly polished distro from devs themselves, crashed within could of minutes in my hands.

Maybe it just my hands, but Gnome never does that.

Tuning / ricing is overrated. I used to spend ~~hours~~ years ricing my desktop. Screw that, gnome it is: simple, elegant, functional.

I do add 2 very useful plugins tho: Wobbly Windows and the Spinning Cube. Shows my age I guess.

Gnome feels like Linux to me, I don't want discount Windows, I could just use Windows.

I don't need or want to customize every little detail, I have a life.

Testing out KDE broke a lot of video and mouse inputs, don't find it worth trying to fix just to test.

Naming everything with K is dumb as hell.

I started with gnome back when Linux was a very young project. Then they started removing options despite the protests of their users so I moved to kde, which added functionality constantly, much to the delight of their users.

And many years later, here we are.