Lmao gnome and kde can never merge. They have entirely different design philosophy. If every open source project merged into a single project we wouldn’t have the competitive and diverse app eco system we have today.

GNOME and Plasma are so far separated that a merger would be impossible, without either eliminating one of the two or completely rewriting both, and I think they cover different niches. GNOME is for people who want a tightly integrated experience, and KDE is for people who want to customize their system. (I would also argue that it’s not possible for there to be only one distro or DE, so long as all the components are open-source. Savvy users will always make their own stuff if they’re allowed to.)

There’s already plenty of cooperation between GNOME and KDE devs on common standards, support for each other’s apps, etc. I hope this continues, and makes both desktops better. A lot of behind-the-scenes stuff, like Wayland extensions, could definitely become shared between the two desktops.

They’ve been separate desktop environments from the start. From top to bottom they share nearly nothing. The compositors, window managers, toolkits and shells are all different.

They also are ideologically opposed. If they merged, which direction would they go? The more feature-rich KDE? Or the more streamlined Gnome? Such a merger would lead to infighting and stagnation.

This is before even talking about the actual code underlying both environments.

I think it’s better for everyone if they stay as two separate projects.

soooo… you want KNOME?

serious answer: Just like you said, behind these projects are different visions and different goals so it would make no sense to sqash both together. Whats a sensible default to someone is horrible to another.

And open source has no such limit, take the linux kernel for example: a giant project of crazy scope which is free software and works better than commercial kernels. What free software lacks are in my opinion UI/UX designers, which is why many non commercially made free software have wierd user interfaces.

Several good answers here. Both Gnome and Plasma are customizable enough you should be able to have a Gnome-y Plasma or a Plasma-y Gnome.

Echoing what has been said already: They both are built on totally different tech stacks with very different philosophies. Gnome is more simplified, a little more “MacOS-like” Plasma is more Windows-like (by default) and is designed to be deeply customized and modular.

You should play around with Gnome and Plasma plugins and themes, that might help make things better for your usage. Or check out other DEs like Cinnamon or Cosmic.

There are already some great answers so I just want to add that merging projects to get synergy effects doesn’t work in the open source world.
Many smaller softwares are heart projects of single developers or a very tiny team. Forcing them to merge with a comparable project (btw who should be even able to do this?) would discourage and alienated them. They would reduce efforts or stop complety.

It’s all open source. You can merge them yourself. It is a massive technical challenge and pretty much impossible, it’d be like merging minecraft and fallout together.

People do make money off of open source projects, not just from donations, but sometimes providing prenium features, or providing their own servers instead of you maintaining your own.

There are project leaders, Linus has the final say in what does and does not make it into the Linux kernel.

Plasma and GNOME are two completely different projects made by completely different organizations made on completely different technologies with completely different philosophies. That would be like proposing that McDonald’s and Wendy’s merge.

Yes, open source development isn’t necessarily as efficient and doesn’t lend itself to as nice of UX/UI/etc, but that’s not the point. The point is the freedom. Do I wish, as a GNOME user, that GNOME had certain features that Plasma does? Yeah, but part of the reason I like GNOME is that they’re so stringent about what makes it into the DE that it makes for an infinitely more polished experience than Plasma. You can definitely approximate the GNOME workflow on Plasma well enough, and that’s the great thing about Plasma: you can do almost anything you want with it.

You’re not the first person to propose that open source projects merge, and you certainly won’t be the last, but freedom also implies that you work on what you want to, so let people work on what they want to!

BTW, there are certainly more DEs than just GNOME and Plasma. Maybe try Budgie! It’s like the default workflow of Plasma mixed with the simplicity of GNOME.

everyone else has great responses but i want to address the snappiness of kde. it’s fairly common advice to disable file indexing, you can find it in the settings app. it can cause some desktop sluggishness and really isn’t necessary.

What makes you think the result will satisfy your needs? It probably wont, and it definitely won’t satisfy the needs of many other people. We have two major DE based on different toolkits, following different philosophies, having different looks and feels. This is good. You can choose. Or you can pick another DE or WM. That’s why Linux is so attractive.

There won’t be a joining of efforts but COSMIC seems like it may be the DE that many are looking for, it has a way to go though, we’ll see.

The teams have very different visions. Basically incompatible at a core level. From the very basic UI libraries. KDE uses QT, a pretty open source friendly tool kit, but IIRC not actually open source itself. Gnome uses GTK. The g in GTK originally referring to Gimp.

Gnome itself has traditionally had a much more apple way of doing things. If you venture outside of that. Things can break easily. And at a base level there are things gnome is kind of reluctant to do UI wise. That said, it’s simple and works well. KDE is kind of jack of all trades master of none. But it still does. All them quite well. If you want to mimic Mac OS. You absolutely can right down to the theme panel placements etc. If you want to emulate windows it’ll do that perfectly too. If you want to look like gnome. Yup. If you wanted to look like some unholy abomination the world was never meant to see. They got you covered as well. In fact, I think Garuda Linux comes default with that.

However, choice is never a bad thing. And there’s no real reason for them to merge. They run side by side. Quite brilliantly. And I even find myself popping back and forth from one to the other randomly. Your issue with snappiness under KDE could be a couple of things. There are a lot of configurable settings under the hood. You can decrease animation times etc etc etc. Which will often give a feeling of snappiness things just moving faster. But at a more fundamental level. Gnome has been a bit better optimized for use under Wayland etc. Which most distributions are moving towards. Which greatly increases the performance and responsiveness of many things. KDE has been lacking in at department. Though early this year we may see a solution to that. In the meantime though, sit back relax. Enjoy both and compute how you like.

Do it

I always felt the opposite. Gnome is a developed and cohesive experience whereas Plasma lets you configure literally everything with very little guardrails.

That said, I agree with your sentiment for wanting the best of both worlds. I like that Kwin has more features for modern displays (Re: mutter-vrr still in merge review).

A lot of the KDE apps are much nicer than the gtk equivalent (❤️ Kate).

You can mix and match at the cost of disk space though. You could run Gnome Shell and use a few KDE apps. Or run Plasma shell and run all gtk apps.

At least that’s what I do. I use Gnome Shell on my laptop (Gnome has the best laptop experience) and use some KDE apps on it.

On my desktop I use Plasma (the best desktop experience especially for gaming), and use a select few gtk applications.

Gnome & Plasma are so “awesome” that I use MATE instead; even things like EvilWM, WindowMaker, Enlightenment are better than gnome & kde