My mother has never daily driven a laptop more recent than a nearly decade old macbook running macOS Sierra. (except, briefly, a quite nice work-provided windows laptop that she hated using.)

She is, however, about to buy a 2025 Lenovo Yoga 7 14", and wants to use linux on it.

As the designated “techy person” in my family, I have been tasked with choosing which distro to put on it. I chose fedora it supports modern hardware nicely, and it’s what I use, which would make tech support easier.

What I’m not sure about is what desktop environment she should use. I’m currently split between GNOME and KDE, since they’re the two that are the most polished and work the best on the kind of hardware she’ll be using.

She seems to prefer a more traditional desktop paradigm (dislikes overly flattened ui’s and autohiding ui elements like scrollbars), but given she’s not very techy and currently uses an iphone and ipad quite a bit, so gnome might feel more friendly with how simple it is, and be a bit more touch-friendly.

I asked her and she’s not sure either, so I’m asking here which one is might be better given the hardware and the preferences she’s expressed.

  • Pika@rekabu.ru
    0·
    1 day ago

    I’d say go KDE.

    GNOME looks like it will be good for portable devices, but it’s kinda not.

    First, in my experience, Fedora on GNOME completely ignores battery limits (which are also set by jumping through so many hoops you can’t even imagine). It just drains this thing to 0, which is not great for longevity. KDE, on its end, has it all in the GUI and it works flawlessly on all distros I tested.

    Second, KDE has made plenty of great optimizations for touchscreens. A while ago, it was not great, but now it’s just the best at handling them, especially if you theme it respectively and do not rely on defaults.

    Third, customizations are so much better in KDE. You can make her laptop look and feel like a MacBook in no time, and edit everything to be touch-friendly.

    One thing GNOME does well though for the use case you describe, though, is app theming, namely Adwaita. Luckily, Adwaita-themed apps and style editors for the rest are freely available on KDE, and you can even change their look as you like.

    So, yeah, go KDE.