I also can’t stand having all my programs’ name starting with K.

Like Okular, Spectacle, Dolphin, …

I like Gnome the best too. In my experience, it’s the desktop environment that focuses the most on making sure that no little bugs slip in. Like normally when you’re using a desktop environment, it will be good except for a few bugs here and there where you have to remember weird things like not backing out of the settings menu in a certain way in order to not trigger a bug. Gnome seems to have the least amount of weird little bugs like that.

It’s not very configurable out of the box, but I prefer that too. I’m getting a bit old and set in my ways, and don’t really want to mess around with too much configuration anymore.

Both take great benefits from the improvements of the other.

KDE was the first one I used after getting more comfortable with Linux and leaving Unity behind. KDE was very customizable and extensible, but when you actually started customizing it quickly became unreliable. I stuck with it for a few years then I tried Elementary next and it was pretty polished but it was limited to a specific distribution. After that I went to GNOME and I’ve been using it for 7 years now. It does need a few extensions, but otherwise I’ve found that it works quite well. I think I’ve also changed, I’m not as interested in things like wobbly windows anymore. I just want the desktop environment to stay out of my way, but I also don’t want it to be too bare bones.

I’m in the same boat. I use mostly stock gnome to avoid experiencing bugs. I used KDE for a bit and loved it but never really loved how many options the settings gave me. I would also constantly run into issues with the docks disappearing when unplugging monitors. In contrast docks on gnome just work. I really only use the Ubuntu dock extension on gnome