Personally, I particularly find all the included applications more useful. GNOME’s definitely aren’t bad, but KDE’s are often best-in-class, particularly for power users. Like, Okular is the PDF reader I recommend even to Windows users. Dolphin is IMO the best file manager out there. Kate is my favorite text editor.
The customizability regarding the workflow is also important to me. It took a few years of experimenting to figure out my preferred workflow, but I’m now often much better organized than my coworkers, just because this workflow is so helpful for me.
I use a few apps intended for KDE on my GNOME system and its clear that there’s a different design philosophy with them. In general I need to have things be very visually uncluttered, so I think it’s just as well that I landed on a distro with GNOME. I have found that the KDE apps that I do use tend to have more functionality/tweakability though. For me it’s a balancing act and I love that Linux gives me these options. Something I also love is having learnt to do things in the terminal. Being able to use a bash alias or keybinding to launch a script or an app in exactly the way I want feels super tidy.
