A picture of Lara Croft in new Tomb Raider hand in hand with Lara Croft from the old Tomb raider Series.
The new one labeled GNOME and the old one KDE.
Imo they are both solid technologically, but KDE delivers much more with it's defaults. Obviously you can theme both to hell and back and make them look however you want and get whatever functionality you want, but default KDE is so much more usable than default gnome it's not even a competition.
Is it? Gnome loads in a ton of services and feels pretty bloated to me. I don't notice that it's any lighter than KDE, and it often feels more sluggish.
But, they're both desktops and are loading in a bunch of stuff whether you use it or not, so you're right that they're pretty comparable.
Gnome is bloated. It needs seconds just to oprn start menu/app switcher/or something like that on my low end laptop.. :/
It also uses more ram at iddle.
Plasma itself isn't bloated, it is only bloated if you install the entire suite of KDE applications. Installing plasma by itself doesn't require that many dependencies.
GNOME has a similar level of optionals for their desktop environment as well, you're just expected to actually INSTALL them.
KDE uses less RAM, you can fact check quite easily.
Depending on the distro it ships with more or less stuff, but a few games, an office suite, media players for audio/video and in some cases a partition manager, are all necessary tools in any setup, at least in my book.