This is the comment that best explains it for me. I started with vim for comfort (less movement to mouse, and less reliance on modifier keys). The editing grammar is something I didn’t really understand until I started gradually using it, but now it’s the thing I most appreciate. I don’t know if I’m necessarily faster in vim, but my work is more fluid. The editing doesn’t interrupt my thinking as much.
Gnome and KDE are two different “desktop environments”. Each distro has a default desktop environment (DE for short), but it’s like a regular application that you can swap out for a different one that does the same thing. The DE is (roughly, I think) the graphical interface to the operating system. So it can feel like the DE is the operating system (especially on Windows or Mac, which don’t have options to change the DE).
Most Linux distros, and certainly all of the beginner friendly ones, make it relatively easy to switch to a different DE. (Or, so I’ve heard. I’ve been using Linux as my daily driver for I’ve a decade, and I barely understand what’s involve in installing a new DE.)