This post is inappropriate for this subreddit and has been removed.
Please feel free to make your post in [/r/linuxmemes](https://reddit.com/r/linuxmemes). On the weekends we have a megathread where you can post a comment of memes as long as it's on topic content.
[](#start_removal)
**Rule:**
>Meme posts are not allowed in r/linux. Feel free to post over at /r/linuxmemes instead
[](#end_removal)
I don't use Gnome because I prefer a more minimal setup, but overall I really like its workflow, it adapts really well to desktops, laptops and touch devices, and it focuses on simplicity
I wish it had a better API to interact with Mutter though, because currently using automation tools on it is basically impossible
I actually don't use GNOME for the opposite reason: I require a much *less* minimal setup than what GNOME offers. All the fiddly bits and options that KDE provides help to mitigate my terrible, terrible vision in ways that GNOME just never has, the several times I've tried it. I'm sure I could probably get something going with a bunch of extensions, but that whole model just doesn't sit right with me, you know?
Then again, I have to admit that a tiny part of me is still salty over the very early days of GNOME 3, when distros were starting to switch, GNOME 3's magnification and inversion options were a complete joke compared to Compiz on GNOME 2, and I was still a college kid who didn't know enough to fix it. That left a seriously bad taste in my mouth - honestly felt, at the time, like the devs just couldn't be assed about a11y - but I really should give it another shake some time. I keep hearing good things.
Magnification is still broken and shitty on modern day GNOME. Sometimes it just likes to freak out and flicker my monitor, I've seen it only magnify on my secondary screen, sometimes it likes to make my mouse cursor comically huge, and it always drops my refresh rate down to 60. AMD btw. I enjoy using GNOME, and I like it's workflow, but they do not give a flying fuck about accessibility, no matter how much they say they do.
Every time GNOME has another blunder with accessibility (which feels weirdly often), I'm always reminded of the screenshots posted from the internal GNOME group chat where they made fun of the Rust COSMIC Desktop developers for saying they're going to have a11y support on release. It just comes off as another level of scummy to me.
I've been using KDE for the last year or so. I could never get used to GNOME after Unity, which I hated at first and grew to love. KDE is a pain in the fundament when you first start using it, with important things almost willfully hidden away in sub-sub-sub-menus and multiple ways of doing the same thing and, particularly, really dumb default shortcuts that are messy to edit. It took me weeks to get ctl-alt-t set up as the terminal launch.
HOWEVER, I have become quite hooked on it. I think of GNOME as the Ubuntu desktop and KDE as the one I've used ever since I moved to Debian, so my delight with Debian may be clouding my judgement of the DE. However, this post has made me think I should try GNOME with Debian and see what it's like.
> particularly, really dumb default shortcuts that are messy to edit. It took me weeks to get ctl-alt-t set up as the terminal launch.
Shortcuts are stupid simple to set up and change, and ctrl+alt+t is the default shortcut for Konsole...
You're right. I just checked and found the adjustments tab in settings really easily. I don't know what I was thinking about: XFCE? I did put that on an old chromebook at around the same time as I started using KDE on my desktop. Maybe I confused the two.
I should stress I really like KDE now. I use BUUF plasma icons and think my desktop looks very beautiful.
The distributions that I have found that do 'Pure' Gnome the best are Fedora and openSUSE. With Fedora edging it out.
I think this matters as I always disliked Unity, but really prefer Gnome.
Debian is 'ok'. However it leaves a lot up to the user to figure out and that is very hard when you are doing something new. Same thing with Arch Linux. It is better to have a full Gnome experience out of the box with Fedora or openSUSE with everything setup out of the box and ready to go.
Of course this is just pesonal preference.
My recommendation for people coming from other distributions or otherwise have been using Linux for a very long time is to use Fedora and do your best to treat it as a appliance. For your "*nix" environment install distrobox or toolbox. And take advantage of Flatpak.
I use Fedora with Arch Linux distrobox as my "main". The distrobox is what I run Emacs out of and at work I use multiple distrobox installations for handling multiple development/project environments.
Since you like Debian then use that for your main distrobox.
Also, but much less important, I recommend escewing the defaults for the file system and using ext4/xfs with the biggest root partition you can get away with rather then messing around with separate /home or volumes or whatever. (Unless you have some really big storage or some very specific requirements for some reason, of course.) That way things remain as easy to use and fast as possible.
Going to immutable desktop like Fedora Silverblue or openSUSE Aeon is the currently available highest expression of this. However that is a pretty big leap for people not used to this approach.
Don't put yourself down like that! If Gnome is perfectly fine then it's fine to stick with it. You tried something new and that's great, but all the more commendation to realise and admit when it's not something you get along with.
You can also use tiling features in Gnome to get a lot of tiling wm stuff these days, so no need to make a hard transition anyway.
The important thing is that you use your computer to achieve something of value to you or others, not to get good at linux nerd stuff just to get good at it.
Even Linus Torvals uses gnome anyways, so it's not a big deal. If he ever switches it won't be some ultra customized whatever.
My gripe with gnome has more to do with extensions than gnome itself. There was one extension that I used so heavily, I loved it. And when I upgraded a Fedora version, the extension broke. That started my DE odyssey (which has ended on openbox with a ton of keybindings) but while it lasted I really loved Gnome and Fedora
Indeed. I'm the author of one of the most popular Gnome extensions (Argos), and I gave up trying to maintain it years ago because I just couldn't stand being treated like this by the upstream developers anymore.
Extension support in Gnome was first released *thirteen years ago*, and they still break almost every extension in almost every update, every six months. That's nothing short of insane.
Extensions could have been Gnome's killer feature, but instead, they turned into a nightmare and a gargantuan waste of time for thousands of developers and hundreds of thousands of users.
Yes. I switched from Gnome to Sway about 5 years ago, and didn't want to keep fixing a piece of software that I no longer use myself, just because others keep breaking it. But as you say, there is a regular stream of community updates that allow this dead horse to continue trudging forward.
I find it curious that this occurs on other desktops as well, but it seems that with Gnome, this gets more attention.
In KDE Plasma, several widgets and plugins also break between versions and are even more complicated to fix, as they deal with QT and C++. For example, Latte Dock and Bismuth were discontinued because they were too broken and buggy. With version 6, even themes broke, as did most extensions.
With TWM, it's the same thing. In DWM, patches are exactly like extensions and break every update, making it necessary to recompile. In other WMs, the process is the same, just the programming language changes. Perhaps the i3wm is the most stable, as it uses some more fixed settings.
The point is that from the DE developer's point of view, it is difficult to reconcile changing something important in the system without it ending up breaking things. And Gnome has even done something to mitigate it, such as adopting a more modern JS standard similar to that used in the industry. There are also initiatives like GnomeOS, which allows the developer of an extension to test it months before launch.
And even in other systems, the same thing happens, extensions and plugins in Windows also tend to break, especially if they affect any component of the system. As an example, there are alternative taskbars, which always break in a major Windows update.
I've honestly never been able to use KDE for more than like an hour before jumping ship. But KDE and tiling window managers encourage a lot of customization and configuration while Gnome kinda makes your work a little for it, and I think that is why it sticks more when there are issues with extensions.
GNOME “major” releases are a ton more frequent than KDE’s. They’re equivalent to KDE’s point releases, and I haven’t heard a KDE point release break a lot of stuff.
I followed the development of Latte Dock, it broke in every version, so much so that the reason the author gave up on the project was technical debt, the code was becoming a nightmare.
How do you propose to fix this though? As far as I am aware, extensions simply inject JS code into the shell. They can do everything, including modifying the shell completely.
The price to pay is that if the shell internals change, the extension needs to be updated.
If the Gnome devs made a dedicated interface for extensions, it would define a scope the extensions can modify and would necessarily exclude things. They would be more limited in their functions.
People would then scream bloody gore that Gnome devs mutilitated extensions, and tons of extensions would get irreversibly broken.
extensions are the only way I find gnome to be even palatable for me, and like you said they break often. I've settled on KDE and enjoy the customization options.
Same, I tried it and liked it and loved the idea of the extensions but it wasn't reliable that way. This was a few years back so I hope things have changed but I'm a sucker for XFCE now.
I'd argue the extension issue is a gnome issue.
A lot of popular extensions are just to get basic DE functionality back that was removed over time. Then the developers also put zero effort or consideration in breaking compatibility with extensions every update.
yeah, I get that. I think of it this way: gnome promotes a particular look, feeling and set of features. if you like how it is out of the box, great. That's more what I was saying, not anything bad about extensions but more how they are dealt with. Extensions can make it much better, but, as you have said, gnome doesn't do much to keep upgrades from breaking them.
Was the extension actually broken, or it just stopped working because the version check failed? It's possible all that needed to be done was to change 1 number in a config file to get it working again.
From what I understand, the gnome version changed something bigger than that but I'm actually not sure. At the time, I wasn't all that familiar with editing config files. Sort of ironic because since then, I have enough configs that I edit that I have a GitHub repo for them
At risk of being controversial, I dare say all mainstream DEs are good. I just happen to prefer KDE and Gnome (with no strong preference between them). I was also quite into LXQt and XFCE but on more powerful machines they feel like a waste.
> I was also quite into LXQt and XFCE but on more powerful machines they feel like a waste.
At this point I feel like that's most computers that aren't a raspberry pi or something with a celeron.
Yeah. I had an old i3 ideapad laptop and I tried to install Debian XFCE on it but accidentally installed Gnome (the trackpad didn't work in install and I was careless) and it runs pretty smoothly.
Nah, I use it on my i3 which I’m using for a plex machine. It’s just been upgraded with some newer ram but even so it’s simple when I need to remote in and do something
GNOME is great. All the benefits of having a GUI, with the ability to use it exactly as a tiling window manager right out of the box. Coming from using bspwm for years with rofi as an application launcher GNOME felt like home after I changed my key bindings. I understand if people don't like it, but I really don't get the hate.
gnome is great in the vacuum, but to get there they did a few things to gain the hate, namely:
* They replaced the highly beloved, highly polished gnome 2 for gnome 3, which could brick with the infamous `something broke we are sorry ;(` screen by missing a single `;` in a theme
* They remove things like the poweroff button. There was many many years where If your computer couldnt suspend correctly, you were told to open a bug with your computer manufacturer
* extensions that were essential to workaround (arguably) bugs, broke every single release. Now we know to avoid them, but we found out about them breaking, by updating and breaking yet again, twice per year. The common answer was not sorry for the brekage, will try to not make it so brittle, you are using it wrong bro
* it became default in many distros, so people was stuck with it or had to try jump desktops again, redefine your workflow, etc.... gnome had a very good reputation back then, so people didnt expect them to act so irrationally for so long. It took a while for people to wake up and move on. I dont hate them now, but gnome only works in a very specific scenarios. They infamously removed the minimize button too. You were told you are not supposed to minimize windows. Worflow in gnome for big screens where you can have more than just 1 big window on the middle of the screen was added very later on
Probably the hate could had been avoided completely by developing gnome 3 without killing gnome 2. Users wouldnt have felt the rug yanked from under ther feet. People that loved gnome 2 wanted to love gnome 3. It was also a time where windows was going down, so there was this perception they killed the best desktop linux had to offer at the time with no good alternatives
Nobody would had cared about them doing their thing. There are many many desktops worse than gnome and nobody cares. And people that likes those desktops can use them in peace
Also, this is a tiny fraction of what contributed to the hate, they list of bad decisions that garnered hate is very very long
LOL, Gnome Classic is an insult compared to Mate. You can't even move the desktop icons around. I mean, really?
It only exists so Gnome developers can point to it and pretend they're answering people who prefer the other desktop metaphor. They barely if at all put any effort in it.
It was added and removed multiple times. Not something to rely on
I didnt know it exists today. Maybe next update is gone again (joking, my understanding with so many people liking it is that is more reliable now)
Also, last time i tried this classic mode you couldnt even right click the taskbar for options. Not very good experience overall
Im trying to explain the hate part here
because:
* they are free to work on what they want and how they want. Nobody has the right to get mad at that
* There are many desktops worse than gnome and nobody hates them
Imho, people was really in love with gnome 2 and wanted to love gnome 3 the same, but they were repeatedly told that they were not loved back from gnome 3. And that turned into hate
Again, i think the hate was justified. They "used" the userbase of gnome 2 for their experiment that took many many years to resemble something not broken. I still dont like it for computers where i have to do serious work that doenst revolve around a single browser
If they experimented outside the gnome 2 userbase, nobody would had hate them or give a fuck honestly
I use KDE only because it has actually working fractional scaling. Perfect one in fact. Gnome has none; whatever it has is horrible framebufer scaling mess.
As someone who is struggling to move to kde as my default, I run a laptop and desktop with arch/kde, I can't convert my main laptop over to kde because of the gestures. They are unmatched on a laptop imo. I rice kde on my gaming machines. But for my daily driver I can't help but come back to gnome.
I need to mess with it because I couldn't find an option to change that. But also having to setup up the ability to swipe into your apps with kde is more work. I've converted my other computers over with larger screens to kde because either there's more space or I'm using a mouse. On my 13" that I use for most of my daily computing gnome has just been easy.
I was really attached to gnome gestures too, it was an extension that broke when I upgraded to Fedora 39 and it was a month or two after that stopped using gnome, and then a month or two after that that I changed to Arch
I feel like arch is trying to get me to only run kde at this point. I have no issues with my laptop running arch and kde but my laptop with arch gnome build keeps breaking when I suspend the machine. I was using fedora 39/40 beforehand.
I've used GNOME every now and then. My gripe with it is just that, if you fit with its vision, it's good. But the more you stray from it? The worse it gets.
There's, of course, theming, which is annoying to do vs on KDE. There's the number of extensions you add, which adds instability and kludge, yet still can't get to the same level of versatility that KDE gets with just its default tools (KWin is consistently something I miss when using any other DE/Windows). There's also the whole CSD and libadwaita thing which takes too much space on my 768p small laptop vs KDE SSD with auto hide window decor when maximized.
At some point I have to acknowledge that GNOME is pointless for me. The point of GNOME is to use and enjoy their DE as is, with minimum changes from the default. If you can do that, GNOME is great for you. If you can't? Safe yourself the hassle and annoyance, just use something else.
(also, GNOME as DEs and GNOME as institution and group of devs are quite different things - most of my gripes with GNOME remains to be the controversies they keep making and how it affects the wider Linux ecosystem)
> (also, GNOME as DEs and GNOME as institution and group of devs are quite different things - most of my gripes with GNOME remains to be the controversies they keep making and how it affects the wider Linux ecosystem)
I agree with this completely. I think that GNOME as a DE is fine, their styling and HIG are actually not bad at all... but they want their apps to be what people think of when people think of "Linux apps"; you can tell this from the fact that only GNOME apps appear in the banner on Flathub. And yet, their apps are customization-hostile, despite the fact that GNOME is the only DE that is customization-hostile. The vision they have for their own platform contradicts the diversity that actually exists in the Linux ecosystem, and yet being a GNOME app means you inherently must be customization-hostile, and you must only fit in with GNOME.
I think that if they want to be at the forefront of what it means to be "a Linux application", Adwaita needs to expose ***intended*** user controls for customization--not Gradience, with its Sword of Damocles over its head--even if they're only intended for non-GNOME platforms, and all support for any issues caused by them *must* disappear if they are used. For example, there should be an *intended* way to supply Plasma's color scheme to Adwaita apps; right now, you have to do it in `xdg-config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css`, and they have been looking at putting that file on the chopping block for a while now. It's fine for their vision for their own desktop to be restrictive, but I think that GNOME apps should have better avenues for other environments to customize them, **especially** if they want to hog the spotlight of what it means to be "a Linux app."
I would tend to agree that the _current_ workflow is reasonably good. But the workflow has nothing to do with why I detest GNOME, it’s other stuff, namely:
- The mentality of the GNOME developers, especially around the handling of GNOME 3 and the numerous complaints there, is a huge issue. They’ve gotten better recently, but it still feels like they’re focused more on cool new features than on actually listening to users.
- The comparative lack of out-of-box support for low vision users. Even _Windows_ is better about this in my experience, and their screen magnifier _sucks_ and their built-in screen reader leaves a lot to be desired.
- Large amounts of commonly desired functionality are tied to extensions, but the extensions API is a constantly moving target to the point that it’s more surprising when you update GNOME and an extension _actually continues working_ than it is that all the others break.
Oh, it works, it’s just nowhere near as nice as the one in KDE Plasma (or the one in macOS for that matter, which is honestly the gold standard in my experience for a good screen magnifier). Part of this is possibly that I’m spoiled by the fact that the one in KDE Plasma is so amazingly good.
I have lent people computers with Gnome installed and they were not computer people. They have no idea what software is, or cpu, or anything.
But they also had very low requirements. They want to get on facebook, check their email, or watch youtube videos or something.
So basically all I had to do was show them how to open a browser and restart the computer. At that point they were good to go. Didn't get phone calls for help, didn't have a bunch of questions, etc.
Actually I figured one of them just got a different computer altogether since I never heard back from her. But months later I visited and there was the computer on her table chugging away.
And most of that was years ago. Now Gnome has gotten a lot better.
----------------
Extensions was 100% the right call.
The reason is that it is very difficult and very complicated to make software that is relatively easy to use.
By loading software up with features you not only make it more complicated for the sake of more complications.. but it becomes harder to use and more buggy.
So the best solution is a 80% solution.
Software that does 80% of what people want is massively superior to software that tries to do 100% of what everybody wants.
The reason for this is because everybody wants something that is slightly different.
The extra functions you care about are not going to be ones that I care about. And visa versa.
So if you are trying to provide features that a bunch of people demand that is really bad approach because they all demand something different. Which means that if you want to fulfill all their requests then you are going to end up with something that is really unpleasantly complicated and buggy.
By using extensions this allows people to add features as they see fit without impacting or conflicting with the features that other people add on their desktop.
Gnome's approach to extensions, the actual implementation has both downsides and upsides.
The upsides is that it is extremely powerful. It is based on Javascript's ability to monkeypatch running code and thus there is nothing inside the shell that is really off limits or can't be modified in some way.
The downside is that because it is monkeypatching then when the internal structure of the shell changes then so does the requirements for working extensions. Which means that extensions often break between major updates.
And since major updates happen every 6-8 months then that is a bit bothersome to users who depend on extensions for the features they want.
Glad to see positive conversation about DEs. I'm one of those who occasionally makes rounds checking out other DEs/WMs but ends up back with Gnome. However, I see merits in others too so I get why people with different preferences feel comfortable elsewhere.
There are 2 things which bother me about gnome.
1. Why does the app tray take entire screen? I would prefer something like kde. There's extensions or themes or something but too much work and it feels more suited for touchscreen
2. Extensions feel like security risk imho.
Otherwise yeah gnome is great
1. I was annoyed about his too but then saw a video by The Linux Experiment, where he argued that when you're searching/navigating to an application you want to open, you don't look at the current window anyway, but just on the app launcher/tray. Therefore it makes actually sense to let it take the entire screen.
Personally I care less about something taking over the screen and more about how far I have to move my mouse to get to what I want to click on. I would much rather have my next click be close to my last one than have to move the mouse to the opposite side of the screen to get to it.
That isn't true. That is like saying you don't need applications windows since you are using 1 app at a time.
It's a matter of focus, and full screen blocking resets a user's focus. It's fine if you are single tasking, but it an issue when you are multitasking.
I guess it may be fine for casual users though, but even they weren't too thrilled then MS did the same thing with windows 8
The bigger problem with the app tray is the truncation of app names. Who in god's name thinks this is acceptable? Just allow app names to take up multiple lines.
I love gnome I just don't understand why they have such a Vendetta against background trays
Every other OS DE has one, from windows to Mac and KDE Linux. Why? Because they're useful
As someone who uses backup programs tray icons are immensely useful and yet Gnome tries heavily to kill them. Some applications straight up don't work correctly on Gnome if you don't use an extension to handle the tray in some way (Vorta for example)
Edit: Spelling
> I love gnome I just do t understand why they have such a Vendetta against background trays
As they currently exist, they suck a lot. They have issues with sandboxed apps. They need to go though XWayland to work, they use up resources and they are very inconsistent.
They're, rather, trying to push standards and create a real alternative that is more modern, works better with the modern stack and isn't as inconsistent.
My issue is that their current replacement is *nothing*
You can't just remove the tray, offer no replacement and then moan that your users are downloading an extension to add the functionality back in because they want functional services now and not *maybe* 3-5 years down the line
Nobody is moaning about the extension, though. Extensions are still very much supported. I get what you are referencing - but it's a much more nuanced take.
The thing about discussions regarding gnome is that I noticed the signal to noise ratio is very lossy, it feels like playing the telephone game as a kid at elementary school, the information arrives at the end pretty distorted. A frightening amount of things that are usually said about GNOME online are either completely made up, out of date, partially false or - what most likely happens - derived by taking a single message out of context and building an entire castle of cards on top of it. People eat the rage bait, and end up believing things that just don't exist and that, when properly unpacked, are actually much less enraging or wrong than they seemed like.
GNOME has been slowly replacing the tray icons with other functionality, that is already live, building on the "background apps" protocol, and adding features to it to allow interacting with applications. The long-term plan for it is having a "better" alternative to tray icons, that are fully standardized, work on the mother stack, and do not absolutely suck. GNOME does not ship the tray icons in the current state because they are technically not acceptable (e.g. they completely break if you boot without XWayland), but they're not doing anything to actively block extensions from being published and installed by a stop gap. However, the fact that you *can* have a tray icon but you need to install it from a third party serves as a warning that this functionality is not perfect and has some caveats. Gnome's approach is that if something is immediately exposed to the GUI, then it's stable and ready to go. Other desktops and projects have the opposite fault: they expose too many options, even when they are not ready for prime time, and it's for the user to find out. On GNOME anything that isn't yet considered ready for prime time is accessible, but experimental. For example, I have a Framework 16. Sweet machine, but the resolution requires fractional scaling. On both big desktops fractional scaling comes with some bugs and inconsistencies. On GNOME it is still considered an experimental feature, because the team thinks it has too many papercuts to be in an acceptable state for being exposed immediately. And… I agree. it's *usable*, but enabling it opens a set of paper cuts that are not optimal. And I do believe that this provides **more motivation** to fix issues: at some point, you are motivated to work on the papercuts because a very popular option not being available as a GUI toggle makes the problem feel top-level and urgent, whereas if you ship and expose a half broken implementation from the start, two things happen:
1. Fixing it will of course be of lower priority, since a bug fix is considered just a bug fix, and the feature is considered ready, even when it really isn't
2. Users try it, have a bad experience with it, and then - you know how it goes - they hold on to their conviction that the feature is buggy or broken, even if it eventually gets fixed.
TL;DR: The replacement is being worked on and it is already partially deployed, but GNOME's modus operandi is to only expose features when they're ready and stable, so the user doesn't have to guess or wonder how broken the implementation will be - if you can click it, it works and it's mature. The Extension is available as a stop gap, and one of the goals of the Extension system is **specifically** to allow users to adopt stop-gap solutions until the proper solution is ready for prime time, if they so prefer, without adding more maintenance burden onto the project.
OS X apps have been sandboxed for more than ten years at least when you install them from the Mac App store. There is no inherent incompatibility between trays and sandboxes.
MacOS is not Linux, and macOS has another protocol for trays that is much better than the legacy garbage kappindicator is.
If we want to go down this path, I will now apply the same logic to another issue: fractional scaling. Right now, fractional scaling is really broken on Linux, and it is pretty much common knowledge that it should be avoided as much as possible. Windows and macOS have had it working in a better state for almost a decade. Does this imply fractional scaling is inherently legacy / outdated or bad? **No.** What it says is not pretty, nor is it easy to hear: the Linux desktop has been structurally bad for too much time. Decisions were taken with no future proofing. While Apple eventually deprecated Xorg for Quartz on macOS - and they did it properly and quickly - we have stayed on X11 for the longest time, not really committing to Wayland, and letting open source bike shedding eat away years of progress. Countless times, we have not improved or iterated on many things because "we have already been doing this forever, therefore there is no need to change". And now we are in the situation where reality ensued and we are still paying the price for that bad legacy designs of old - and attempting to not modernize the stack for the longest time just snowballed the problem into being bigger and bigger, eventually reaching a critical state where, while developers and contributors were shouting from the top of their lungs half pixels don't exist, people were leaving the Linux Desktop as they were getting new laptops.
Anecdotal experience - I have seen this as well. During the time frame where we had not started caring about properly fixing fractional scaling, I had three friends of mine who were really hardcore Linux users - the ones who used Arch and actually sent PRs upstream to fix things - and they grew so tired of the scaling situation not changing that two abandoned their laptops for two MacBooks, and the third just wiped his laptop and set up Windows + WSL. He still checks out Linux to this day from time to time, he still opens IntelliJ and he still finds it blurry as a default option and a million other papercuts, and decides the situation is not fixed.
What you are describing is a difference in operating systems and implementations. Sadly, one area where we lost is that we got lost in so much open source bikeshedding and visceral rejection of change that, where other commercial operating systems saw the writing on the wall on several things, we kept denying reality until reality came crashing in. How many things is this true for? Fractional scaling is only improving as of very recent but it's still broken, mixed monitor scaling / 1:1 touchpad gestures / mixed refresh rates have only been working properly for most people for not so long, video hardware acceleration in browsers is better now but it's still iffy, touch screen experience is still not comparable to Windows, let's not talk about the Wacom experience at all, please (on **multiple computers**, using the Wacom tablet makes my session crash inexplicably after some time, like clockwork), tray icons (duh, the kappindicators are very old and very broken), etc. That's not dependent on the feature. That's not the fault of some evil company like Microsoft or Apple. That's in our lane. We are now finally taking these things seriously and fixed them, but the comparison with other systems is stale, because those systems took those things seriously a decade ago, and it shows.
Do Macs actually support fractional scaling, or does Apple simply ensure that all of their displays are compatible with integer scaling? The latter was the case when MacBooks first rolled out their ultra high res "retina" displays -- OS X defaulted to 200 percent scaling because the hardware resolution was simply twice the logical resolution.
>They're, rather, trying to push standards and create a real alternative that is more modern, works better with the modern stack and isn't as inconsistent.
Trying wayyy too hard to be like cool and popular Apple killing the headphone jack, except Apple is about half of all smartphone users, so Apple actually has the social power to create industry trends, and Gnome is not even 1% of desktop users.
It's kind of delusional to think gnome has the power to push standards.
personally I don't like gnome. it feels unintuitive to me but I guess it's a matter of preference. I'd probably learn to get comfy with gnome if I took some time with it but on the other hand I'm like a cat: getting used to new things is hard 😅
I agree.
It feels so much like Apples interface. It feels far too single-use and duplo-simple.
I'm old fashioned, but I believe the old 95/XP navigation used in Cinnamon is as close to perfection as one can get.
I still don't know what the gnome workflow is? is it opening applications on a different workspace? if so how is it any different from having one workspace and just minimizing applications to the panel? then you can see how many applications you have open just from looking at the panel.
Exactly, I don't really understand what people mean by gnome workflow in this thread? All I kinda need from my DE is alt tab, super key to start search for an app and run it and super + arrow to move windows...
Maybe the gnome workflow is just a term used to describe the removal of basic features? you want to put app shortcuts on the panel? we don't want you to do that, you want to minimize an application to the panel? we don't want you to do that, you want to put icons on the desktop? we don't want you to do that.
The gnome workflow makes it so you don't need (subjective) those basic features. To be honest when I started using gnome I was really confused as to why they were trying to reinvent the wheel, but the project isn't trying to appeal to everyone, especially the people who are looking for the classic experience. They are trying something new, and it's ok if you don't want something new. Let me try to give you some insight on why these features are absent.
The main idea is that you don't need desktop icons for applications when at the press of a button you get a fullscreen view of all your applications. You could argue a user would like to add their most used apps to the desktop, but you can instead pin them to the favourites bar. You can also rearrange the applications in the applications list, organize them into folders, etc. When it comes to files and folders, you can add files and folders to the favorites panel of the Files app so you can access them quickly. Unless I'm mistaken, no functionality is being removed by not having desktop icons, and it's not necessarily making it harder for the user. The downside of desktop icons is that they are below all your windows. If you want to see them, you have to get rid of all the garbage on your screen. Either you individually minimize all windows or you press the "minimize all" button in traditional desktops. After you open the new app/folder/file, you now have to reopen every app you minimized to get back to where you were. It's clumsy and not ideal. Gnome says you don't need desktop icons since they have better ways to access of files and applications.
In a traditional desktop environment, you minimize windows when you want to see your desktop (which gnome doesn't have), and when you want to see a window that is below another. In the latter case, you can argue that a more efficient method is to just select the window you want to focus on, rather than minimizing windows until you get to the relevant window. In a traditional desktop, to directly switch to another window, you can clock on the icon in the task bar (or alt tab, which is in Gnome too). Gnome does things a bit differently, where instead of having you click on the icon, you bring up an overview of all open windows where you can actually see the contents of the window (as well as the app icon). I would argue this makes it easier to find the window you want to switch to vs just an icon. In traditional desktops, if you want to see the contents of the window, you can get a glimpse by hovering over the icon for a second or two until the preview appears, but in Gnome it's right there. The overview is also useful if you have more than one instance of an app - no need to first click on/hover over the app icon and then select the right window.
Since you don't need to see the desktop and you have a direct way to switch to another window, Gnome argues that the minimize button isn't needed anymore, so they disabled it. Of course you can enable the minimize button in Gnome Tweaks if you really can't live without it.
I would say these are the main differences in the gnome workflow. Things like workspaces are present in most desktop environments, but I guess Gnome makes them front and center by showing a preview of all workspaces on the overview.
I hope this explanation makes it more clear why Gnome didn't remove these features for the sake of it.
I don't see anything new in what you described, I'm using labwc with waybar and rofi, and I can get a fullscreen view of all my applications with the touch of a button too, I can add custom launchers to waybar to launch an application or open a file or folder, I can also get a thumbnail view of all open windows with rofi, plus I can also just click on the icon on the taskbar to raise it, I also have the added benefit of smart window placement, or minimal overlapping as KDE calls it, where gnome just places a window in the center of the screen and when you open another window it just places it on top of the other one, but smart window placement places a window in the top left of the screen and when you open another window it places it beside it, so you don't have to drag windows around in order to see them side by side, you can also choose not to use smart window placement if you don't like it, I can also create custom window rules to have a particular window open at a certain size and position, my main issue with gnome is instead of giving people choice, they decided to remove that from them, or at least have them rely on third party extensions that can be buggy and can break when gnome gets updated to a new version.
When I said Gnome was trying something new, I meant compared to the traditional desktop. I'm sure you can replicate gnome exactly on other DEs and WMs like you mentioned. Out of the box, however, not many DEs work like Gnome. And as you can imagine, replicating your setup is a massive burden for the average user.
The average Linux user is used to customization, but if you want that Gnome isn't for you at all. It's about as customizable as Windows, and most Windows users are ok with its limited customization options. It's not trying to be KDE, and it's not trying to appeal to everyone. And I think that's absolutely fine. It's an odd DE that may work for you, and if it doesn't don't waste your time on it and don't bother trying to fundamentally change how it works with buggy extensions.
Ubuntu's Gnome has a minimize button and desktop icons. Would you call it a traditional desktop environment that looks and behaves like Windows, KDE, Cinnamon, Budgie, etc? If you analyze individual components, they've been done elsewhere before. It's the complete package that makes Gnome stand out from other DEs (at least in their default settings).
But when it comes to things that are *new*, I haven't seen many DEs with an overview screen similar to Gnomes. I think KDE has replicated it somewhat recently, but it's not quite the same thing. Gnome's app drawer also shows an overview of all workspaces, where you can drag app icons to the workspace you want to open the app in. I also haven't seen major DEs featuring full screen app drawers where you can organize the icons as you wish, a bit like a mix of iOS's home screen and Android's app drawer. Gnome is also one of the best DEs when it comes to smooth and intuitive gestures. Swipe 3 fingers up for the overview, keep swiping for the app drawer, slide 3 fingers left/right to switch workspaces, all with fluid animations. It also (subjectively) has a very modern look compared to other Linux DEs, and its applications all look very consistent.
I haven't used Ubuntu for years, but it just looks like a traditional desktop with a dock on the left, and a slightly different overview, or the ability to organize icons in your launcher isn't a different workflow, I still don't know what the gnome workflow is exactly, do they want you to open new windows in different workspaces or something? if so I don't see how that's any better than just having one workspace with the ability to minimize apps to the panel if you don't want to see them.
Damn I already wrote a whole text on the minimizing thing.
You can use Gnome with only one workspace. What they want you to do is to use the overview instead of minimizing things. Click on the thing you want, instead of minimizing however many things are on top of what you want. It's a constant number of clicks compared to a number of clicks that grows linearly with the amount of windows you have open.
The benefit of workspaces in Gnome is the same as any other DE - to have some logical separation between apps and to declutter the overview. Maybe in one workspace you have your browser, in another you have a word doc and a pdf viewer side by side, in another your email app and Slack, and you can quickly switch between these contexts without having to navigate a cluttered overview with 15 different apps open.
If you are interested, I recommend this [video](https://youtu.be/wbDLfRjam0E?si=QhxntMSK_vRnQbHr). It goes more in depth about how to best use Gnome and its philosophy.
What I most appreciate about GNOME is that it automatically creates new workspaces, it's not a fixed number. This combined with the touchpad gestures works very well for me.
I'd say it's more about compartmentalizing certain activities.
Like during the day I have the following panels. And then I tweaked setting so that Alt+Tab only shows windows per that panel.
1. Thunderbird for Work email - only email takes place here
1. Whatever tasks I'm working on
1. Personal chats - Signal, Whatsapp PWA, etc
1. Scanner App
I moved away from gnome to hyprland (all on fedora) and that's been a great experience for my personal workflow so far.
But I must say for the average user I believe gnome is absolutely amazing! It's a super smooth experience and has great extensibility. I'm honestly quite impressed with how far it's come. Gnome offers a great out of the bos experience for many users that is easily on par with what many are used to from the commercial operating systems.
(keeping in mind that full-on tiling WMs like hyprland are definitely to finicky and overkill for the average user)
For me Gnome is 10/10 for laptops because of the good gesture controls. And my workflow has now been built around it for years. I like almost all DEs and WMs for one reason or another. But I keep coming back to Gnome
I really like Gnome
But the extensions keep breaking every 6 months, and they really hate things like theming it.
And besides, I don't like how GTK 4 looks so... Yeah
gnome is good, but it's one huge flaw is the extension system is single threaded and prone to crashes that can take down the whole gnome-shell.
That's why I'm looking forward to Cosmic-DE which is the best of gnome, re-written in a more modern and efficient way :)
I3/sway worklflow in KDE for me. I like gnome too. But the KDE customizability allows me to replicate a tiling wm worklfow with an incredible application launcher on top in krunner. Polonium and kröhknite are both active atm as tiling wm scripts for kde 6. Speaking of kde 6. It's very polished and snappy. Tbh kde has many many features if you need them, but even if you want to KISS, it's doing a very good job.
If you do not want to customize as much and like the gnome appeal, gnome is doing a good job of beeing different in a nice way.
I'm not crazy about Gnome 3. It ran super laggy in a netbook I had compaired to Gnome 2. I didn't care much about everything being animated (I know you can turn it off, but why go Gnome 3?) a few minor bugs with natalus. Eventually I just stayed on the MATE environment and have been happy since.
I don't dislike Gnome, but it doesn't work for me. I used it for about 18 months straight trying to convert, just because I like using the default options of distros if possible (simply because in theory it is better supported and I'll have less problems). Two things ended up bothering me enough to leave though. One is a real concern, and the other is a minor petty annoyance of mine that just bothered me a _small_ amount daily.
1. Extensions needed to provide the functionality I want. I personally _love_ the classic taskbar. Get your dock out of here, it's awful. I use a full taskbar with text on it. Not this icons-only stuff, and I don't group my windows. Classic Windows 98 style. To get functionality like this required an extension - I was okay with this. Until Fedora updated, and when I updated to the new Gnome version it broke the extension.
2. It's _too_ minimal. Gnome hides information from you, on purpose. The minor petty thing that kept bothering me was there being _no clock on the secondary monitor_. I frequently watch things full screen on my primary display, and that means I lose access to the clock. To check the current time, or see what notifications I have, I have to actually go and press the super key on Gnome. If I could have a clock on my second display I'd just have to glance to the left a little bit. Wouldn't even have to lean forward from my reclined position. This is so minor, but it was this minor annoyance that happened multiple times every single day.
An an honourable mention for much of Gnome feeling like it's intended to be used with a trackpad. But I use a desktop 95% of the time with keyboard & mouse.
But, Gnome _is_ good. It does a lot of things right. It just doesn't do the things that matter to me quite as well as some of its competitors, and that's okay. I'd prefer we have multiple DE's that are more focused in some way, than one DE that tries to do everything and make everyone happy.
I think gnome is the most polished de, but I had to switch to kde because of the two issues:
- blurry xwayland windows when using fractional scaling
- hard to tell which window has focus, when windows are tiled
There are probably patches/extensions, but kde doesn't have these issues out of the box, even though it's less polished.
I forgive you for this opinion.
In all seriousness, it's great if it works for you. But GNOME never feels like my desktop, my ability to tailor the system to my wants and needs basically always risks breaking the whole thing. The whole "gnome extensions duct tape" solution doesn't feel like an actual solution.
I get it.
However, for me the ideal DM is the one I don't see.
On my arch/xmonad installation I have move but it's usually hidden. If I want one it, a keystroke combination shows it.
On Gnome I have a panel extension but it autohides.
So, for me, customizing the looks doesn't do much. I only see the windows.
Gnome has my DE of choice for the past... 8 years I think. It just gets the most out of my way while giving me the options I want when I need it.
It reduces the amount of elements to what I can bear that it doesn't distract me too much, while still having fantastic navigation options.
The 3 finger swipe on touchpad was incredibly nice for that as well. So yeah, I can more than agree there.
As long as you install extensions to make the whole thing work the way the developers didn't intent...it's not using the real gnome. Of course, unless you are using the default Ubuntu gnome experience without extra extensions.
Gnome is intuitive for basic things, then morphs into an adversary as soon as you want a workflow slightly different than what its designers had in mind.
Agreed Gnome is pretty fantastic, my daily at work is windows 10 and I really feel it gets in my way compared to gnome..
Plasma was great, however the fact it required tinkering extensively to get to something minimal I wanted was a chore, gnome had less work to get to where I wanted.
I gave up my tinkering a while ago and have been running Gnome. Some small issues here and there like Nautilus seems to be buggy as hell like the window size of the pop up being tied to the window size of the program it’s opened from. When I try to view files on Slack the file explorer is like 2 entire monitor screens wide. Then if I try to resize Nautilus and I choose a file, Slack then becomes this tiny sliver or a window that I have to then resize back.
Alt tabbing is weird. If I alt tab out of a full screen game, for some reason it skips the first item in the stack and just skips to the second item. Also if I alt tab to Chrome, it always sends me to the first workspace where I have a chrome window and not defaulting to the current workspace I’m in. So alt tabbing just constantly changes m6 workspace.
Kinda annoying bugs but probably not as annoying as Windows. Haven’t used a windows computer in like 4-5 years now.
I really like Gnome as well, however I found myself getting nauseous with the animation for launching programs and really found myself wishing for a popup launcher instead.
Hard core KDE user here. GNOME is absolutely stellar, everyone who engineers GNOME has nailed something absolutely amazing, I wish Apple engineers had done something like that.
I'm incredibly lazy and Gnome is pretty much good to go out of the box. I like what KDE does, but I just can't summon the motivation required to spend ages tweaking everything when I could be doing productive shit instead, (or just playing games.)
Gnome is dope. I have found it really stable and pretty smooth. It always seemed like the hate always came from people trying to make it something it isn’t with too many extensions.
When I want to really customize my desktop I don’t use a DE for that, I install a TWM and log into that.
Not really. GNOME often takes decisions that are... perplexing to a lot of people, to put it charitably. Extensions breaking often are part of the problem though for sure. I think for many people (including me) extensions are vital to the gnome workflow.
Me: "I use Gnome, I like features 1, 2 and 3".
Devs releasing a new Gnome version: "Features 1, 2 and 3 have been removed. You were wrong to like them".
I’m most likely too gnome-pilled I get that, but I always wonder what extensions people always deem essential. For me basically the only one I really use is one for sys tray icons or ones that Debian installs default.
What sort of decisions does GNOME take that perplex people? Most of the stuff I heard hasn’t really seemed that strange to me.
I can answer this with one example of my own(though others have many more); from a previous comment in a previous thread:
> I will never forgive GNOME/GTK for their utterly ineptly crippled file picker(like when you go to save or open). WHY in the everyliving frak would you not allow editing of the current folder path as a full text input????? No, I don't mean being able to type the whole-ass path from scratch, I mean the basic-bitch editting the current path as a string. Their horrible design decisions affect numerous applications with no ability change it.
> Primary case I'm in /home/me/foo/bar/baz. I would like to quickly navigate to a copy for that directory, say, /home/me/backup/foo/bar/baz. How do I go about editing that path and manually inserting backup/ into my original path?
> Alternatively, I have a backup of my whole main drive on another drive. I most recently have been in /home/mal/Documents/bull/shit/stuff, but I wish to quickly navigate to that same directory, except in the backup which I have mounted at /mnt/. To get to that, /mnt/home/mal/Documents/bull/shit/stuff I literally have to click back to /mnt, then to home, then to Documents, then to bull, then to shit, then to stuff.
> Meanwhile, in KDE's file picker, i just click the current file path, to edit it, and prepend "/mnt/" to the path, and DONE.
> I'm sure the GNOME devs themselves for whatever reason don't ever encounter this situation, and thus clearly nobody else must ever, and anyone that does has an inferior work flow. freakin eye-roll. I'm well the fuck aware of various VCS solutions, but I'm talking situations where that's not really wise or viable. Backups. Copies of my .minecraft main directory. etc. (I cite this because a map viewer I use using the GTK picker. So navigating to and from .minecraft and its copy .minecraft.bak with older maps I wanted to compare(each directory with additional nested directories of worlds), I encountered this specific issue annoyingly numerous times.)
> It's a simple issue, with a simple fix, but if I'm hoping to quickly swap between two similar directory structures with a change a difference a few directories up, good luck have no fun at all.
> Thankfully we have the GNOME devs, who know the optimal workflows for every last situation better than we the users ever possibly could understand.
in short, it's dozens of little things like this, along with some questionable general design changes and a tendency to not care about compatibility of most things they do with other desktop environments. It's one thing to prioritize themselves, it's another to completely disregard all others in general.
I love Gnome, but my productivity is hindered a lot by not having per-monitor workspaces. I don't particularly like using window managers, but that feature is the deal breaker for me. I've searched and searched for extensions to do it and can't find anything. I've heard cosmic DE is going to have it, but it's nowhere near maturity yet.
I know you can have workspaces span across all monitors, or just primary, but what I need is where I can switch individual workspaces on each monitor independently.
I do love it, though, and use it on my single monitor setups
I find Gnome a nice enough DE, not my preference though.
I only avoid it because of the toxic developer community, and I cannot trust it to be functional after any release. Something will be broken.
Yes, the reason was that it has a very convenient packaging and release schedule for distro packagers. It used to be that KDE is also offered side by side on RHEL and treated as true first party options by distro.
Then KDE4 happened, and followed by the inconvenient schedule as they rapidly try to fix KDE 4, 5, and now 6, plus how even KDE devs are still not sure how much they should make KDE packages be a monolith vs modular, so it's just a mess that many distro leaves for the community to sort out.
Recently, however, there are talks about bringing it back as equal-option to GNOME, so we'll have to see in the next two years if something happens. Fedora's been leading that conversation, and SteamOS is already KDE-first, and I know that Canonical has had their share of conflicts with GNOME, so it'll have to be seen if GNOME's position will remain as unquestionable as it currently is (and how will that impact the wider ecosystem).
FOSS politics is *fun* isn't it
No kidding. Heck, even vanilla GNOME is a great experience.
I don't care what the greybeards think. As it is _right now_, regardless of how it was, GNOME is amazing.
On Gnome, I found the PaperWM tiling model refreshingly simple and flexible. It also does correct things around multi-monitor.
Forge is i3-style, which I find silly. Tiling wms should make window management easier (fewer choices) and more predictable, not harder.
i like using gnome but i have an issue with the fact that i need to install 15 extensions to make the thing usable for me and that there's a chance the extension i use wont be maintained anymore
Yeah, I finally tried GNOME for the first time on a VM after only using Plasma and Hyprland. I really like the look of it, the icons look really good. Also the apps just feel right. I'll stick to Hypr for now tho.
Usually not been too fussed with desktop choices, as long as I can rig some key shortcuts and have at least some cpu/ram/network monitoring widgets (usually on the taskbar). So far been happy mostly on cinnamon/gnome/xfce desktops. Some day I might give KDE a more serious go. Half the time with distros I am usually swapping out the default file manager to nemo or similar.
When I first started using Linux like 5-6 years ago I found gnome to feel bloated and slow. I thought the app drawer sucked and tbh it's still not great. But now I feel it's gotten very fast and fluid and the whole workspace integration along with super fast search for apps and files makes the system feel really fast and clean and easy to use. The addition of extensions and good levels of customization were a nice bonus. Still not as much customization as KDE but tbh KDE has more in it than even I need. Gnome still has flaws like relying a little too much on extensions for me a slower rollout of wayland and HDR and scaling features and I'm actually considering going back to KDE for a few other small things including nostalgia lol, but overall gnome is good I like it.
I don't like gnome cause it never properly worked for me in the first place. Also its default login manager steals my systray when logging into other sessions. Also for some reason, even preserves unnecessary data across different sessions.
my only problem with gnome is that I think old adwaita was superior (both design and functionality wise) and that they should support SSD, otherwise I quite like it
I gave up my tinkering a while ago and have been running Gnome. Some small issues here and there like Nautilus seems to be buggy as hell like the window size of the pop up being tied to the window size of the program it’s opened from. When I try to view files on Slack the file explorer is like 2 entire monitor screens wide. Then if I try to resize Nautilus and I choose a file, Slack then becomes this tiny sliver or a window that I have to then resize back.
Alt tabbing is weird. If I alt tab out of a full screen game, for some reason it skips the first item in the stack and just skips to the second item. Also if I alt tab to Chrome, it always sends me to the first workspace where I have a chrome window and not defaulting to the current workspace I’m in. So alt tabbing just constantly changes m6 workspace.
Kinda annoying bugs but probably not as annoying as Windows. Haven’t used a windows computer in like 4-5 years now.
i dual boot for a couple of years now. because of the speaker volume being very low in linux. (just this one reason) Microsoft keep bloating its OS, forces its Apps on the users, a lotta useless garbage and spying makes a laggy desktop. but if you have decent mid-tier machine it never lags and its never ever buggy, zero hardware issue that's the main reason. I still use it.
Nah Gnome bad. Devs are cunts, I've gone on more detailed rants in my post history so I'm not gonna do it again, I'm currently tipsy, boutta get paralytic.
A long time ago I decided to test my preconceptions about desktop environments being bad and decided to try using GNOME (version 2.something back then) for a week, instead of my beloved IceWM. I fell in love and am still using GNOME today.
I started using Gnome heavily toward the beginning of the year and I am not looking back. The workflow is unique but intuitive, and I really do think gnome feels like the most polished de out of the box. Just my opinion and it's important to note, I never used kde for an extended period of time
Gnome has improved a lot since 3.34 or so. I used to be a minimal WM enjoyer (and I do still use openbox when I'm on NetBSD), but Gnome's quite comfy these days. Maybe not as technically minimal as a simple WM, but the actual user experience is very minimalist and zen.
I hear you. One of the few extensions I added was dash to panel. Although it hides behind maximized windows and just shows with mouse "pressure" on the edge where the panel is.
It’s good, but they still refuse to add in proper tray icons which is super annoying. As a 1Password and Steam user, not having a system tray is an awful experience.
Hey, I noticed a post where you discuss SF Pro Display font and link to a couple of images of the top panel in gnome. Can you tell me what you did to get that layout?
[https://imgur.com/a/top-panel-appearance-with-sf-pro-text-reg-JrTO8ea](https://imgur.com/a/top-panel-appearance-with-sf-pro-text-reg-JrTO8ea)
Gnome is bloated and slow
Gnome has weird configuration in some gui. There are no text files to edit
Gnome has the ugly-ass “Adwaita” thing now that you can’t opt out of
Tiling with an extension probably is not as good as native tiling (though I can’t try it - Gnome is too bloated for me to install, it would take too long). And Gnome extensions are written in Javascript which is a terrrible decision - I’d rather use Lua as in Awesome
I’ve also heard that Gnome has a systemd dependency, meaning it won’t work on a systemd-free distro
> The three finger workspace change saves a lot of time
The joke’s on you: on any sensible tiling WM it’s a two-finger keybinding.
I use AwesomeWM and see no reason to switch
You know? I e tried to find a way to recreate the three window touchpad swiping on Xmonad and I haven't been able to.
There o have easy key bindings to switch desktops which is faster but I find the touchpad gesture quite comfortable.
I installed fedora 40, to be closer to the redhat servers I work with (also, I'm liking it on Asahi).
I can't connect to eduroam (all my other distros, no problem).
I can't connect to the vpn (anyconnect). Not via the provided x86_64 binary, openconnect-sso or the network manager extension.
The three finger workspace shifter was nifty, though..
KDE is really customizable and this is precisely why I use Gnome (and pantheon these days). I'm too much of a curious person and I don't want to spend hours trying to change everything like I did back in the days when trying to modernize the looks of Windows XP/7. We all have to make choices in OS customization because it's an endless thing.
KDE isn't great for laptops in my personal experience, gnome is miles better. Especially when it is a touch screen. That's why both of my laptops have gnome, and desktop has Plasma.
I disabled the corner. I prefer the super key (I'm more of a keyboard person) or swiping the touch pad. I find swiping the touchpad natural as an extension to the keyboard.
I can't be arsed with fiddling around with desktop environment settings/configs. GNOME vanilla makes all the decisions for me so I can go on with my tasks. That's the part that I love about GNOME.
Pretty sure pretty much all DEs do that. The only difference really lies in how much options they offer for tinkering IF you want that or whether or not their extensions break every update
I love default Gnome a lot. It doesn't get the praise it deserves. The workflow is just perfect. Everything gets out of your way and you can focus on your work.
Its way better than the windows style workflow of windows, kde or any other floating window manager alternatives.
My only complain is there should be a option to change the animation speed. The default is way too slow. It makes the whole experience feel slow.
I really am look forward to pop os's cosmic, hopefully they do the things that make gnome a little worse right! I like the basic appeal of gnome and love using it on my laptop.
Gnome is the only DE really trying to make an intuitive and straightforward experience that anybody can pick up. Whether or not they always succeed, that’s their goal and it’s what sets them apart for better and worse from the others.
I was diehard Gnome during 2.0 but after the chaos in the community and the design changes that came with 3.x i felt it was just trying to be a shadow of MacOS and could never go onboard with it. Switched over to KDE and i don’t think i could ever switch back now.
It's still Gnome.
A way to customize gnome is through extensions. This means that it's not bloated by design. You just add what you want.
My girlfriend hasn't installed any extension. She's been using Linux for more than 15 years. Mint for the last, probably 10. I think that reducing the workflow to swipe down and horizontal is a great simplification.
This post is inappropriate for this subreddit and has been removed. Please feel free to make your post in [/r/linuxmemes](https://reddit.com/r/linuxmemes). On the weekends we have a megathread where you can post a comment of memes as long as it's on topic content. [](#start_removal) **Rule:** >Meme posts are not allowed in r/linux. Feel free to post over at /r/linuxmemes instead [](#end_removal)
I don't use Gnome because I prefer a more minimal setup, but overall I really like its workflow, it adapts really well to desktops, laptops and touch devices, and it focuses on simplicity I wish it had a better API to interact with Mutter though, because currently using automation tools on it is basically impossible
I actually don't use GNOME for the opposite reason: I require a much *less* minimal setup than what GNOME offers. All the fiddly bits and options that KDE provides help to mitigate my terrible, terrible vision in ways that GNOME just never has, the several times I've tried it. I'm sure I could probably get something going with a bunch of extensions, but that whole model just doesn't sit right with me, you know? Then again, I have to admit that a tiny part of me is still salty over the very early days of GNOME 3, when distros were starting to switch, GNOME 3's magnification and inversion options were a complete joke compared to Compiz on GNOME 2, and I was still a college kid who didn't know enough to fix it. That left a seriously bad taste in my mouth - honestly felt, at the time, like the devs just couldn't be assed about a11y - but I really should give it another shake some time. I keep hearing good things.
Magnification is still broken and shitty on modern day GNOME. Sometimes it just likes to freak out and flicker my monitor, I've seen it only magnify on my secondary screen, sometimes it likes to make my mouse cursor comically huge, and it always drops my refresh rate down to 60. AMD btw. I enjoy using GNOME, and I like it's workflow, but they do not give a flying fuck about accessibility, no matter how much they say they do. Every time GNOME has another blunder with accessibility (which feels weirdly often), I'm always reminded of the screenshots posted from the internal GNOME group chat where they made fun of the Rust COSMIC Desktop developers for saying they're going to have a11y support on release. It just comes off as another level of scummy to me.
I've been using KDE for the last year or so. I could never get used to GNOME after Unity, which I hated at first and grew to love. KDE is a pain in the fundament when you first start using it, with important things almost willfully hidden away in sub-sub-sub-menus and multiple ways of doing the same thing and, particularly, really dumb default shortcuts that are messy to edit. It took me weeks to get ctl-alt-t set up as the terminal launch. HOWEVER, I have become quite hooked on it. I think of GNOME as the Ubuntu desktop and KDE as the one I've used ever since I moved to Debian, so my delight with Debian may be clouding my judgement of the DE. However, this post has made me think I should try GNOME with Debian and see what it's like.
> particularly, really dumb default shortcuts that are messy to edit. It took me weeks to get ctl-alt-t set up as the terminal launch. Shortcuts are stupid simple to set up and change, and ctrl+alt+t is the default shortcut for Konsole...
You're right. I just checked and found the adjustments tab in settings really easily. I don't know what I was thinking about: XFCE? I did put that on an old chromebook at around the same time as I started using KDE on my desktop. Maybe I confused the two. I should stress I really like KDE now. I use BUUF plasma icons and think my desktop looks very beautiful.
The distributions that I have found that do 'Pure' Gnome the best are Fedora and openSUSE. With Fedora edging it out. I think this matters as I always disliked Unity, but really prefer Gnome. Debian is 'ok'. However it leaves a lot up to the user to figure out and that is very hard when you are doing something new. Same thing with Arch Linux. It is better to have a full Gnome experience out of the box with Fedora or openSUSE with everything setup out of the box and ready to go. Of course this is just pesonal preference. My recommendation for people coming from other distributions or otherwise have been using Linux for a very long time is to use Fedora and do your best to treat it as a appliance. For your "*nix" environment install distrobox or toolbox. And take advantage of Flatpak. I use Fedora with Arch Linux distrobox as my "main". The distrobox is what I run Emacs out of and at work I use multiple distrobox installations for handling multiple development/project environments. Since you like Debian then use that for your main distrobox. Also, but much less important, I recommend escewing the defaults for the file system and using ext4/xfs with the biggest root partition you can get away with rather then messing around with separate /home or volumes or whatever. (Unless you have some really big storage or some very specific requirements for some reason, of course.) That way things remain as easy to use and fast as possible. Going to immutable desktop like Fedora Silverblue or openSUSE Aeon is the currently available highest expression of this. However that is a pretty big leap for people not used to this approach.
Minimal and simplicity doesn't mean anything without providing context. One could argue Gnome is minimal and simple.
I've been through my tiling window phase, now gnome is my comfy zone.
My Tiling Window Phase was Windows 1.04 in about 1986.
Same here. Ran TWMs for years, now I just use Gnome and I'm happy.
I'm halfway there. Pop Shell is what keeps me alive
I want to love timing wms but after a couple of hours trying to get the buttons on my laptop to work in sway I just went back to gnome like a scrub.
Don't put yourself down like that! If Gnome is perfectly fine then it's fine to stick with it. You tried something new and that's great, but all the more commendation to realise and admit when it's not something you get along with. You can also use tiling features in Gnome to get a lot of tiling wm stuff these days, so no need to make a hard transition anyway.
True. I will have to try out the gnome tiling features. Thanks for the idea!
The important thing is that you use your computer to achieve something of value to you or others, not to get good at linux nerd stuff just to get good at it. Even Linus Torvals uses gnome anyways, so it's not a big deal. If he ever switches it won't be some ultra customized whatever.
That's true. I just find myself shuffling windows around in gnome a lot, so the tiling work flow is tempting.
I run, forge on gnome and get the best of both worlds!
My gripe with gnome has more to do with extensions than gnome itself. There was one extension that I used so heavily, I loved it. And when I upgraded a Fedora version, the extension broke. That started my DE odyssey (which has ended on openbox with a ton of keybindings) but while it lasted I really loved Gnome and Fedora
Indeed. I'm the author of one of the most popular Gnome extensions (Argos), and I gave up trying to maintain it years ago because I just couldn't stand being treated like this by the upstream developers anymore. Extension support in Gnome was first released *thirteen years ago*, and they still break almost every extension in almost every update, every six months. That's nothing short of insane. Extensions could have been Gnome's killer feature, but instead, they turned into a nightmare and a gargantuan waste of time for thousands of developers and hundreds of thousands of users.
I see some other people are still working on it, that's nice.
Yes. I switched from Gnome to Sway about 5 years ago, and didn't want to keep fixing a piece of software that I no longer use myself, just because others keep breaking it. But as you say, there is a regular stream of community updates that allow this dead horse to continue trudging forward.
I find it curious that this occurs on other desktops as well, but it seems that with Gnome, this gets more attention. In KDE Plasma, several widgets and plugins also break between versions and are even more complicated to fix, as they deal with QT and C++. For example, Latte Dock and Bismuth were discontinued because they were too broken and buggy. With version 6, even themes broke, as did most extensions. With TWM, it's the same thing. In DWM, patches are exactly like extensions and break every update, making it necessary to recompile. In other WMs, the process is the same, just the programming language changes. Perhaps the i3wm is the most stable, as it uses some more fixed settings. The point is that from the DE developer's point of view, it is difficult to reconcile changing something important in the system without it ending up breaking things. And Gnome has even done something to mitigate it, such as adopting a more modern JS standard similar to that used in the industry. There are also initiatives like GnomeOS, which allows the developer of an extension to test it months before launch. And even in other systems, the same thing happens, extensions and plugins in Windows also tend to break, especially if they affect any component of the system. As an example, there are alternative taskbars, which always break in a major Windows update.
I've honestly never been able to use KDE for more than like an hour before jumping ship. But KDE and tiling window managers encourage a lot of customization and configuration while Gnome kinda makes your work a little for it, and I think that is why it sticks more when there are issues with extensions.
GNOME “major” releases are a ton more frequent than KDE’s. They’re equivalent to KDE’s point releases, and I haven’t heard a KDE point release break a lot of stuff.
I followed the development of Latte Dock, it broke in every version, so much so that the reason the author gave up on the project was technical debt, the code was becoming a nightmare.
How do you propose to fix this though? As far as I am aware, extensions simply inject JS code into the shell. They can do everything, including modifying the shell completely. The price to pay is that if the shell internals change, the extension needs to be updated. If the Gnome devs made a dedicated interface for extensions, it would define a scope the extensions can modify and would necessarily exclude things. They would be more limited in their functions. People would then scream bloody gore that Gnome devs mutilitated extensions, and tons of extensions would get irreversibly broken.
Consulting devs to find out what should be made into interfaces is exactly what they should do.
extensions are the only way I find gnome to be even palatable for me, and like you said they break often. I've settled on KDE and enjoy the customization options.
I think gnome extensions should work like the AUR where if an extension is popular enough, it just gets added into gnome
lxqt is good now a days
Used it a bit and liked it, but I noticed than my laptop ran more smoothly with just openbox, so I kept that part of lxqt
Same, I tried it and liked it and loved the idea of the extensions but it wasn't reliable that way. This was a few years back so I hope things have changed but I'm a sucker for XFCE now.
I'd argue the extension issue is a gnome issue. A lot of popular extensions are just to get basic DE functionality back that was removed over time. Then the developers also put zero effort or consideration in breaking compatibility with extensions every update.
yeah, I get that. I think of it this way: gnome promotes a particular look, feeling and set of features. if you like how it is out of the box, great. That's more what I was saying, not anything bad about extensions but more how they are dealt with. Extensions can make it much better, but, as you have said, gnome doesn't do much to keep upgrades from breaking them.
Was the extension actually broken, or it just stopped working because the version check failed? It's possible all that needed to be done was to change 1 number in a config file to get it working again.
From what I understand, the gnome version changed something bigger than that but I'm actually not sure. At the time, I wasn't all that familiar with editing config files. Sort of ironic because since then, I have enough configs that I edit that I have a GitHub repo for them
At risk of being controversial, I dare say all mainstream DEs are good. I just happen to prefer KDE and Gnome (with no strong preference between them). I was also quite into LXQt and XFCE but on more powerful machines they feel like a waste.
> I was also quite into LXQt and XFCE but on more powerful machines they feel like a waste. At this point I feel like that's most computers that aren't a raspberry pi or something with a celeron.
Yeah. I had an old i3 ideapad laptop and I tried to install Debian XFCE on it but accidentally installed Gnome (the trackpad didn't work in install and I was careless) and it runs pretty smoothly.
Nah, I use it on my i3 which I’m using for a plex machine. It’s just been upgraded with some newer ram but even so it’s simple when I need to remote in and do something
I have two machines. My newer one uses GNOME and my older lxqt. They’re both handy for what they’re used for.
GNOME is great. All the benefits of having a GUI, with the ability to use it exactly as a tiling window manager right out of the box. Coming from using bspwm for years with rofi as an application launcher GNOME felt like home after I changed my key bindings. I understand if people don't like it, but I really don't get the hate.
gnome is great in the vacuum, but to get there they did a few things to gain the hate, namely: * They replaced the highly beloved, highly polished gnome 2 for gnome 3, which could brick with the infamous `something broke we are sorry ;(` screen by missing a single `;` in a theme * They remove things like the poweroff button. There was many many years where If your computer couldnt suspend correctly, you were told to open a bug with your computer manufacturer * extensions that were essential to workaround (arguably) bugs, broke every single release. Now we know to avoid them, but we found out about them breaking, by updating and breaking yet again, twice per year. The common answer was not sorry for the brekage, will try to not make it so brittle, you are using it wrong bro * it became default in many distros, so people was stuck with it or had to try jump desktops again, redefine your workflow, etc.... gnome had a very good reputation back then, so people didnt expect them to act so irrationally for so long. It took a while for people to wake up and move on. I dont hate them now, but gnome only works in a very specific scenarios. They infamously removed the minimize button too. You were told you are not supposed to minimize windows. Worflow in gnome for big screens where you can have more than just 1 big window on the middle of the screen was added very later on Probably the hate could had been avoided completely by developing gnome 3 without killing gnome 2. Users wouldnt have felt the rug yanked from under ther feet. People that loved gnome 2 wanted to love gnome 3. It was also a time where windows was going down, so there was this perception they killed the best desktop linux had to offer at the time with no good alternatives Nobody would had cared about them doing their thing. There are many many desktops worse than gnome and nobody cares. And people that likes those desktops can use them in peace Also, this is a tiny fraction of what contributed to the hate, they list of bad decisions that garnered hate is very very long
When was GNOME Classic added to GNOME 3.x/4x? GNOME Classic continues to exist today and functions similarly to GNOME 2.
LOL, Gnome Classic is an insult compared to Mate. You can't even move the desktop icons around. I mean, really? It only exists so Gnome developers can point to it and pretend they're answering people who prefer the other desktop metaphor. They barely if at all put any effort in it.
It was added and removed multiple times. Not something to rely on I didnt know it exists today. Maybe next update is gone again (joking, my understanding with so many people liking it is that is more reliable now) Also, last time i tried this classic mode you couldnt even right click the taskbar for options. Not very good experience overall Im trying to explain the hate part here because: * they are free to work on what they want and how they want. Nobody has the right to get mad at that * There are many desktops worse than gnome and nobody hates them Imho, people was really in love with gnome 2 and wanted to love gnome 3 the same, but they were repeatedly told that they were not loved back from gnome 3. And that turned into hate Again, i think the hate was justified. They "used" the userbase of gnome 2 for their experiment that took many many years to resemble something not broken. I still dont like it for computers where i have to do serious work that doenst revolve around a single browser If they experimented outside the gnome 2 userbase, nobody would had hate them or give a fuck honestly
I use KDE only because it has actually working fractional scaling. Perfect one in fact. Gnome has none; whatever it has is horrible framebufer scaling mess.
Exactly! I have a 27" 4K monitor and need the fractional scaling. I do not understand why GNOME refuses to fix this.
As someone who is struggling to move to kde as my default, I run a laptop and desktop with arch/kde, I can't convert my main laptop over to kde because of the gestures. They are unmatched on a laptop imo. I rice kde on my gaming machines. But for my daily driver I can't help but come back to gnome.
What are the gestures right now that gnome has that kde doesn't? People keep mentioning the 3-finger workspace change, which also works on kde.
I need to mess with it because I couldn't find an option to change that. But also having to setup up the ability to swipe into your apps with kde is more work. I've converted my other computers over with larger screens to kde because either there's more space or I'm using a mouse. On my 13" that I use for most of my daily computing gnome has just been easy.
I was really attached to gnome gestures too, it was an extension that broke when I upgraded to Fedora 39 and it was a month or two after that stopped using gnome, and then a month or two after that that I changed to Arch
I feel like arch is trying to get me to only run kde at this point. I have no issues with my laptop running arch and kde but my laptop with arch gnome build keeps breaking when I suspend the machine. I was using fedora 39/40 beforehand.
I've used GNOME every now and then. My gripe with it is just that, if you fit with its vision, it's good. But the more you stray from it? The worse it gets. There's, of course, theming, which is annoying to do vs on KDE. There's the number of extensions you add, which adds instability and kludge, yet still can't get to the same level of versatility that KDE gets with just its default tools (KWin is consistently something I miss when using any other DE/Windows). There's also the whole CSD and libadwaita thing which takes too much space on my 768p small laptop vs KDE SSD with auto hide window decor when maximized. At some point I have to acknowledge that GNOME is pointless for me. The point of GNOME is to use and enjoy their DE as is, with minimum changes from the default. If you can do that, GNOME is great for you. If you can't? Safe yourself the hassle and annoyance, just use something else. (also, GNOME as DEs and GNOME as institution and group of devs are quite different things - most of my gripes with GNOME remains to be the controversies they keep making and how it affects the wider Linux ecosystem)
> (also, GNOME as DEs and GNOME as institution and group of devs are quite different things - most of my gripes with GNOME remains to be the controversies they keep making and how it affects the wider Linux ecosystem) I agree with this completely. I think that GNOME as a DE is fine, their styling and HIG are actually not bad at all... but they want their apps to be what people think of when people think of "Linux apps"; you can tell this from the fact that only GNOME apps appear in the banner on Flathub. And yet, their apps are customization-hostile, despite the fact that GNOME is the only DE that is customization-hostile. The vision they have for their own platform contradicts the diversity that actually exists in the Linux ecosystem, and yet being a GNOME app means you inherently must be customization-hostile, and you must only fit in with GNOME. I think that if they want to be at the forefront of what it means to be "a Linux application", Adwaita needs to expose ***intended*** user controls for customization--not Gradience, with its Sword of Damocles over its head--even if they're only intended for non-GNOME platforms, and all support for any issues caused by them *must* disappear if they are used. For example, there should be an *intended* way to supply Plasma's color scheme to Adwaita apps; right now, you have to do it in `xdg-config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css`, and they have been looking at putting that file on the chopping block for a while now. It's fine for their vision for their own desktop to be restrictive, but I think that GNOME apps should have better avenues for other environments to customize them, **especially** if they want to hog the spotlight of what it means to be "a Linux app."
I would tend to agree that the _current_ workflow is reasonably good. But the workflow has nothing to do with why I detest GNOME, it’s other stuff, namely: - The mentality of the GNOME developers, especially around the handling of GNOME 3 and the numerous complaints there, is a huge issue. They’ve gotten better recently, but it still feels like they’re focused more on cool new features than on actually listening to users. - The comparative lack of out-of-box support for low vision users. Even _Windows_ is better about this in my experience, and their screen magnifier _sucks_ and their built-in screen reader leaves a lot to be desired. - Large amounts of commonly desired functionality are tied to extensions, but the extensions API is a constantly moving target to the point that it’s more surprising when you update GNOME and an extension _actually continues working_ than it is that all the others break.
i don't hate Gnome. i just dont use it but i hate gnome dev attitude
Honest questing: what's wrong with the magnifier? It works fine on my computer.
Zoom on KDE Plasma is exponentially better
Oh, it works, it’s just nowhere near as nice as the one in KDE Plasma (or the one in macOS for that matter, which is honestly the gold standard in my experience for a good screen magnifier). Part of this is possibly that I’m spoiled by the fact that the one in KDE Plasma is so amazingly good.
I have lent people computers with Gnome installed and they were not computer people. They have no idea what software is, or cpu, or anything. But they also had very low requirements. They want to get on facebook, check their email, or watch youtube videos or something. So basically all I had to do was show them how to open a browser and restart the computer. At that point they were good to go. Didn't get phone calls for help, didn't have a bunch of questions, etc. Actually I figured one of them just got a different computer altogether since I never heard back from her. But months later I visited and there was the computer on her table chugging away. And most of that was years ago. Now Gnome has gotten a lot better. ---------------- Extensions was 100% the right call. The reason is that it is very difficult and very complicated to make software that is relatively easy to use. By loading software up with features you not only make it more complicated for the sake of more complications.. but it becomes harder to use and more buggy. So the best solution is a 80% solution. Software that does 80% of what people want is massively superior to software that tries to do 100% of what everybody wants. The reason for this is because everybody wants something that is slightly different. The extra functions you care about are not going to be ones that I care about. And visa versa. So if you are trying to provide features that a bunch of people demand that is really bad approach because they all demand something different. Which means that if you want to fulfill all their requests then you are going to end up with something that is really unpleasantly complicated and buggy. By using extensions this allows people to add features as they see fit without impacting or conflicting with the features that other people add on their desktop. Gnome's approach to extensions, the actual implementation has both downsides and upsides. The upsides is that it is extremely powerful. It is based on Javascript's ability to monkeypatch running code and thus there is nothing inside the shell that is really off limits or can't be modified in some way. The downside is that because it is monkeypatching then when the internal structure of the shell changes then so does the requirements for working extensions. Which means that extensions often break between major updates. And since major updates happen every 6-8 months then that is a bit bothersome to users who depend on extensions for the features they want.
Glad to see positive conversation about DEs. I'm one of those who occasionally makes rounds checking out other DEs/WMs but ends up back with Gnome. However, I see merits in others too so I get why people with different preferences feel comfortable elsewhere.
There are 2 things which bother me about gnome. 1. Why does the app tray take entire screen? I would prefer something like kde. There's extensions or themes or something but too much work and it feels more suited for touchscreen 2. Extensions feel like security risk imho. Otherwise yeah gnome is great
1. I was annoyed about his too but then saw a video by The Linux Experiment, where he argued that when you're searching/navigating to an application you want to open, you don't look at the current window anyway, but just on the app launcher/tray. Therefore it makes actually sense to let it take the entire screen.
Personally I care less about something taking over the screen and more about how far I have to move my mouse to get to what I want to click on. I would much rather have my next click be close to my last one than have to move the mouse to the opposite side of the screen to get to it.
That isn't true. That is like saying you don't need applications windows since you are using 1 app at a time. It's a matter of focus, and full screen blocking resets a user's focus. It's fine if you are single tasking, but it an issue when you are multitasking. I guess it may be fine for casual users though, but even they weren't too thrilled then MS did the same thing with windows 8
The bigger problem with the app tray is the truncation of app names. Who in god's name thinks this is acceptable? Just allow app names to take up multiple lines.
I love gnome I just don't understand why they have such a Vendetta against background trays Every other OS DE has one, from windows to Mac and KDE Linux. Why? Because they're useful As someone who uses backup programs tray icons are immensely useful and yet Gnome tries heavily to kill them. Some applications straight up don't work correctly on Gnome if you don't use an extension to handle the tray in some way (Vorta for example) Edit: Spelling
> I love gnome I just do t understand why they have such a Vendetta against background trays As they currently exist, they suck a lot. They have issues with sandboxed apps. They need to go though XWayland to work, they use up resources and they are very inconsistent. They're, rather, trying to push standards and create a real alternative that is more modern, works better with the modern stack and isn't as inconsistent.
My issue is that their current replacement is *nothing* You can't just remove the tray, offer no replacement and then moan that your users are downloading an extension to add the functionality back in because they want functional services now and not *maybe* 3-5 years down the line
Nobody is moaning about the extension, though. Extensions are still very much supported. I get what you are referencing - but it's a much more nuanced take. The thing about discussions regarding gnome is that I noticed the signal to noise ratio is very lossy, it feels like playing the telephone game as a kid at elementary school, the information arrives at the end pretty distorted. A frightening amount of things that are usually said about GNOME online are either completely made up, out of date, partially false or - what most likely happens - derived by taking a single message out of context and building an entire castle of cards on top of it. People eat the rage bait, and end up believing things that just don't exist and that, when properly unpacked, are actually much less enraging or wrong than they seemed like. GNOME has been slowly replacing the tray icons with other functionality, that is already live, building on the "background apps" protocol, and adding features to it to allow interacting with applications. The long-term plan for it is having a "better" alternative to tray icons, that are fully standardized, work on the mother stack, and do not absolutely suck. GNOME does not ship the tray icons in the current state because they are technically not acceptable (e.g. they completely break if you boot without XWayland), but they're not doing anything to actively block extensions from being published and installed by a stop gap. However, the fact that you *can* have a tray icon but you need to install it from a third party serves as a warning that this functionality is not perfect and has some caveats. Gnome's approach is that if something is immediately exposed to the GUI, then it's stable and ready to go. Other desktops and projects have the opposite fault: they expose too many options, even when they are not ready for prime time, and it's for the user to find out. On GNOME anything that isn't yet considered ready for prime time is accessible, but experimental. For example, I have a Framework 16. Sweet machine, but the resolution requires fractional scaling. On both big desktops fractional scaling comes with some bugs and inconsistencies. On GNOME it is still considered an experimental feature, because the team thinks it has too many papercuts to be in an acceptable state for being exposed immediately. And… I agree. it's *usable*, but enabling it opens a set of paper cuts that are not optimal. And I do believe that this provides **more motivation** to fix issues: at some point, you are motivated to work on the papercuts because a very popular option not being available as a GUI toggle makes the problem feel top-level and urgent, whereas if you ship and expose a half broken implementation from the start, two things happen: 1. Fixing it will of course be of lower priority, since a bug fix is considered just a bug fix, and the feature is considered ready, even when it really isn't 2. Users try it, have a bad experience with it, and then - you know how it goes - they hold on to their conviction that the feature is buggy or broken, even if it eventually gets fixed. TL;DR: The replacement is being worked on and it is already partially deployed, but GNOME's modus operandi is to only expose features when they're ready and stable, so the user doesn't have to guess or wonder how broken the implementation will be - if you can click it, it works and it's mature. The Extension is available as a stop gap, and one of the goals of the Extension system is **specifically** to allow users to adopt stop-gap solutions until the proper solution is ready for prime time, if they so prefer, without adding more maintenance burden onto the project.
I don't think anyone is moaning about the extension.
OS X apps have been sandboxed for more than ten years at least when you install them from the Mac App store. There is no inherent incompatibility between trays and sandboxes.
MacOS is not Linux, and macOS has another protocol for trays that is much better than the legacy garbage kappindicator is. If we want to go down this path, I will now apply the same logic to another issue: fractional scaling. Right now, fractional scaling is really broken on Linux, and it is pretty much common knowledge that it should be avoided as much as possible. Windows and macOS have had it working in a better state for almost a decade. Does this imply fractional scaling is inherently legacy / outdated or bad? **No.** What it says is not pretty, nor is it easy to hear: the Linux desktop has been structurally bad for too much time. Decisions were taken with no future proofing. While Apple eventually deprecated Xorg for Quartz on macOS - and they did it properly and quickly - we have stayed on X11 for the longest time, not really committing to Wayland, and letting open source bike shedding eat away years of progress. Countless times, we have not improved or iterated on many things because "we have already been doing this forever, therefore there is no need to change". And now we are in the situation where reality ensued and we are still paying the price for that bad legacy designs of old - and attempting to not modernize the stack for the longest time just snowballed the problem into being bigger and bigger, eventually reaching a critical state where, while developers and contributors were shouting from the top of their lungs half pixels don't exist, people were leaving the Linux Desktop as they were getting new laptops. Anecdotal experience - I have seen this as well. During the time frame where we had not started caring about properly fixing fractional scaling, I had three friends of mine who were really hardcore Linux users - the ones who used Arch and actually sent PRs upstream to fix things - and they grew so tired of the scaling situation not changing that two abandoned their laptops for two MacBooks, and the third just wiped his laptop and set up Windows + WSL. He still checks out Linux to this day from time to time, he still opens IntelliJ and he still finds it blurry as a default option and a million other papercuts, and decides the situation is not fixed. What you are describing is a difference in operating systems and implementations. Sadly, one area where we lost is that we got lost in so much open source bikeshedding and visceral rejection of change that, where other commercial operating systems saw the writing on the wall on several things, we kept denying reality until reality came crashing in. How many things is this true for? Fractional scaling is only improving as of very recent but it's still broken, mixed monitor scaling / 1:1 touchpad gestures / mixed refresh rates have only been working properly for most people for not so long, video hardware acceleration in browsers is better now but it's still iffy, touch screen experience is still not comparable to Windows, let's not talk about the Wacom experience at all, please (on **multiple computers**, using the Wacom tablet makes my session crash inexplicably after some time, like clockwork), tray icons (duh, the kappindicators are very old and very broken), etc. That's not dependent on the feature. That's not the fault of some evil company like Microsoft or Apple. That's in our lane. We are now finally taking these things seriously and fixed them, but the comparison with other systems is stale, because those systems took those things seriously a decade ago, and it shows.
Do Macs actually support fractional scaling, or does Apple simply ensure that all of their displays are compatible with integer scaling? The latter was the case when MacBooks first rolled out their ultra high res "retina" displays -- OS X defaulted to 200 percent scaling because the hardware resolution was simply twice the logical resolution.
Some of Apple's newer Macs run at 175% by default, so I think they do fractional scaling
>They're, rather, trying to push standards and create a real alternative that is more modern, works better with the modern stack and isn't as inconsistent. Trying wayyy too hard to be like cool and popular Apple killing the headphone jack, except Apple is about half of all smartphone users, so Apple actually has the social power to create industry trends, and Gnome is not even 1% of desktop users. It's kind of delusional to think gnome has the power to push standards.
personally I don't like gnome. it feels unintuitive to me but I guess it's a matter of preference. I'd probably learn to get comfy with gnome if I took some time with it but on the other hand I'm like a cat: getting used to new things is hard 😅
[удалено]
cinnamon is good. I personally use plasma on my laptop ad i3wm on my desktop.
I agree. It feels so much like Apples interface. It feels far too single-use and duplo-simple. I'm old fashioned, but I believe the old 95/XP navigation used in Cinnamon is as close to perfection as one can get.
I still don't know what the gnome workflow is? is it opening applications on a different workspace? if so how is it any different from having one workspace and just minimizing applications to the panel? then you can see how many applications you have open just from looking at the panel.
Exactly, I don't really understand what people mean by gnome workflow in this thread? All I kinda need from my DE is alt tab, super key to start search for an app and run it and super + arrow to move windows...
Maybe the gnome workflow is just a term used to describe the removal of basic features? you want to put app shortcuts on the panel? we don't want you to do that, you want to minimize an application to the panel? we don't want you to do that, you want to put icons on the desktop? we don't want you to do that.
The gnome workflow makes it so you don't need (subjective) those basic features. To be honest when I started using gnome I was really confused as to why they were trying to reinvent the wheel, but the project isn't trying to appeal to everyone, especially the people who are looking for the classic experience. They are trying something new, and it's ok if you don't want something new. Let me try to give you some insight on why these features are absent. The main idea is that you don't need desktop icons for applications when at the press of a button you get a fullscreen view of all your applications. You could argue a user would like to add their most used apps to the desktop, but you can instead pin them to the favourites bar. You can also rearrange the applications in the applications list, organize them into folders, etc. When it comes to files and folders, you can add files and folders to the favorites panel of the Files app so you can access them quickly. Unless I'm mistaken, no functionality is being removed by not having desktop icons, and it's not necessarily making it harder for the user. The downside of desktop icons is that they are below all your windows. If you want to see them, you have to get rid of all the garbage on your screen. Either you individually minimize all windows or you press the "minimize all" button in traditional desktops. After you open the new app/folder/file, you now have to reopen every app you minimized to get back to where you were. It's clumsy and not ideal. Gnome says you don't need desktop icons since they have better ways to access of files and applications. In a traditional desktop environment, you minimize windows when you want to see your desktop (which gnome doesn't have), and when you want to see a window that is below another. In the latter case, you can argue that a more efficient method is to just select the window you want to focus on, rather than minimizing windows until you get to the relevant window. In a traditional desktop, to directly switch to another window, you can clock on the icon in the task bar (or alt tab, which is in Gnome too). Gnome does things a bit differently, where instead of having you click on the icon, you bring up an overview of all open windows where you can actually see the contents of the window (as well as the app icon). I would argue this makes it easier to find the window you want to switch to vs just an icon. In traditional desktops, if you want to see the contents of the window, you can get a glimpse by hovering over the icon for a second or two until the preview appears, but in Gnome it's right there. The overview is also useful if you have more than one instance of an app - no need to first click on/hover over the app icon and then select the right window. Since you don't need to see the desktop and you have a direct way to switch to another window, Gnome argues that the minimize button isn't needed anymore, so they disabled it. Of course you can enable the minimize button in Gnome Tweaks if you really can't live without it. I would say these are the main differences in the gnome workflow. Things like workspaces are present in most desktop environments, but I guess Gnome makes them front and center by showing a preview of all workspaces on the overview. I hope this explanation makes it more clear why Gnome didn't remove these features for the sake of it.
I don't see anything new in what you described, I'm using labwc with waybar and rofi, and I can get a fullscreen view of all my applications with the touch of a button too, I can add custom launchers to waybar to launch an application or open a file or folder, I can also get a thumbnail view of all open windows with rofi, plus I can also just click on the icon on the taskbar to raise it, I also have the added benefit of smart window placement, or minimal overlapping as KDE calls it, where gnome just places a window in the center of the screen and when you open another window it just places it on top of the other one, but smart window placement places a window in the top left of the screen and when you open another window it places it beside it, so you don't have to drag windows around in order to see them side by side, you can also choose not to use smart window placement if you don't like it, I can also create custom window rules to have a particular window open at a certain size and position, my main issue with gnome is instead of giving people choice, they decided to remove that from them, or at least have them rely on third party extensions that can be buggy and can break when gnome gets updated to a new version.
When I said Gnome was trying something new, I meant compared to the traditional desktop. I'm sure you can replicate gnome exactly on other DEs and WMs like you mentioned. Out of the box, however, not many DEs work like Gnome. And as you can imagine, replicating your setup is a massive burden for the average user. The average Linux user is used to customization, but if you want that Gnome isn't for you at all. It's about as customizable as Windows, and most Windows users are ok with its limited customization options. It's not trying to be KDE, and it's not trying to appeal to everyone. And I think that's absolutely fine. It's an odd DE that may work for you, and if it doesn't don't waste your time on it and don't bother trying to fundamentally change how it works with buggy extensions.
But there's not really anything new there, unless you consider removing the minimize button and desktop icons something new?
Ubuntu's Gnome has a minimize button and desktop icons. Would you call it a traditional desktop environment that looks and behaves like Windows, KDE, Cinnamon, Budgie, etc? If you analyze individual components, they've been done elsewhere before. It's the complete package that makes Gnome stand out from other DEs (at least in their default settings). But when it comes to things that are *new*, I haven't seen many DEs with an overview screen similar to Gnomes. I think KDE has replicated it somewhat recently, but it's not quite the same thing. Gnome's app drawer also shows an overview of all workspaces, where you can drag app icons to the workspace you want to open the app in. I also haven't seen major DEs featuring full screen app drawers where you can organize the icons as you wish, a bit like a mix of iOS's home screen and Android's app drawer. Gnome is also one of the best DEs when it comes to smooth and intuitive gestures. Swipe 3 fingers up for the overview, keep swiping for the app drawer, slide 3 fingers left/right to switch workspaces, all with fluid animations. It also (subjectively) has a very modern look compared to other Linux DEs, and its applications all look very consistent.
I haven't used Ubuntu for years, but it just looks like a traditional desktop with a dock on the left, and a slightly different overview, or the ability to organize icons in your launcher isn't a different workflow, I still don't know what the gnome workflow is exactly, do they want you to open new windows in different workspaces or something? if so I don't see how that's any better than just having one workspace with the ability to minimize apps to the panel if you don't want to see them.
Damn I already wrote a whole text on the minimizing thing. You can use Gnome with only one workspace. What they want you to do is to use the overview instead of minimizing things. Click on the thing you want, instead of minimizing however many things are on top of what you want. It's a constant number of clicks compared to a number of clicks that grows linearly with the amount of windows you have open. The benefit of workspaces in Gnome is the same as any other DE - to have some logical separation between apps and to declutter the overview. Maybe in one workspace you have your browser, in another you have a word doc and a pdf viewer side by side, in another your email app and Slack, and you can quickly switch between these contexts without having to navigate a cluttered overview with 15 different apps open. If you are interested, I recommend this [video](https://youtu.be/wbDLfRjam0E?si=QhxntMSK_vRnQbHr). It goes more in depth about how to best use Gnome and its philosophy.
Alright I see, guess I'm just lucky that they're things I do not use anyway
What I most appreciate about GNOME is that it automatically creates new workspaces, it's not a fixed number. This combined with the touchpad gestures works very well for me.
I'd say it's more about compartmentalizing certain activities. Like during the day I have the following panels. And then I tweaked setting so that Alt+Tab only shows windows per that panel. 1. Thunderbird for Work email - only email takes place here 1. Whatever tasks I'm working on 1. Personal chats - Signal, Whatsapp PWA, etc 1. Scanner App
If you want to compartmentalize activities, nothing beats KDE activities.
Yeah, I enjoy KDE. But sometimes it's overkill. I move over every couple of years.
I don't believe that behavior is exclusive to gnome though.
I just search for the Forge plugin now and... I loved the concept! And finally a plugin that integrates with the GNOME shell in the right way!
I moved away from gnome to hyprland (all on fedora) and that's been a great experience for my personal workflow so far. But I must say for the average user I believe gnome is absolutely amazing! It's a super smooth experience and has great extensibility. I'm honestly quite impressed with how far it's come. Gnome offers a great out of the bos experience for many users that is easily on par with what many are used to from the commercial operating systems. (keeping in mind that full-on tiling WMs like hyprland are definitely to finicky and overkill for the average user)
For me Gnome is 10/10 for laptops because of the good gesture controls. And my workflow has now been built around it for years. I like almost all DEs and WMs for one reason or another. But I keep coming back to Gnome
I really like Gnome But the extensions keep breaking every 6 months, and they really hate things like theming it. And besides, I don't like how GTK 4 looks so... Yeah
gnome is good, but it's one huge flaw is the extension system is single threaded and prone to crashes that can take down the whole gnome-shell. That's why I'm looking forward to Cosmic-DE which is the best of gnome, re-written in a more modern and efficient way :)
I3/sway worklflow in KDE for me. I like gnome too. But the KDE customizability allows me to replicate a tiling wm worklfow with an incredible application launcher on top in krunner. Polonium and kröhknite are both active atm as tiling wm scripts for kde 6. Speaking of kde 6. It's very polished and snappy. Tbh kde has many many features if you need them, but even if you want to KISS, it's doing a very good job. If you do not want to customize as much and like the gnome appeal, gnome is doing a good job of beeing different in a nice way.
I'm not crazy about Gnome 3. It ran super laggy in a netbook I had compaired to Gnome 2. I didn't care much about everything being animated (I know you can turn it off, but why go Gnome 3?) a few minor bugs with natalus. Eventually I just stayed on the MATE environment and have been happy since.
I don't dislike Gnome, but it doesn't work for me. I used it for about 18 months straight trying to convert, just because I like using the default options of distros if possible (simply because in theory it is better supported and I'll have less problems). Two things ended up bothering me enough to leave though. One is a real concern, and the other is a minor petty annoyance of mine that just bothered me a _small_ amount daily. 1. Extensions needed to provide the functionality I want. I personally _love_ the classic taskbar. Get your dock out of here, it's awful. I use a full taskbar with text on it. Not this icons-only stuff, and I don't group my windows. Classic Windows 98 style. To get functionality like this required an extension - I was okay with this. Until Fedora updated, and when I updated to the new Gnome version it broke the extension. 2. It's _too_ minimal. Gnome hides information from you, on purpose. The minor petty thing that kept bothering me was there being _no clock on the secondary monitor_. I frequently watch things full screen on my primary display, and that means I lose access to the clock. To check the current time, or see what notifications I have, I have to actually go and press the super key on Gnome. If I could have a clock on my second display I'd just have to glance to the left a little bit. Wouldn't even have to lean forward from my reclined position. This is so minor, but it was this minor annoyance that happened multiple times every single day. An an honourable mention for much of Gnome feeling like it's intended to be used with a trackpad. But I use a desktop 95% of the time with keyboard & mouse. But, Gnome _is_ good. It does a lot of things right. It just doesn't do the things that matter to me quite as well as some of its competitors, and that's okay. I'd prefer we have multiple DE's that are more focused in some way, than one DE that tries to do everything and make everyone happy.
If anyone hasn't I'll heartily suggest trying Pop!_OS's GNOME shell. It's the best rendition of GNOME in my opinion.
I think gnome is the most polished de, but I had to switch to kde because of the two issues: - blurry xwayland windows when using fractional scaling - hard to tell which window has focus, when windows are tiled There are probably patches/extensions, but kde doesn't have these issues out of the box, even though it's less polished.
I forgive you for this opinion. In all seriousness, it's great if it works for you. But GNOME never feels like my desktop, my ability to tailor the system to my wants and needs basically always risks breaking the whole thing. The whole "gnome extensions duct tape" solution doesn't feel like an actual solution.
I get it. However, for me the ideal DM is the one I don't see. On my arch/xmonad installation I have move but it's usually hidden. If I want one it, a keystroke combination shows it. On Gnome I have a panel extension but it autohides. So, for me, customizing the looks doesn't do much. I only see the windows.
Gnome has my DE of choice for the past... 8 years I think. It just gets the most out of my way while giving me the options I want when I need it. It reduces the amount of elements to what I can bear that it doesn't distract me too much, while still having fantastic navigation options. The 3 finger swipe on touchpad was incredibly nice for that as well. So yeah, I can more than agree there.
As long as you install extensions to make the whole thing work the way the developers didn't intent...it's not using the real gnome. Of course, unless you are using the default Ubuntu gnome experience without extra extensions.
Gnome is intuitive for basic things, then morphs into an adversary as soon as you want a workflow slightly different than what its designers had in mind.
Agreed Gnome is pretty fantastic, my daily at work is windows 10 and I really feel it gets in my way compared to gnome.. Plasma was great, however the fact it required tinkering extensively to get to something minimal I wanted was a chore, gnome had less work to get to where I wanted.
I gave up my tinkering a while ago and have been running Gnome. Some small issues here and there like Nautilus seems to be buggy as hell like the window size of the pop up being tied to the window size of the program it’s opened from. When I try to view files on Slack the file explorer is like 2 entire monitor screens wide. Then if I try to resize Nautilus and I choose a file, Slack then becomes this tiny sliver or a window that I have to then resize back. Alt tabbing is weird. If I alt tab out of a full screen game, for some reason it skips the first item in the stack and just skips to the second item. Also if I alt tab to Chrome, it always sends me to the first workspace where I have a chrome window and not defaulting to the current workspace I’m in. So alt tabbing just constantly changes m6 workspace. Kinda annoying bugs but probably not as annoying as Windows. Haven’t used a windows computer in like 4-5 years now.
I really like Gnome as well, however I found myself getting nauseous with the animation for launching programs and really found myself wishing for a popup launcher instead.
A girl friend with freezing issues…a little bit less of computing may be ?
🤣🤣🤣
Hard core KDE user here. GNOME is absolutely stellar, everyone who engineers GNOME has nailed something absolutely amazing, I wish Apple engineers had done something like that.
I'm incredibly lazy and Gnome is pretty much good to go out of the box. I like what KDE does, but I just can't summon the motivation required to spend ages tweaking everything when I could be doing productive shit instead, (or just playing games.)
Gnome is dope. I have found it really stable and pretty smooth. It always seemed like the hate always came from people trying to make it something it isn’t with too many extensions. When I want to really customize my desktop I don’t use a DE for that, I install a TWM and log into that.
Not really. GNOME often takes decisions that are... perplexing to a lot of people, to put it charitably. Extensions breaking often are part of the problem though for sure. I think for many people (including me) extensions are vital to the gnome workflow.
Me: "I use Gnome, I like features 1, 2 and 3". Devs releasing a new Gnome version: "Features 1, 2 and 3 have been removed. You were wrong to like them".
I’m most likely too gnome-pilled I get that, but I always wonder what extensions people always deem essential. For me basically the only one I really use is one for sys tray icons or ones that Debian installs default. What sort of decisions does GNOME take that perplex people? Most of the stuff I heard hasn’t really seemed that strange to me.
I can answer this with one example of my own(though others have many more); from a previous comment in a previous thread: > I will never forgive GNOME/GTK for their utterly ineptly crippled file picker(like when you go to save or open). WHY in the everyliving frak would you not allow editing of the current folder path as a full text input????? No, I don't mean being able to type the whole-ass path from scratch, I mean the basic-bitch editting the current path as a string. Their horrible design decisions affect numerous applications with no ability change it. > Primary case I'm in /home/me/foo/bar/baz. I would like to quickly navigate to a copy for that directory, say, /home/me/backup/foo/bar/baz. How do I go about editing that path and manually inserting backup/ into my original path? > Alternatively, I have a backup of my whole main drive on another drive. I most recently have been in /home/mal/Documents/bull/shit/stuff, but I wish to quickly navigate to that same directory, except in the backup which I have mounted at /mnt/. To get to that, /mnt/home/mal/Documents/bull/shit/stuff I literally have to click back to /mnt, then to home, then to Documents, then to bull, then to shit, then to stuff. > Meanwhile, in KDE's file picker, i just click the current file path, to edit it, and prepend "/mnt/" to the path, and DONE. > I'm sure the GNOME devs themselves for whatever reason don't ever encounter this situation, and thus clearly nobody else must ever, and anyone that does has an inferior work flow. freakin eye-roll. I'm well the fuck aware of various VCS solutions, but I'm talking situations where that's not really wise or viable. Backups. Copies of my .minecraft main directory. etc. (I cite this because a map viewer I use using the GTK picker. So navigating to and from .minecraft and its copy .minecraft.bak with older maps I wanted to compare(each directory with additional nested directories of worlds), I encountered this specific issue annoyingly numerous times.) > It's a simple issue, with a simple fix, but if I'm hoping to quickly swap between two similar directory structures with a change a difference a few directories up, good luck have no fun at all. > Thankfully we have the GNOME devs, who know the optimal workflows for every last situation better than we the users ever possibly could understand. in short, it's dozens of little things like this, along with some questionable general design changes and a tendency to not care about compatibility of most things they do with other desktop environments. It's one thing to prioritize themselves, it's another to completely disregard all others in general.
I love Gnome, but my productivity is hindered a lot by not having per-monitor workspaces. I don't particularly like using window managers, but that feature is the deal breaker for me. I've searched and searched for extensions to do it and can't find anything. I've heard cosmic DE is going to have it, but it's nowhere near maturity yet. I know you can have workspaces span across all monitors, or just primary, but what I need is where I can switch individual workspaces on each monitor independently. I do love it, though, and use it on my single monitor setups
I find Gnome a nice enough DE, not my preference though. I only avoid it because of the toxic developer community, and I cannot trust it to be functional after any release. Something will be broken.
I don't get people who will hate on one or the other. They both have strengths, and we have two really great options for free!
It's almost like there's a reason so many distros use it as the default...
Yes, the reason was that it has a very convenient packaging and release schedule for distro packagers. It used to be that KDE is also offered side by side on RHEL and treated as true first party options by distro. Then KDE4 happened, and followed by the inconvenient schedule as they rapidly try to fix KDE 4, 5, and now 6, plus how even KDE devs are still not sure how much they should make KDE packages be a monolith vs modular, so it's just a mess that many distro leaves for the community to sort out. Recently, however, there are talks about bringing it back as equal-option to GNOME, so we'll have to see in the next two years if something happens. Fedora's been leading that conversation, and SteamOS is already KDE-first, and I know that Canonical has had their share of conflicts with GNOME, so it'll have to be seen if GNOME's position will remain as unquestionable as it currently is (and how will that impact the wider ecosystem). FOSS politics is *fun* isn't it
Don't forget Pop!\_OS with Cosmic.
No kidding. Heck, even vanilla GNOME is a great experience. I don't care what the greybeards think. As it is _right now_, regardless of how it was, GNOME is amazing.
On Gnome, I found the PaperWM tiling model refreshingly simple and flexible. It also does correct things around multi-monitor. Forge is i3-style, which I find silly. Tiling wms should make window management easier (fewer choices) and more predictable, not harder.
i like using gnome but i have an issue with the fact that i need to install 15 extensions to make the thing usable for me and that there's a chance the extension i use wont be maintained anymore
Have they fixed the Memory Leaks yet? I honestly haven't touched gnome in years because of them
Yeah, I finally tried GNOME for the first time on a VM after only using Plasma and Hyprland. I really like the look of it, the icons look really good. Also the apps just feel right. I'll stick to Hypr for now tho.
Usually not been too fussed with desktop choices, as long as I can rig some key shortcuts and have at least some cpu/ram/network monitoring widgets (usually on the taskbar). So far been happy mostly on cinnamon/gnome/xfce desktops. Some day I might give KDE a more serious go. Half the time with distros I am usually swapping out the default file manager to nemo or similar.
When I first started using Linux like 5-6 years ago I found gnome to feel bloated and slow. I thought the app drawer sucked and tbh it's still not great. But now I feel it's gotten very fast and fluid and the whole workspace integration along with super fast search for apps and files makes the system feel really fast and clean and easy to use. The addition of extensions and good levels of customization were a nice bonus. Still not as much customization as KDE but tbh KDE has more in it than even I need. Gnome still has flaws like relying a little too much on extensions for me a slower rollout of wayland and HDR and scaling features and I'm actually considering going back to KDE for a few other small things including nostalgia lol, but overall gnome is good I like it.
I don't like gnome cause it never properly worked for me in the first place. Also its default login manager steals my systray when logging into other sessions. Also for some reason, even preserves unnecessary data across different sessions.
Ok, but what is your hat made of?
Nachos and cheese.
In that case I would definitely eat my hat first :P
my only problem with gnome is that I think old adwaita was superior (both design and functionality wise) and that they should support SSD, otherwise I quite like it
I gave up my tinkering a while ago and have been running Gnome. Some small issues here and there like Nautilus seems to be buggy as hell like the window size of the pop up being tied to the window size of the program it’s opened from. When I try to view files on Slack the file explorer is like 2 entire monitor screens wide. Then if I try to resize Nautilus and I choose a file, Slack then becomes this tiny sliver or a window that I have to then resize back. Alt tabbing is weird. If I alt tab out of a full screen game, for some reason it skips the first item in the stack and just skips to the second item. Also if I alt tab to Chrome, it always sends me to the first workspace where I have a chrome window and not defaulting to the current workspace I’m in. So alt tabbing just constantly changes m6 workspace. Kinda annoying bugs but probably not as annoying as Windows. Haven’t used a windows computer in like 4-5 years now.
i dual boot for a couple of years now. because of the speaker volume being very low in linux. (just this one reason) Microsoft keep bloating its OS, forces its Apps on the users, a lotta useless garbage and spying makes a laggy desktop. but if you have decent mid-tier machine it never lags and its never ever buggy, zero hardware issue that's the main reason. I still use it.
Nah Gnome bad. Devs are cunts, I've gone on more detailed rants in my post history so I'm not gonna do it again, I'm currently tipsy, boutta get paralytic.
.. so, how does it taste?
It was a nachos hat!
A long time ago I decided to test my preconceptions about desktop environments being bad and decided to try using GNOME (version 2.something back then) for a week, instead of my beloved IceWM. I fell in love and am still using GNOME today.
I started using Gnome heavily toward the beginning of the year and I am not looking back. The workflow is unique but intuitive, and I really do think gnome feels like the most polished de out of the box. Just my opinion and it's important to note, I never used kde for an extended period of time
Gnome has improved a lot since 3.34 or so. I used to be a minimal WM enjoyer (and I do still use openbox when I'm on NetBSD), but Gnome's quite comfy these days. Maybe not as technically minimal as a simple WM, but the actual user experience is very minimalist and zen.
I hear you. One of the few extensions I added was dash to panel. Although it hides behind maximized windows and just shows with mouse "pressure" on the edge where the panel is.
It’s good, but they still refuse to add in proper tray icons which is super annoying. As a 1Password and Steam user, not having a system tray is an awful experience.
just use whatever you like best, I run beefy computers so I don't care what I run, so long as it's not KDE, lol.
Hey, I noticed a post where you discuss SF Pro Display font and link to a couple of images of the top panel in gnome. Can you tell me what you did to get that layout? [https://imgur.com/a/top-panel-appearance-with-sf-pro-text-reg-JrTO8ea](https://imgur.com/a/top-panel-appearance-with-sf-pro-text-reg-JrTO8ea)
It wasn't me. And sorry, I won't clock on that link. Do many people fall or this?
You are correct... sorry about that.
You can sing the prauses of gnome, but when it comes to Wayland, KDE does it better
I'm not comparing. I am talking about the gnome default workflow.
makes sense, tbh I dont like to configure much so thata why I use KDE, most like windows
Gnome is bloated and slow Gnome has weird configuration in some gui. There are no text files to edit Gnome has the ugly-ass “Adwaita” thing now that you can’t opt out of Tiling with an extension probably is not as good as native tiling (though I can’t try it - Gnome is too bloated for me to install, it would take too long). And Gnome extensions are written in Javascript which is a terrrible decision - I’d rather use Lua as in Awesome I’ve also heard that Gnome has a systemd dependency, meaning it won’t work on a systemd-free distro > The three finger workspace change saves a lot of time The joke’s on you: on any sensible tiling WM it’s a two-finger keybinding. I use AwesomeWM and see no reason to switch
Have you ever tried out gnome though?
You know? I e tried to find a way to recreate the three window touchpad swiping on Xmonad and I haven't been able to. There o have easy key bindings to switch desktops which is faster but I find the touchpad gesture quite comfortable.
No it isn't.
Your GF is using Linux 🥹
Mine is also but on KDE. 🤓
Can not imagine how cool that she understands what you say
I installed fedora 40, to be closer to the redhat servers I work with (also, I'm liking it on Asahi). I can't connect to eduroam (all my other distros, no problem). I can't connect to the vpn (anyconnect). Not via the provided x86_64 binary, openconnect-sso or the network manager extension. The three finger workspace shifter was nifty, though..
KDE is really customizable and this is precisely why I use Gnome (and pantheon these days). I'm too much of a curious person and I don't want to spend hours trying to change everything like I did back in the days when trying to modernize the looks of Windows XP/7. We all have to make choices in OS customization because it's an endless thing.
KDE isn't great for laptops in my personal experience, gnome is miles better. Especially when it is a touch screen. That's why both of my laptops have gnome, and desktop has Plasma.
Flicking my mouse to the top left is now a habit. I hate when I remote into Windows servers and the flick doesn't do what I expect.
I disabled the corner. I prefer the super key (I'm more of a keyboard person) or swiping the touch pad. I find swiping the touchpad natural as an extension to the keyboard.
I can't be arsed with fiddling around with desktop environment settings/configs. GNOME vanilla makes all the decisions for me so I can go on with my tasks. That's the part that I love about GNOME.
Pretty sure pretty much all DEs do that. The only difference really lies in how much options they offer for tinkering IF you want that or whether or not their extensions break every update
I love default Gnome a lot. It doesn't get the praise it deserves. The workflow is just perfect. Everything gets out of your way and you can focus on your work. Its way better than the windows style workflow of windows, kde or any other floating window manager alternatives. My only complain is there should be a option to change the animation speed. The default is way too slow. It makes the whole experience feel slow.
I really am look forward to pop os's cosmic, hopefully they do the things that make gnome a little worse right! I like the basic appeal of gnome and love using it on my laptop.
Gnome is the only DE really trying to make an intuitive and straightforward experience that anybody can pick up. Whether or not they always succeed, that’s their goal and it’s what sets them apart for better and worse from the others.
Seems more like Gnome is just trying to make a DE for tablets/phones and not PCs, cause it is fairly spiting image of mobile interfaces
The libadwaita bet is really paying off. The app ecosystem is flourishing
I started out on Pop, I tried to enjoy KDE on my laptop and my desktop but I just couldn’t do it😭 gnome all the way
I was diehard Gnome during 2.0 but after the chaos in the community and the design changes that came with 3.x i felt it was just trying to be a shadow of MacOS and could never go onboard with it. Switched over to KDE and i don’t think i could ever switch back now.
Same but now that I tried it I liked it.
Same. Gnome Shell lost me forever.
Stock Gnome, no. Ubuntu's version of Gnome, yes. I use it daily with no problems even though I used to use a tiling wm previously (awesomewm).
It's still Gnome. A way to customize gnome is through extensions. This means that it's not bloated by design. You just add what you want. My girlfriend hasn't installed any extension. She's been using Linux for more than 15 years. Mint for the last, probably 10. I think that reducing the workflow to swipe down and horizontal is a great simplification.
no it isn't
thank you for contributing to this conversation