In my experience, KDE Plasma is surprisingly actually better than Gnome for tablet use. You would think that Gnome's more minimal and chunky UI would make it a better fit, but Plasma just has a lot more little usability QOL features.
Did something change on the keyboard front? I love KDE but I can only use it comfortably on my Steam Deck with a horrible combination of Steam's keyboard, Onboard and Maliit and all of them suck in their own little ways.
GNOME is more keyboard-focused "in the way the devs thought it's good". If users want to change the way, they gonna use tweaks, dconf editor or gsettings and navigate a jungle of key-value pairs like Windows Registry
How is KDE less keyboard-focused? I spent like ten minutes setting up kwin shortcuts and now have the same level of keyboard-only interaction as with any WM.
Both KDE and Gnome have a comparable set of default keyboard shortcuts.
The difference is if you are in KDE, you have easier ability to adjust to what you want with a lot more available shortcut actions, while in Gnome you generally are expected to live with the choices of the devs.
iOS users think the same way born from ignorance. But hey, if you don't mind inefficient workflows and an extreme lack of customization to fix that, then GNOME works.
I don't find it very inefficient. There's also plenty of customization. This is a pretty specious comparison; on iOS you literally pay money a la carte for minor customization options. On GNOME, you might have to turn to less-supported third party extensions, or God forbid do some very minor config file or command line work. Far less than you'd need to do to do something similar in a tiling wm, of course... And most things that end users who just want to actually use their computer might care about are supported already. The system tray is the single feature I think is glaringly missing from GNOME currently, hopefully they'll get that officially supported soon.
Kind of weird to get so bent out of shape about some people choosing to use a certain interface.
Lmao, you even admit hoe dumb it is with the system tray. And you're wrong, I can have XFCE exactly hoe I want it in a matter of 15 minutes, using only the settings apps, and it will absolutely dog walk the workflows of GNOME.
GNOME doesn't have nearly enough keyboard shortcuts for me as a keyboard focused user. IMHO, keyboard use is all about customizability, which GNOME is not.
Slightly off-topic, but this annoyed me during the Win 8.1/10 start screen era as well. Just because an interface is touch-friendlier doesn't mean it can't also be an improvement for keyboard/mouse users as well.
Then they ditched all that and made it a worse experience for everyone in Win 11, so un turn I ditched their mess and fully switched over.
Classic shell has been installed on all of my windows machines as part of my "make windows usable" loadout since i was basically forced to upgrade* from w7 to w10
Lmao that community is hilarious - it's all the most blatantly biased low-brow cheap shots about Linux I've ever seen and is just being spammed by 1-2 haters all the time 🤣
Gnome does some questionable things, and some are just personal preference, but there is at least one thing that they do that makes zero sense regardless of how you use your system...
The AppIndicator extension SHOULD be default. There is no reason for it to be an extension other than pure stubbornness. There are applications that literally require it in order to function at all.
That you need an extension to disable the overview at startup still boggles my mind and the arrogance of the developers in the thread that started it didn't lessen my antipathy for Gnome at all.
It provides easy access to search. I understand now though why you wouldn't want it to open automatically (if you have startup programs you want to see instead).
In my case because I have my PC connected to the TV and Steam starting automatically in big screen mode. But according to the devs I'm doing it wrong and should get used to it because it's the better experience when I can go and grab my keyboard to start typing the name of the program I want to start.
I'll be honest, I could probably use Gnome if I had to, with a few addons. But when I try it, the second I get to that dialog and it does that, I just shut it down and install something else. To me, it just epitomizes the contempt the developers have for the users, that it continues to exist after this long.
There's a new Wayland protocol that probably will land in the next gnome release. The new protocol is supported by KDE and other desktops as well.
The reason that it was removed is because it is extremely hacky and bad. There have been talks within the project to just reads support since the extension got so many downloads but the new API is better anyway
I won't disagree with you there. They should've had a replacement before deprecating it. In there defense there was a alternative being developed but it ended up stalling over disagreements between KDE and gnome. The whole thing is a dumpster fire honestly. I'm glad they are cleaning it up. KDE and Gnome want the same thing for the most part they just kept getting into pointless bickering.
"I understand that some compositors have no interest in allowing clients to show arbitrary content in tray areas. GNOME, for example, doesn't even have a tray area and it is my understanding that they believe that even the current SNI protocols allow clients too much freedom. Such compositors should not implement this protocol."
--the page you're referencing, by the creator of the protocol
Gnome also believes that a window must have control over its own titlebar to draw it as it sees fit while simultaneously declaring it must not have control over a tray icon.
Also funny that Gnome seems to have objected to KDE proposal and wrote their own even though they seem to say point blank that while they are dictating how all the other DEs will do it, they themselves will be ignoring it. Why get in the business of a protocol you don't even want to implement in the first place...
Depends on your login flow. There is a session manager which normally boots up and let's you choose. But you can also configure it to auto login and send you to the Lockscreen of your window manager.
You can also mix login manager, window manager with desktop background managers, wallet managers etc..., in practice you can build your own desktop experience
I know the answer is "just build it" but man I want to be able to have adm<username login under something like nemo and a terminal window only. But then have username login under full Mint Cinnamon. Would be quite dope. Just don't feel like making it happen at the moment. I'll have to reconfigure permissions to revoke from my standard user.
Edit: oops you can comment out text in Lemmy?
Editedit: I did it. Too me 15 minutes -.-
Which then is no longer an issue with GNOME but rather RHEL. But again, it's not like we can't figure out a way to install whatever in Hanna Montana's dreams is allowed. 🤙
Mainly because gnome is harder to ignore than a lot of other opinionated DEs.
It's been the default target for fedora and red hat, and like other choices rh makes, it propagates throughout the broader ecosystem.
Even if you ignore them, they dictate how Linux desktops are broadly allowed to work by largely asserting authority over FreeDesktop and by extension Wayland.
One of these is that they absolutely hate the concept of server side decorations, as a result even as they begrudgingly allowed it as a Wayland protocol, they insisted that it must not be mandatory and they are allowed to ignore it. This means applications that do not care about their decorations otherwise now must care about their decorations. As a user, the consequence is that any GTK application you might use is likely to just pop out as a gnome looking window among a bunch of otherwise consistent windows.
GNOME looks like it is touch friendly, but try to run it on a tablet and it's really fucking not. I had to DL a bunch of tweaks tools to make it useable at all and now the tablet breaks whenever there's a Gnome update that the tweaks weren't designed for.
I run Gnome on Debian on a tablet, and I find it wonderful.
Of course, my only points of comparison, so far, are iOS, Android and Windows tablets. Gnome is (per my own arbitrary last use of each) quite a bit nicer than any of those, at least.
Honestly I'd say the worst part is the osk. They need to treat it a bit more like phosh does. It's sooooo far behind when compared to modern device osks. Sure there's some extensions to help it out, but they don't go far enough to make it decent on a tablet. And it feels incredibly clunky to use with gdm when signing in, where no extension can help it..
Don't even try to say GNOME is a touch screen design. I've used it with a touchscreen, it's just bad design. What bothers me the most is that is close to being good if not for a couple of stupid decisions like having no system tray.
The system tray thing irks me to no end. Some apps still use one to control things and you have to use hacky plugins to get them to show. Other than that there's a lot I do like about gnome. Plasma suits my needs more though. So much more you can do with it.
Yep. I don't even want a proper system tray, just gimme a list with the apps that are still running with their windows closed. They can't even do that.
I know. It also exists for regular software but, as is tradition with GNOME, it uses its own stupid protocol instead of what everyone else uses so it doesn't work for 80% of the software I use.
Ive changed my entire work flow because of this. On my laptop I use paperWM for infinite horizontal scrolling/tiling and "vertical" workspaces for organizing windows.
Instead of minimizing windows, I just switch workspaces. Windows that need to be next to each other are on the same workspace, anything else is treated like a full screen app.
It's a little weird, but for productivity with a TouchPad it's been an absolute game changer. Ican have a workspace dedicated to programming, obe thats just documents, one for each of my courses, one thats discord and music players, etc.
Same workflow here but on KDE. I even have an extension that sends any maximized screen to its own desktop and deletes the desktop when it's closed or no longer maximized.
I use gnome too and I like it but that's just not true. IME support (input of east Asian languages like Japanese) kind of sucks, especially as they only do ibus and not fcitx5.
Oh, I didn't know about that. I luckily (for the purpose of using gnome and computers in general) only speak languages using the modern latin alphabet (and letters derived from it).
I used arch btw with latest gnome on amd c60 brazos apu laptop and laptop with i7 4700mq and gtx850m and laptop with Ryzen 5700u apu, so far gestures only worked on ryzen apu, on any other laptop without Ryzen features don't work and no amount of tinkering makes it work
You activated my trap card! My sickness was but a simple ruse to lure you into complacency! Your attack was weak, unfocused! I jump up, standing on my bed, your face is now easy prey for my unnaturally sharp knees. The structural rigidity of your nose is now forfeit!
Yeah, it's almost usable but I suspect most people don't wanna deal with broken extensions every new release. Last time my extensions broke, all I had to do to fix them was changing the target version in the manifest. Clearly, there weren't enough changes to the DE to warrant breaking them and they were just broken on purpose.
Yeah, it usually takes a week for the official versions of the extensions I use to work again after a gnome version update. It's easily worked around, usually, but that hard break every update sucks.
I just dislike the way KDE structures it's menus more, and while I suspect that I could tweak KDE to be something I like using, I also suspect that that would be much more annoying to fix for the next mayor Update.
I sometimes think about swapping over to i3, but I haven't yet had the leisure to give it a try.
Do you mean the application menu? Not trying to evangelize here, it's just that I almost never see it because Krunner is so integrated with everything in KDE that it feels like the intended way to launch stuff so I find it weird that the application menu bothers you.
If you mean the menus on the applications themselves, fair enough, I guess. I also don't understand why they're still just a regular app menu (File, Edit, etc...) but crammed into a single button.
Oh, yeah, that also annoyed me. I actually meant the settings menu, though. I have set up KDE for friends/family a few times, and depending on screen size and scaling, even in conditions that shouldn't be edge cases, there where sometimes scrollbars in both directions.
I also just, kinda don't like the vibe, I guess? That's extremely subjective, I know, just something I noticed every time I worked with KDE.
Last time I've used minimize and maximize buttons was 20 years ago. And yet I think accessibility is more important than whatever the fuck designers that create clean dumb UIs think is important.
Tbf, you can maximize by double-clicking the titlebar or dragging the window to the top so the button is kind of redundant. You can also (un)minimize by clicking on the taskbar so the minimize button would too be kind of redundant if GNOME hadn't gotten rid of the fucking task bar.
lol somebody woke up on the wrong side of bed. I'm just telling you the reasoning as to why it's done because it's a fun fact. I don't care what you use. Chill.
Its pretty standard thing to say to someone who thinks projects their emotional state onto someone else. Nothing about my statement suggested I 'woke up on the wrong side of the bed' It does however suggest you can't take a rebuff and act childish about it.
Except for this one Debian machine I have to maintain. They will still disappear on ever restart. They will still be turned on in tweaks and the only way to get them to appear is to switch them from right to left. Luckily I don't have to use it much.
I get distracted/overwhelmed fairly easily, so GNOME is a godsend. minimalistic top bar + on demand workspaces to throw my extra windows into = I can actually get stuff done.
Makes me wonder, how much of the hate on GNOME is because it reminds people about Win8.
I never used Win8 but used to administer some 2012 and 2012R2 servers. On the former the only issue caused by the start screen was the fact that there was no button to open it. This was very annoying when RDPing to the servers, but the issue wouldn't matter on desktop since you have super key for it.
Besides that, it was everything else in that OS that made me hate it
most of the things in gnome extensions should be built in and available from the settings. that being said there's nothing stopping me from just using something else, hence why I use kde.
GNOME has clear philosophy and they work for themselves, not for you so they decide what features they care to invest time and what features they don’t care about.
Having a standardised method for plugins is in my opinion good enough, nobody forces you to use extensions. And if you don’t want extensions to break, then wait till the extensions are ready prior updating GNOME.
You can't know that and I can't imagine it would be true. If the plugins many folks find essential were incorporated into GNOME itself then they'd be updated where necessary as a matter of course in developing a new release.
GNOME has clear philosophy and they work for themselves, not for you so they decide what features they care to invest time and what features they don’t care about.
You're not wrong! This is an arrogant and common take produced in poor taste though. A holdover from the elitism that continues to plague so many projects. Design philosophy leads UX decision making and the proper first goal for any good and functional design is user accessibility. This is not limited to accomodations we deem worthy of our attention.
Good artists set ego aside to better serve their art. Engineers must set pet peeves aside to better serve their projects. If what they find irksome gets in the way of their ability to build functionally better bridges, homes, and software then it isn't reality which has failed to live up to the Engineer's standards. This is where GNOME, and many other projects, fall short. Defenders standing stalwart on the technical correctness of a volunteer's lack of obligation to those whose needs they ostensibly labor for does not induce rightness. It exposes the masturbatory nature of the facade.
Engineers have every right to bake in options catering to their pet peeves (even making them the defaults). That's not the issue. When those opinions disallow addressing the accessibility needs of those who like and use what they've built there is no justification other than naked pride. This is foolish.
Having a standardised method for plugins is in my opinion good enough, nobody forces you to use extensions. And if you don’t want extensions to break, then wait till the extensions are ready prior updating GNOME.
I agree! Having a standardized method for plugins is good, however; the argument which follows misses the point. GNOME lucked into a good pole position as one of the default GNU/Linux DEs and has enjoyed the benefit of that exposure. Continuing to ignore obvious failures in method elsewhere while enshrining chosen paradigms of tool use as sacrosanct alienates users for whom those paradigms are neither resonant nor useful.
No one will force Engineers to use accessibility features they don't need. Not needing them doesn't justify refusing the build them. Not building them as able is an abdication of social responsibility. If an engineer does not believe they have any social responsibility then they shouldn't participate in projects whose published design philosophy includes language such as:
Their walk isn't matching their talk in a few areas and it is right and good to call them to task for it.
Post statement:
This is coming from someone who drives Linux daily, mostly from the console, and prefers GNOME to KDE. All of the above is meant without vitriol or ire and sent in the spirit of progress and solidarity.
extensions (in my testing, typically in a VM of fedora or openSUSE) are a pain in the ass to use. it's also difficult to find the one that I'm looking for because there's generally several with the same name. something like a system tray (iirc the extension is "app indicators") or having the dock always visible on the desktop (idk what the extension is called) are features that most people who don't already use gnome rely on to some degree. these things are core functionality of most desktops precisely because most people use and like these features, and adding a few of the most popular features won't add enough extra data to really be bloat.
quick sidenote, while typing this I realized the way I have been phrasing things may sound a little aggressive. it's not meant to, this is meant to be more of a breakdown of why I think what I do about gnome as a desktop. I'm not sure how to rephrase this to be less aggressive, so I'm leaving this bit right where I noticed it instead.
I personally am very big on having all the customization I can get (kde user, obviously) but I actually did almost stick with gnome once. I tried vanilla is because orchid has just come out and while I was messing with it I found out that it had the dock extension available by default (was new to Linux at the time and didn't know how to actually use extensions yet) and with that dock extension I didn't mind gnome as much. the thing with gnome is that it has a lot of good ideas but it ruins a lot of them by only half-implementing what everyone else is already doing. most people would probably find it a lot more usable if it just had features that have been standard since literally the beginning of GUIs, and used to be standard in gnome.
Im not si much a customisation guy, but ended up with KDE and global apple theme, after all 🤭
But I see what GNOME is doing and support them, I think the Linux community as a whole profits from the work they do.
I agree with your opinion that, right now, it is very time consuming finding the right extensions that one need, but I think the problem is more the extension store having bad UI than extensions being bad as whole.
And what I meant is not that distributions are doing a great job right now, choosing what extensions to preinstall, more so that they are able to and that it would be a nice feature of a distro having some essential GNOME extensions preinstalled, even if default disabled.
Gnome is not really touch-centric, it's more keyboard-crentric. Sure, the activity overview is great for touch. It's even greater for the keyboard though. And I don't like using the mouse a lot anyway
There's a gnome for mobile branch that has what you'd expect from a good touch experience. Pretty sure the plan is to bring some of that work over to the main desktop branch at some point.
But plugins break every update and gnome tweaks doesn't let you change gnomes gtk theme anymore and from what I heard they added it in Gnome 3 bcs there was alot of drama
Extensions require time to be updated to support the newest gnome version. It is only any issue if you update right after the newest gnome release. It is better to stay on something stable anyway since you probably will find bugs in the latest and greatest.
As far a gnome tweaks is concerned it is still actively maintained and is needed for those who want to do more tweaking. It is important to note modern gnome is all libadwaita based which means it doesn't use GTK themes. You can still set the theme for legacy apps but for libadwaita you need to set the colors you are looking for. The old style GTK is pretty much retired in gnome because it caused lots of inconsistent and non inclusive UI elements. Libadwaita makes everything the same and looks more modern than basically everything out there. (My opinion)
YEAH true I can see plugins being used on something like Debian.
Oh that's why gnome tweaks got read of gtk theming I saw a forum post saying gnome devs don't want customization especially they have this page: https://stopthemingmy.app/
I don't want customization. The biggest users of gnome is probably enterprise Linux. In the enterprise or business space you want reliability and predictably.
Both gnome and xfce4 has kiosk modes and settings which allows an admin to lock the system down. Xfce4 tends to be a little more favored since it is easier to make it look like Windows.
Of course it depends on the deployment and company. Almost everyone is going to be on Windows since it is the easiest to manage from a desktop perspective. Like it or not group policy is pretty hard to compete with. I do think Wayland and XDG desktop portals will definitely help make Linux a more appealing option but at the end of the day business just want something standard and supported.
MacOS use to be the best. Pretty sure Gnome is based on it, but macOS keeps adding security options that makes things more complicated. Every single plugin is now blocked by default, lots of drivers need you to modify security options in safe mode to be installed, it's a pain. It use to be great but these day, Gnome is better IMO.
Sure, but then you're comparing OS with window managers. As far as windows management goes, I honestly prefer the way Mac does it. It actually kinda reminds me to i3wm but friendlier. I even configured Plasma to work somewhat like it. GNOME honestly isn't bad, it just has a couple of deal breakers I'm not willing to deal with and the devs are not willing to fix.
I mean, there's some decent design principles behind it. For one, it just takes up space only once rather than for each window individually.
But much more importantly, it makes use of an implication of Fitts's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law#Implications_for_UI_design
TL;DR: Because you can slam your mouse cursor against the top of the screen, you can't miss the menu vertically. It's like an infinitely tall button. This makes it fast for users to move their cursor there.
Having said that, this macOS design is from a time when the mouse and navigation menus were the primary user interaction method, which they're not anymore. So, yeah, that's why it was designed like that, but I doubt they'd expend this much effort to design it like that again.
I work on macOS 90% of the time. It's super well design, but it gets worse with each release. The security options are way too intrusive. Gnome is much more intuitive these days.
I was about to agree on the macOS part, but Gnome is really terrible in terms of UX. They are good at eye candy and unfortunately don't seem to know the difference between a pretty and a good UI.
You know how you start hallucinating in a sensory deprivation situation? I feel a lot of UX people just aren't talking to users directly and thus we get whatever they hallucinate is a good design, disconnected from any actual user needs. Any user feedback only comes after they've made their mind up and is seen as the users being wrong, as the alternative is harder to deal with.
It's free so I can't really complain, but I can use KDE instead.
They need to stop messing with things that work. Feature creep is how Windows XP turned into the dumpster fire it is today. Does the interface have a working file explorer? Does it support add-ons? Does it have a file search? You're done.
Sure you can, because those are two different things. Feature creep applies to functionality that is there straight out the box. Add-ons are things that are built ontop of the out the box solution.
To put it in hardware, if you buy a PC then a PC is what you get out the box. If every PC had to come with a dedicated graphics card that would be a PC feature creep, because every PC doesn't need a dedicated graphics card. However, that doesn't mean you want mobo manufacturers to remove the PCIe slot, because you might want to add on (pun intended) a graphic card.
Just because I think something shouldn't be in the baseline for everyone doesn't mean I also don't want to those things to be available for the people who do want those things in their system
Not at all. OS should just be core functionality, all bells and whistles should be add-ons so they can be added, replaced, or done without if not needed.
That really depends on where you draw the line on what is "core functionality". I'd consider a system tray to be core functionality, you apparently don't.
Friendly reminder: before people liked XP, people hated XP. Much of the criticism that applied to Vista at launch also applied to XP. Guess which one is looked back at more fondly.
And I actually thought Vista was good. Leagues better than XP even. It served me well for 3 years. Now I don't even use Windows anymore.
I did that for a while, but ultimately got too frustrated due to a few things:
Having to explore extensions in the first place for fairly basic functionally that I would have expected gnome to naturally implement
Every update would break extensions, and I'd have to wait for the extension author to update it, and about a fourth of the time the extension was abandoned and I would just have to go without or search for a similar.
At their best I always felt a lot of the extensions were having to settle for a lesser experience due to limitations of the extension mechanism.
Ultimately, I found that experience I was trying to get to that gnome never would normally support and would evaporate on updates and never be quite right anyway was just a natural featureset of Plasma. So I just do that and haven't had to sweat updates nearly as much as when I kept trying to make a go of it with gnome shell. I kept giving it a shot because of my gnome 2 experience (admittedly augmented by compiz), but gnome 3/mutter have not been a good fit for me.
I ended up switching to Gnome because KDE would always feel a bit jank to me. Something about it always feels slightly off, animations not working properly or being choppy like my desktop had an unstable framerate. Might just be it fighting with Nvidia, but I don't have several hundred bucks lying around to upgrade my card and switch to AMD...
Kind of odd seeing the massive hate boner the community seems so have for Gnome, at least we have options for desktop environments at all.
They act like they know best, and rarely listen to user feedback.
They act like Apple, and that is very bad.
Not only that, but they also act like they are the default and only desktop on Linux, and rarely if ever cooperate with other desktop groups to make things work smoothly.
They are dragged kicking and screaming into following standards, and were the biggest source of NACKs (effectively a "veto") on the Wayland protocol and a huge reason why Wayland still isn't complete after over a decade of design.
The gnome desktop is pretty, but it is not functional. You can make it functional by installing gobs of extensions, but those extensions don't follow a cohesive workflow concept, and often break with updates. It's like trying to mod Skyrim or Minecraft.
To contrast that, KDE:
Explicitly listens to its users and has scheduled times for specifically taking in user feedback (within the scope of broad goals)
Actively works to be interoperable with other environments
Follows standards and pushes them forward
Has all the functionality out of the box, and can be made pretty with extensions/assets (the inverse of Gnome).
Functionality mostly doesnt break on updates unless it's major (like switching to Wayland as the primary development target).
I don't say much about it because it's stupid to argue, but I've used a LOT of different desktop interfaces over the past 45+ years (yeah, really!), and GNOME...well, GNOME sucks. When Gnome3 was first released we all had high hopes for it improving on Gnome2 (which for those of us on Unix systems was a huge improvement over CDE), and instead it was buggy, clunky, awkward, and an enormous resource hog. Oh yeah, and it was massively unconfigurable. AND it continued to not improve for many many years, until most people I know switched to KDE or one of the other environments (MATE, Cinnamon, and xfce were very popular).
Gnome 4x added a touchscreen paradigm, whether you had a touchscreen or not, and made the experience worse in the process.
If you like it, great! Use it and love it all you want! I'll play with it once every year or so just to see if someone has finally designed something that doesn't suck so badly, but for a functional desktop, no thanks.
I think the fact that most of the 'fringe' desktops are well-known in the community because of people trying to escape GNOME is pretty telling.
If you used Gnome back in the day you know there was a lot of that configurability built in. Then one day the developer decided to start taking it away. Slowly but surely all the ability to configure Gnome was removed. If you experienced this arc like I did you were left scratching your head.
Yes KDE was always more configurable, but removing what configurability Gnome did have made it less useful. For power users this is a big deal. It is like a company taking away all your features and thinking you are going to like it.
I think the gnome haters are just the loudest. I've had all of the same issues with KDE and gnome has just always worked for me. Sure it's not as customizable, but it gets the job done without annoying issues.
Old gnome is nostalgic to me, because my first venture into Linux was Fedora Core 4. I was still using Win98 at the time, and gnome 2.10 felt so modern in comparison, with rounded corners and soft gradients.
Coming back to Linux after having not touched it for a very, very long time I tried gnome again and I just do not like it at all. It's weird looking. Maybe too modern for me, i don't know.
I'll check that out, thanks! It does look nice. I have two PCs with Mint with Cinnamon, I'm pretty happy with. I have one more PC to switch over to Linux, I'll probably try MATE on that.
When i switched from Windows to Linux, i wanted actual changes, not just a slightly different look
Unrelated question: does anyone know how to show the time in fullscreen or merge the bar with window close button with the top bar with the screen so there arent 2 different bars in GNOME?
I used Gnome Shell 3 for 4 years before giving up on it and going to KDE.
The huge differentiator is that KDE may look like windows OOTB on most distros, but if you want you can easily make it look like Gnome, Mac, Unity.. whatever. The panels and menus are infinitely configurable.
And that is why this meme is dead on the money. I've come to hate dev teams that have "visions" that they cram down users throats regardless of the experience. And the irony is that Gnome 2 used to be much more configurable than older KDE versions.
The huge differentiator is that KDE may look like windows OOTB on most distros, but if you want you can easily make it look like Gnome, Mac, Unity… whatever. The panels and menus are infinitely configurable.
Is there a way to configure the look of all the apps running on kde? Because one of the main things that keeps my away from KDE is how ugly all the k* apps look out of the box.
KDEs vision is letting users have the experience they want. You can have a vision without limiting configurability and cramming bad UX down the pipe to your users.
I agree. The only time a strong vision is a problem is if there are no options. But now, the people who don't want gnome can easily just use something else. I want the gnome devs to do their thing, and as long as I enjoy using gnome I will use it.
Not only that but gnome has a great extension portfolio. Even if they introduce breaking changes I’m happy because I’m glad they are making changes and moving forward rather then bloating with old features
Yes but what if you need to set up a computer for public use at a community center or a library or something? You shouldn't expect the visitors to know your custom config. Until there's a tiling WM that also has GUI elements that enforce the principle of discoverability, I think off-the-shelf DE's are the only viable option for this usecase.
It's funny because GNOME was the first OSS X11 desktop environment to get actual usability testing from corporate developers (Sun Microsystems).
I'm not sure if they still have a user interface design guideline document, though. They probably burned it when GNOME 3 development started. Haven't checked. I've mostly used Xfce since then (and very recently KDE).
I am a veteran of that war. I shitposted for Vim. The scars that war left will never heal. The nice doctor here is trying to get me to use nano. Baby steps she says. But she say says soon I will be using Kwrite.
:q
No wait! I think I meant :q!
Crap, I wanted to save that. :wq
It's a pity that the dont improve touch experience. Especially floating touch keyboard situation - there is none (working well).
My only complain in (default PopOs/Gnome's?) Dolphin file explorer there is no "space" to right click in the "current" directory... Otherwise IMHO it's no worse than Windows!
Compiz, XFCE, and GNOME <40 (now Cinnamon and MATE) proved quality UI design 15+ years ago.
It is actually insulting to Linux desktop that the default DE on the top distros don't even have minimize and expand buttons by default, and that any extra features require DE plugins.
GNOME 40+ is like Wayland. Years of development for practically no real user improvements. Every update shows off features DEs had over a decade ago.
GNOME 47's first listed big change is accent colors. wtf??????? What the f*** do you think we've been using GTK and Qt for???????
At least with KDE, the ram usage is justified. GNOME eats system resources just to give you a shitty ChomeOS UI that feels just as cheap.
The moment XFCE ports to Wayland, I'll happily swap Compiz for Wayfire and use my computer like a normal person.
Thankfully Gnome is ridiculously customisable. The native experience is shit, but installing a few extensions fixes all the issues I had with it at least.
That's fair. A couple of programs I use are more compatible with Gnome so I had an incentive to get it working. My desktop is pretty much identical to KDE/Windows with a start menu (ArcMenu extension), a taskbar (Dash to Panel extension) and I've removed all keyboard shortcuts to the Overview eyesore and have prevented it from showing up at launch (No overview at start-up extension).
I've been a big fan of gnome since the gnome2 days. I was ok with Gnome3 when it came out. Typically preferred it over plasma.
Having recently tried plasma, yeah it's certainly the better desktop environment. They have done a fantastic job, very impressive.
I suspect QT is simply a better toolkit, however I have limited experience with gtk as qt fits my needs better for work. I'm excited to see where Iced and Cosmo goes, just wish iced had a stable webview (although a web socket is probably good enough for my needs anyway. )
I agree, but a couple of programs I use were specifically made compatible with Gnome. It only took me three extensions to make my UI look like KDE though, so it wasn't too bad.
My KDE setup is neither like Windows nor like MacOS.
Stock options are often laid out similarly to Windows to make transition smoother. But many of them are powerful enough to make the UI look radically different according to your needs.
Not on my PC rn, but here's the previous iteration, arguably in between two styles (and also with broken font size in one place, which was fixed later). I like how Mac organizes panels on the top, but I hate the dock panel. The desktop also has KRunner activate near the screen center whenever I type when I'm focused in desktop, so that I could find any apps or perform simple actions super quickly. Still, I decided to not have it open when it's not running, as I prefer minimalism.
True to some extent, and I do this, but some aspects are unavoidable. For example the GTK save/open dialogue is used by Firefox, and it sucks (why can't I type the fucking path in?). There aren't good and popular alternative browsers that use Qt or any other toolkit with a decent dialogue.
If you're on Plasma, rt-click the start menu and Edit Applications. Find Firefox and into the environment line add GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 and save it.
This is something I do on every new install because the GTK dialogs with their buttons at the top and every other thing wrong with them hurts me deep inside to witness.
Have you considered that maybe people actually like the thing and wanna use it but can't because of a stupid design choice made by the dev team headquartered all the way inside their own asses?
Every time I try kde I get pissed off that every time I make a settings change I have to hit apply as well. Gnome I just change the settings and close the window. Plus I can never figure out how to switch workspaces. I like super+scroll wheel or swiping on a laptop.
How did the maker of that comic fuck up the very first sentence that badly? It makes no sense. The closest I can guess is it should be "forcing touch design on desktop users" and not "in", but even that is idiotic grammar. It's like they don't know what any of the words really mean.
Lets not be deliberately obtuse, you're clearly meant to be using it with your feet.
Just the left foot only
GNOME is more keyboard-focused than KDE. It just also happens to have much better touch support.
Get this meme to /linuxsucks where it belongs.
In my experience, KDE Plasma is surprisingly actually better than Gnome for tablet use. You would think that Gnome's more minimal and chunky UI would make it a better fit, but Plasma just has a lot more little usability QOL features.
This has been my experience as well. Fedora KDE is easier and more intuitive than Fedora GNOME on my Surface Go 2.
Did something change on the keyboard front? I love KDE but I can only use it comfortably on my Steam Deck with a horrible combination of Steam's keyboard, Onboard and Maliit and all of them suck in their own little ways.
Not everyone is the same
GNOME is more keyboard-focused "in the way the devs thought it's good". If users want to change the way, they gonna use tweaks, dconf editor or
gsettingsand navigate a jungle of key-value pairs like Windows RegistryYeah, this meme is a complete whiff, just seems edgy/hipster-y while ignoring the fact that nobody really cares because GNOME is a great DE.
Horrible meme but it sparked some interesting discussion.
How is KDE less keyboard-focused? I spent like ten minutes setting up kwin shortcuts and now have the same level of keyboard-only interaction as with any WM.
Well, I guess because you don't need to do the ten minutes of setup.
Both KDE and Gnome have a comparable set of default keyboard shortcuts.
The difference is if you are in KDE, you have easier ability to adjust to what you want with a lot more available shortcut actions, while in Gnome you generally are expected to live with the choices of the devs.
Oh, I get it! I just have to reprogram my brain to the GNOME way instead of the much more efficient way that I actually want!
Use a tiling wm. GNOME is for people who want a sane, human-friendly default.
iOS users think the same way born from ignorance. But hey, if you don't mind inefficient workflows and an extreme lack of customization to fix that, then GNOME works.
I don't find it very inefficient. There's also plenty of customization. This is a pretty specious comparison; on iOS you literally pay money a la carte for minor customization options. On GNOME, you might have to turn to less-supported third party extensions, or God forbid do some very minor config file or command line work. Far less than you'd need to do to do something similar in a tiling wm, of course... And most things that end users who just want to actually use their computer might care about are supported already. The system tray is the single feature I think is glaringly missing from GNOME currently, hopefully they'll get that officially supported soon.
Kind of weird to get so bent out of shape about some people choosing to use a certain interface.
Lmao, you even admit hoe dumb it is with the system tray. And you're wrong, I can have XFCE exactly hoe I want it in a matter of 15 minutes, using only the settings apps, and it will absolutely dog walk the workflows of GNOME.
GNOME doesn't have nearly enough keyboard shortcuts for me as a keyboard focused user. IMHO, keyboard use is all about customizability, which GNOME is not.
You can set keyboard shortcuts by the main navigation is designed to be done via mouse gestures.
This is not really a true statement then, and it's what was being replied to.
Slightly off-topic, but this annoyed me during the Win 8.1/10 start screen era as well. Just because an interface is touch-friendlier doesn't mean it can't also be an improvement for keyboard/mouse users as well.
Then they ditched all that and made it a worse experience for everyone in Win 11, so un turn I ditched their mess and fully switched over.
Classic shell has been installed on all of my windows machines as part of my "make windows usable" loadout since i was basically forced to upgrade* from w7 to w10
And it can be even more keyboard focused with Pop Shell over the top. That adds tiling and window focus by shortcut, similar to i3-wm.
Lmao that community is hilarious - it's all the most blatantly biased low-brow cheap shots about Linux I've ever seen and is just being spammed by 1-2 haters all the time 🤣
How do you even open the "Application" view on a touch device?
Gnome does some questionable things, and some are just personal preference, but there is at least one thing that they do that makes zero sense regardless of how you use your system...
The AppIndicator extension SHOULD be default. There is no reason for it to be an extension other than pure stubbornness. There are applications that literally require it in order to function at all.
That you need an extension to disable the overview at startup still boggles my mind and the arrogance of the developers in the thread that started it didn't lessen my antipathy for Gnome at all.
Why wouldn't you want the overview at startup?
Because there is nothing to overwiew yet, obviously.
It provides easy access to search. I understand now though why you wouldn't want it to open automatically (if you have startup programs you want to see instead).
actually, i just want to click one of my pinned panel favorites, but yeah, no need for search basically.
In my case because I have my PC connected to the TV and Steam starting automatically in big screen mode. But according to the devs I'm doing it wrong and should get used to it because it's the better experience when I can go and grab my keyboard to start typing the name of the program I want to start.
Because you already set firefox to autostart
Default the cursor to the Search field on a Save dialog is possibly the absolute fucking stupidest thing ever.
I love GNOME and everytime I tried an other DE I came back to GNOME. But the cursor in the search field is annoying and incomprehensible…
I'll be honest, I could probably use Gnome if I had to, with a few addons. But when I try it, the second I get to that dialog and it does that, I just shut it down and install something else. To me, it just epitomizes the contempt the developers have for the users, that it continues to exist after this long.
I'm triggered. Why would you even mention that.
I think the lack of a system tray in gnome is a case of perfect of being the enemy of good.
https://youtu.be/ejqNCbE42cg
There's a new Wayland protocol that probably will land in the next gnome release. The new protocol is supported by KDE and other desktops as well.
The reason that it was removed is because it is extremely hacky and bad. There have been talks within the project to just reads support since the extension got so many downloads but the new API is better anyway
Their solution to a problem is to pretend like it doesn't exist simply because it will go away in the future? It's a reason, but it isn't a good one.
I won't disagree with you there. They should've had a replacement before deprecating it. In there defense there was a alternative being developed but it ended up stalling over disagreements between KDE and gnome. The whole thing is a dumpster fire honestly. I'm glad they are cleaning it up. KDE and Gnome want the same thing for the most part they just kept getting into pointless bickering.
Would you mind providing a link or the name of the new protocol?
ext-tray-v1https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/355There's no reason to expect GNOME to implement it, and I'm surprised they haven't NACKed it.
It literally was developed by gnome. The merge request is coming from a gnome developer.
You don't have to like gnome but it is silly to try to gate keep over it.
"I understand that some compositors have no interest in allowing clients to show arbitrary content in tray areas. GNOME, for example, doesn't even have a tray area and it is my understanding that they believe that even the current SNI protocols allow clients too much freedom. Such compositors should not implement this protocol."
--the page you're referencing, by the creator of the protocol
Which I find to be a weird stance.
Gnome also believes that a window must have control over its own titlebar to draw it as it sees fit while simultaneously declaring it must not have control over a tray icon.
Also funny that Gnome seems to have objected to KDE proposal and wrote their own even though they seem to say point blank that while they are dictating how all the other DEs will do it, they themselves will be ignoring it. Why get in the business of a protocol you don't even want to implement in the first place...
In a land where desktops can be ripped out and replace with ease - what's the point in arguing? GNOME isn't my thing but I'm glad it's an option.
Can you swap out desktop environments in Linux like launchers on android?
Yeah pretty much. Or have multiple installed and pick which to use when you log in
Wait what?! Install several, pick upon login?! Had no idea, that's awesome.
Depends on your login flow. There is a session manager which normally boots up and let's you choose. But you can also configure it to auto login and send you to the Lockscreen of your window manager.
You can also mix login manager, window manager with desktop background managers, wallet managers etc..., in practice you can build your own desktop experience
I know the answer is "just build it" but man I want to be able to have adm<username login under something like nemo and a terminal window only. But then have username login under full Mint Cinnamon. Would be quite dope. Just don't feel like making it happen at the moment. I'll have to reconfigure permissions to revoke from my standard user.
Edit: oops you can comment out text in Lemmy? Editedit: I did it. Too me 15 minutes -.-
It will be goofy as the config files will still stick around between desktops.
I would runs desktop in a container or VM.
Yes
Yes
My main complaint with how Gnome does stuff is in environments where it is the only option (e.g. RHEL).
Which then is no longer an issue with GNOME but rather RHEL. But again, it's not like we can't figure out a way to install whatever in Hanna Montana's dreams is allowed. 🤙
Mainly because gnome is harder to ignore than a lot of other opinionated DEs.
It's been the default target for fedora and red hat, and like other choices rh makes, it propagates throughout the broader ecosystem.
Even if you ignore them, they dictate how Linux desktops are broadly allowed to work by largely asserting authority over FreeDesktop and by extension Wayland.
One of these is that they absolutely hate the concept of server side decorations, as a result even as they begrudgingly allowed it as a Wayland protocol, they insisted that it must not be mandatory and they are allowed to ignore it. This means applications that do not care about their decorations otherwise now must care about their decorations. As a user, the consequence is that any GTK application you might use is likely to just pop out as a gnome looking window among a bunch of otherwise consistent windows.
I avoid all of the modern gnome apps now as a result of this.
Even Windows allows the equivalent of server side decorations...
GNOME looks like it is touch friendly, but try to run it on a tablet and it's really fucking not. I had to DL a bunch of tweaks tools to make it useable at all and now the tablet breaks whenever there's a Gnome update that the tweaks weren't designed for.
I run Gnome on Debian on a tablet, and I find it wonderful.
Of course, my only points of comparison, so far, are iOS, Android and Windows tablets. Gnome is (per my own arbitrary last use of each) quite a bit nicer than any of those, at least.
Honestly I'd say the worst part is the osk. They need to treat it a bit more like phosh does. It's sooooo far behind when compared to modern device osks. Sure there's some extensions to help it out, but they don't go far enough to make it decent on a tablet. And it feels incredibly clunky to use with gdm when signing in, where no extension can help it..
That's true. Windows also did this badly, on the same tablet, so I didn't notice.
If KDE does better, I might switch. I think I would use my tablet un-docked more often if logging in wasn't so clunky.
Its not bad on a tablet. However I think the core design build around keyboard and mouse. (Mostly mouse/trackpad)
distro?
Fedora
k
Don't even try to say GNOME is a touch screen design. I've used it with a touchscreen, it's just bad design. What bothers me the most is that is close to being good if not for a couple of stupid decisions like having no system tray.
The system tray thing irks me to no end. Some apps still use one to control things and you have to use hacky plugins to get them to show. Other than that there's a lot I do like about gnome. Plasma suits my needs more though. So much more you can do with it.
Yep. I don't even want a proper system tray, just gimme a list with the apps that are still running with their windows closed. They can't even do that.
That literally exists for Flatpaks
I know. It also exists for regular software but, as is tradition with GNOME, it uses its own stupid protocol instead of what everyone else uses so it doesn't work for 80% of the software I use.
Ive changed my entire work flow because of this. On my laptop I use paperWM for infinite horizontal scrolling/tiling and "vertical" workspaces for organizing windows. Instead of minimizing windows, I just switch workspaces. Windows that need to be next to each other are on the same workspace, anything else is treated like a full screen app. It's a little weird, but for productivity with a TouchPad it's been an absolute game changer. Ican have a workspace dedicated to programming, obe thats just documents, one for each of my courses, one thats discord and music players, etc.
For a normal mouse, it's a kafkaesque nightmare.
Same workflow here but on KDE. I even have an extension that sends any maximized screen to its own desktop and deletes the desktop when it's closed or no longer maximized.
What is it?
Macsimize6 or something like that
Just use dash to dock extension. But I agree the system tray not being there by default is a puzzling experience.
I gonna be absolutely honest,gnome is fantastic for laptops.
Why, did they add a "New Text Document" context menu option again?
Gnome users be like "Open in Terminal" > touch filename.txt
Can you not "just" add a "New Text Document.txt" template?
Why don't they "just" add it for me so I don't have to click it again to rename the file after it's made?
Yes, everything (really, everything) just works, even on funky hardware like those tablet-pc things.
I use gnome too and I like it but that's just not true. IME support (input of east Asian languages like Japanese) kind of sucks, especially as they only do ibus and not fcitx5.
Oh, I didn't know about that. I luckily (for the purpose of using gnome and computers in general) only speak languages using the modern latin alphabet (and letters derived from it).
I used arch btw with latest gnome on amd c60 brazos apu laptop and laptop with i7 4700mq and gtx850m and laptop with Ryzen 5700u apu, so far gestures only worked on ryzen apu, on any other laptop without Ryzen features don't work and no amount of tinkering makes it work
My laptop has an 8th gen i5 and so far everything works(except my pipewire beig constantly broken).
Agree,It looks really nice on Laptops
I absolutely love (slightly tweaked) gnome. Fight me if you want, I'm sick in bed and have time.
well if you're sick in bed this will be an easy fight...
I elbow slam your face, your turn
You activated my trap card! My sickness was but a simple ruse to lure you into complacency! Your attack was weak, unfocused! I jump up, standing on my bed, your face is now easy prey for my unnaturally sharp knees. The structural rigidity of your nose is now forfeit!
Much like the Gnome user experience! :-D
I'm also sick and in bed, and this is such an appealing offer of a sparring match, but alas, I've never used Gnome
this makes you the ideal candidate for an internet argument !
Well, use the time to try it, I guess.
Man, they already said that they're sick. Have some mercy!
Fight, fight, fight!
Yeah, it's almost usable but I suspect most people don't wanna deal with broken extensions every new release. Last time my extensions broke, all I had to do to fix them was changing the target version in the manifest. Clearly, there weren't enough changes to the DE to warrant breaking them and they were just broken on purpose.
Yeah, it usually takes a week for the official versions of the extensions I use to work again after a gnome version update. It's easily worked around, usually, but that hard break every update sucks.
I just dislike the way KDE structures it's menus more, and while I suspect that I could tweak KDE to be something I like using, I also suspect that that would be much more annoying to fix for the next mayor Update.
I sometimes think about swapping over to i3, but I haven't yet had the leisure to give it a try.
Do you mean the application menu? Not trying to evangelize here, it's just that I almost never see it because Krunner is so integrated with everything in KDE that it feels like the intended way to launch stuff so I find it weird that the application menu bothers you.
If you mean the menus on the applications themselves, fair enough, I guess. I also don't understand why they're still just a regular app menu (File, Edit, etc...) but crammed into a single button.
Oh, yeah, that also annoyed me. I actually meant the settings menu, though. I have set up KDE for friends/family a few times, and depending on screen size and scaling, even in conditions that shouldn't be edge cases, there where sometimes scrollbars in both directions.
I also just, kinda don't like the vibe, I guess? That's extremely subjective, I know, just something I noticed every time I worked with KDE.
prepare....smack!
They seem to be at war with the minimize and maximize buttons.
Really weird decision they make
Last time I've used minimize and maximize buttons was 20 years ago. And yet I think accessibility is more important than whatever the fuck designers that create clean dumb UIs think is important.
Tbf, you can maximize by double-clicking the titlebar or dragging the window to the top so the button is kind of redundant. You can also (un)minimize by clicking on the taskbar so the minimize button would too be kind of redundant if GNOME hadn't gotten rid of the fucking task bar.
So the solution is I change my decades long habits. Sounds kinda like microsoft.
lol somebody woke up on the wrong side of bed. I'm just telling you the reasoning as to why it's done because it's a fun fact. I don't care what you use. Chill.
Don't push your emotional state onto me.
Did you just reply "no u"?
Its pretty standard thing to say to someone who thinks projects their emotional state onto someone else. Nothing about my statement suggested I 'woke up on the wrong side of the bed' It does however suggest you can't take a rebuff and act childish about it.
Brother, what on Earth are you talking about? Rebuff to what? We're not debating.
You can just toggle them back on
Except for this one Debian machine I have to maintain. They will still disappear on ever restart. They will still be turned on in tweaks and the only way to get them to appear is to switch them from right to left. Luckily I don't have to use it much.
I like gnome personally. It is all about simple inclusive design
I get distracted/overwhelmed fairly easily, so GNOME is a godsend. minimalistic top bar + on demand workspaces to throw my extra windows into = I can actually get stuff done.
That's ok, we don't kink shame around here.
I thought it was going to be a joke about Windows 8
I was expecting gnuImp.
Happy cake day
Thanks.
yw
Or 11
Wh-what? Have you used GNOME before or just mad because they don't have the shitty main menu copied from MS Windows?
One more, gnomes interface change from classic is like the Windows 8 interface but for linux :-D
Makes me wonder, how much of the hate on GNOME is because it reminds people about Win8.
I never used Win8 but used to administer some 2012 and 2012R2 servers. On the former the only issue caused by the start screen was the fact that there was no button to open it. This was very annoying when RDPing to the servers, but the issue wouldn't matter on desktop since you have super key for it.
Besides that, it was everything else in that OS that made me hate it
Gnome is terrible, if I keep it I install cinnamon - if Idon't its running xfce.
i like gnome, it looks good, is smooth, and does it's job
most of the things in gnome extensions should be built in and available from the settings. that being said there's nothing stopping me from just using something else, hence why I use kde.
What is the difference between adding a extension and enabling a setting other than that a disabled feature is just bloat?
I mean any distro can serve the extension it wants
I don't use GNOME, but from what I've read (and from experience with other software that has extensions) they often break when GNOME updates.
The features would break if they were built in.
GNOME has clear philosophy and they work for themselves, not for you so they decide what features they care to invest time and what features they don’t care about.
Having a standardised method for plugins is in my opinion good enough, nobody forces you to use extensions. And if you don’t want extensions to break, then wait till the extensions are ready prior updating GNOME.
You can't know that and I can't imagine it would be true. If the plugins many folks find essential were incorporated into GNOME itself then they'd be updated where necessary as a matter of course in developing a new release.
You're not wrong! This is an arrogant and common take produced in poor taste though. A holdover from the elitism that continues to plague so many projects. Design philosophy leads UX decision making and the proper first goal for any good and functional design is user accessibility. This is not limited to accomodations we deem worthy of our attention.
Good artists set ego aside to better serve their art. Engineers must set pet peeves aside to better serve their projects. If what they find irksome gets in the way of their ability to build functionally better bridges, homes, and software then it isn't reality which has failed to live up to the Engineer's standards. This is where GNOME, and many other projects, fall short. Defenders standing stalwart on the technical correctness of a volunteer's lack of obligation to those whose needs they ostensibly labor for does not induce rightness. It exposes the masturbatory nature of the facade.
Engineers have every right to bake in options catering to their pet peeves (even making them the defaults). That's not the issue. When those opinions disallow addressing the accessibility needs of those who like and use what they've built there is no justification other than naked pride. This is foolish.
I agree! Having a standardized method for plugins is good, however; the argument which follows misses the point. GNOME lucked into a good pole position as one of the default GNU/Linux DEs and has enjoyed the benefit of that exposure. Continuing to ignore obvious failures in method elsewhere while enshrining chosen paradigms of tool use as sacrosanct alienates users for whom those paradigms are neither resonant nor useful.
No one will force Engineers to use accessibility features they don't need. Not needing them doesn't justify refusing the build them. Not building them as able is an abdication of social responsibility. If an engineer does not believe they have any social responsibility then they shouldn't participate in projects whose published design philosophy includes language such as:
Their walk isn't matching their talk in a few areas and it is right and good to call them to task for it.
Post statement: This is coming from someone who drives Linux daily, mostly from the console, and prefers GNOME to KDE. All of the above is meant without vitriol or ire and sent in the spirit of progress and solidarity.
extensions (in my testing, typically in a VM of fedora or openSUSE) are a pain in the ass to use. it's also difficult to find the one that I'm looking for because there's generally several with the same name. something like a system tray (iirc the extension is "app indicators") or having the dock always visible on the desktop (idk what the extension is called) are features that most people who don't already use gnome rely on to some degree. these things are core functionality of most desktops precisely because most people use and like these features, and adding a few of the most popular features won't add enough extra data to really be bloat.
I personally am very big on having all the customization I can get (kde user, obviously) but I actually did almost stick with gnome once. I tried vanilla is because orchid has just come out and while I was messing with it I found out that it had the dock extension available by default (was new to Linux at the time and didn't know how to actually use extensions yet) and with that dock extension I didn't mind gnome as much. the thing with gnome is that it has a lot of good ideas but it ruins a lot of them by only half-implementing what everyone else is already doing. most people would probably find it a lot more usable if it just had features that have been standard since literally the beginning of GUIs, and used to be standard in gnome.
Im not si much a customisation guy, but ended up with KDE and global apple theme, after all 🤭
But I see what GNOME is doing and support them, I think the Linux community as a whole profits from the work they do.
I agree with your opinion that, right now, it is very time consuming finding the right extensions that one need, but I think the problem is more the extension store having bad UI than extensions being bad as whole.
And what I meant is not that distributions are doing a great job right now, choosing what extensions to preinstall, more so that they are able to and that it would be a nice feature of a distro having some essential GNOME extensions preinstalled, even if default disabled.
Gnome is not really touch-centric, it's more keyboard-crentric. Sure, the activity overview is great for touch. It's even greater for the keyboard though. And I don't like using the mouse a lot anyway
There's a gnome for mobile branch that has what you'd expect from a good touch experience. Pretty sure the plan is to bring some of that work over to the main desktop branch at some point.
Oh! A Gnome hate thread!
I'm in!
FUCKING GNOME>!!!111!!!ELEVEN
More like forcing no customization
You can change it up with gnome tweaks and extensions. By default you can set accent colors and the background. (Plus move apps around the dashboard)
But plugins break every update and gnome tweaks doesn't let you change gnomes gtk theme anymore and from what I heard they added it in Gnome 3 bcs there was alot of drama
Extensions require time to be updated to support the newest gnome version. It is only any issue if you update right after the newest gnome release. It is better to stay on something stable anyway since you probably will find bugs in the latest and greatest.
As far a gnome tweaks is concerned it is still actively maintained and is needed for those who want to do more tweaking. It is important to note modern gnome is all libadwaita based which means it doesn't use GTK themes. You can still set the theme for legacy apps but for libadwaita you need to set the colors you are looking for. The old style GTK is pretty much retired in gnome because it caused lots of inconsistent and non inclusive UI elements. Libadwaita makes everything the same and looks more modern than basically everything out there. (My opinion)
YEAH true I can see plugins being used on something like Debian.
Oh that's why gnome tweaks got read of gtk theming I saw a forum post saying gnome devs don't want customization especially they have this page: https://stopthemingmy.app/
I don't want customization. The biggest users of gnome is probably enterprise Linux. In the enterprise or business space you want reliability and predictably.
Ok that would make sense why Most Enterprise oriented distros only ship Gnome
Funny enough Xfce4 is also commonly used as well.
Both gnome and xfce4 has kiosk modes and settings which allows an admin to lock the system down. Xfce4 tends to be a little more favored since it is easier to make it look like Windows.
Of course it depends on the deployment and company. Almost everyone is going to be on Windows since it is the easiest to manage from a desktop perspective. Like it or not group policy is pretty hard to compete with. I do think Wayland and XDG desktop portals will definitely help make Linux a more appealing option but at the end of the day business just want something standard and supported.
I'm going to roll your machine back to KDE4
Hell yeah, Oxygen
Both Gnome and KDE are 100x better than win or macOS. I use KDE for me but I install Gnome on my familly 's stuff.
Idk, man, macOS is basically a tiling WM and isn't even that far from GNOME. Windows's window management (pun not intended) does suck.
MacOS use to be the best. Pretty sure Gnome is based on it, but macOS keeps adding security options that makes things more complicated. Every single plugin is now blocked by default, lots of drivers need you to modify security options in safe mode to be installed, it's a pain. It use to be great but these day, Gnome is better IMO.
Sure, but then you're comparing OS with window managers. As far as windows management goes, I honestly prefer the way Mac does it. It actually kinda reminds me to i3wm but friendlier. I even configured Plasma to work somewhat like it. GNOME honestly isn't bad, it just has a couple of deal breakers I'm not willing to deal with and the devs are not willing to fix.
This is just wishful thinking. macOS is the GOAT of UI/UX.
Okay. Explain the global menu, then. Why would I want the menu at the top of the screen, always, instead of attached to the top of the window?
I mean, there's some decent design principles behind it. For one, it just takes up space only once rather than for each window individually.
But much more importantly, it makes use of an implication of Fitts's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law#Implications_for_UI_design
TL;DR: Because you can slam your mouse cursor against the top of the screen, you can't miss the menu vertically. It's like an infinitely tall button. This makes it fast for users to move their cursor there.
Having said that, this macOS design is from a time when the mouse and navigation menus were the primary user interaction method, which they're not anymore. So, yeah, that's why it was designed like that, but I doubt they'd expend this much effort to design it like that again.
I don't have any issues with mouse precision, so having to navigate that extra distance every time is a pain in the ass.
I work on macOS 90% of the time. It's super well design, but it gets worse with each release. The security options are way too intrusive. Gnome is much more intuitive these days.
I was about to agree on the macOS part, but Gnome is really terrible in terms of UX. They are good at eye candy and unfortunately don't seem to know the difference between a pretty and a good UI.
Why is it so terrible with multiple monitors then?
It was pretty bad last time I used it
You know how you start hallucinating in a sensory deprivation situation? I feel a lot of UX people just aren't talking to users directly and thus we get whatever they hallucinate is a good design, disconnected from any actual user needs. Any user feedback only comes after they've made their mind up and is seen as the users being wrong, as the alternative is harder to deal with.
It's free so I can't really complain, but I can use KDE instead.
They need to stop messing with things that work. Feature creep is how Windows XP turned into the dumpster fire it is today. Does the interface have a working file explorer? Does it support add-ons? Does it have a file search? You're done.
"But . . . "
You're DONE.
Windows XP is EOL...
You can't be against feature creep and for add-ons. Those two are entirely antithetical.
Sure you can, because those are two different things. Feature creep applies to functionality that is there straight out the box. Add-ons are things that are built ontop of the out the box solution.
To put it in hardware, if you buy a PC then a PC is what you get out the box. If every PC had to come with a dedicated graphics card that would be a PC feature creep, because every PC doesn't need a dedicated graphics card. However, that doesn't mean you want mobo manufacturers to remove the PCIe slot, because you might want to add on (pun intended) a graphic card.
Just because I think something shouldn't be in the baseline for everyone doesn't mean I also don't want to those things to be available for the people who do want those things in their system
Not at all. OS should just be core functionality, all bells and whistles should be add-ons so they can be added, replaced, or done without if not needed.
That really depends on where you draw the line on what is "core functionality". I'd consider a system tray to be core functionality, you apparently don't.
Everything in KDE is the bare minimum for core functionality. Anything less is not functional.
I really liked XP. I still have a machine running it.
Air gapped right?
Oh, yeah. I don't even have the network adapter drivers installed.
Friendly reminder: before people liked XP, people hated XP. Much of the criticism that applied to Vista at launch also applied to XP. Guess which one is looked back at more fondly.
And I actually thought Vista was good. Leagues better than XP even. It served me well for 3 years. Now I don't even use Windows anymore.
Most people here are old and bitter
As long as I can still customize Gnome with some extensions for improved focus, it'll stay my DE of choice.
I did that for a while, but ultimately got too frustrated due to a few things:
Ultimately, I found that experience I was trying to get to that gnome never would normally support and would evaporate on updates and never be quite right anyway was just a natural featureset of Plasma. So I just do that and haven't had to sweat updates nearly as much as when I kept trying to make a go of it with gnome shell. I kept giving it a shot because of my gnome 2 experience (admittedly augmented by compiz), but gnome 3/mutter have not been a good fit for me.
A lot of the hate seems to come from the people who spend an hour tweaking everything. For me I want it to work and be easy to use out of the box.
I feel like the majority of DE developers are just back-end developers, which like, of course that's not going to be a great user experience lol
Please don't force touch design in me!
Please force touch design in me
I actually like Gnome. I like the way it looks and I have no problems with UX. I also don't feel the need to use any extensions.
¯\_('_')_/¯
It's a fine DE... But boy making appindicator/KStatus an un-officially-supported extension is dumb
I ended up switching to Gnome because KDE would always feel a bit jank to me. Something about it always feels slightly off, animations not working properly or being choppy like my desktop had an unstable framerate. Might just be it fighting with Nvidia, but I don't have several hundred bucks lying around to upgrade my card and switch to AMD...
Kind of odd seeing the massive hate boner the community seems so have for Gnome, at least we have options for desktop environments at all.
My problem with Gnome is the foundation itself.
They act like they know best, and rarely listen to user feedback.
They act like Apple, and that is very bad.
Not only that, but they also act like they are the default and only desktop on Linux, and rarely if ever cooperate with other desktop groups to make things work smoothly.
They are dragged kicking and screaming into following standards, and were the biggest source of NACKs (effectively a "veto") on the Wayland protocol and a huge reason why Wayland still isn't complete after over a decade of design.
The gnome desktop is pretty, but it is not functional. You can make it functional by installing gobs of extensions, but those extensions don't follow a cohesive workflow concept, and often break with updates. It's like trying to mod Skyrim or Minecraft.
To contrast that, KDE:
Explicitly listens to its users and has scheduled times for specifically taking in user feedback (within the scope of broad goals)
Actively works to be interoperable with other environments
Follows standards and pushes them forward
Has all the functionality out of the box, and can be made pretty with extensions/assets (the inverse of Gnome).
Functionality mostly doesnt break on updates unless it's major (like switching to Wayland as the primary development target).
I don't say much about it because it's stupid to argue, but I've used a LOT of different desktop interfaces over the past 45+ years (yeah, really!), and GNOME...well, GNOME sucks. When Gnome3 was first released we all had high hopes for it improving on Gnome2 (which for those of us on Unix systems was a huge improvement over CDE), and instead it was buggy, clunky, awkward, and an enormous resource hog. Oh yeah, and it was massively unconfigurable. AND it continued to not improve for many many years, until most people I know switched to KDE or one of the other environments (MATE, Cinnamon, and xfce were very popular).
Gnome 4x added a touchscreen paradigm, whether you had a touchscreen or not, and made the experience worse in the process.
If you like it, great! Use it and love it all you want! I'll play with it once every year or so just to see if someone has finally designed something that doesn't suck so badly, but for a functional desktop, no thanks.
I think the fact that most of the 'fringe' desktops are well-known in the community because of people trying to escape GNOME is pretty telling.
There. The last couple decades of GNOME development in a nutshell.
If you used Gnome back in the day you know there was a lot of that configurability built in. Then one day the developer decided to start taking it away. Slowly but surely all the ability to configure Gnome was removed. If you experienced this arc like I did you were left scratching your head.
Yes KDE was always more configurable, but removing what configurability Gnome did have made it less useful. For power users this is a big deal. It is like a company taking away all your features and thinking you are going to like it.
I think the gnome haters are just the loudest. I've had all of the same issues with KDE and gnome has just always worked for me. Sure it's not as customizable, but it gets the job done without annoying issues.
Gnome has more in common with hyprland than it does with tablet interfaces
Fight me fight me fight me fight me
Gnome Mobile uses a near the same experience of workspaces for full view apps. That's exactly how I use hyprland.
Old gnome is nostalgic to me, because my first venture into Linux was Fedora Core 4. I was still using Win98 at the time, and gnome 2.10 felt so modern in comparison, with rounded corners and soft gradients.
Coming back to Linux after having not touched it for a very, very long time I tried gnome again and I just do not like it at all. It's weird looking. Maybe too modern for me, i don't know.
If you miss GNOME 2 try MATE. It is a continuation of GNOME 2.
I'll check that out, thanks! It does look nice. I have two PCs with Mint with Cinnamon, I'm pretty happy with. I have one more PC to switch over to Linux, I'll probably try MATE on that.
I love GNOME and hate KDE
When i switched from Windows to Linux, i wanted actual changes, not just a slightly different look
Unrelated question: does anyone know how to show the time in fullscreen or merge the bar with window close button with the top bar with the screen so there arent 2 different bars in GNOME?
I used Gnome Shell 3 for 4 years before giving up on it and going to KDE.
The huge differentiator is that KDE may look like windows OOTB on most distros, but if you want you can easily make it look like Gnome, Mac, Unity.. whatever. The panels and menus are infinitely configurable.
And that is why this meme is dead on the money. I've come to hate dev teams that have "visions" that they cram down users throats regardless of the experience. And the irony is that Gnome 2 used to be much more configurable than older KDE versions.
Is there a way to configure the look of all the apps running on kde? Because one of the main things that keeps my away from KDE is how ugly all the k* apps look out of the box.
In Plasma 6 there are a crazy number of ways to skin and change the look.
This video was a good way for me to learn some of the basics. https://youtu.be/R6C-RNhHMrE
https://store.kde.org/browse?cat=717&ord=rating
or
https://store.kde.org/browse?cat=722&ord=rating
To be honest I have the opposite feeling, dev teams with no vision trying to support every single feature possible with no standards drives me bananas
KDEs vision is letting users have the experience they want. You can have a vision without limiting configurability and cramming bad UX down the pipe to your users.
It's no coincidence that C++ is the primary language used in KDE...
Idk why people are so against specialization…
I agree. The only time a strong vision is a problem is if there are no options. But now, the people who don't want gnome can easily just use something else. I want the gnome devs to do their thing, and as long as I enjoy using gnome I will use it.
Not only that but gnome has a great extension portfolio. Even if they introduce breaking changes I’m happy because I’m glad they are making changes and moving forward rather then bloating with old features
TBH both gnome and KDE are broken piles of crap. Cinnamon and XFCE are the only good DE's left out there (at least for xorg, idk about wayland).
All DEs are jank. The only good DE is the tiling wm I put 10k lines of config into.
Don't get me wrong, that's also janky, but it's my
faultjank.Yes but what if you need to set up a computer for public use at a community center or a library or something? You shouldn't expect the visitors to know your custom config. Until there's a tiling WM that also has GUI elements that enforce the principle of discoverability, I think off-the-shelf DE's are the only viable option for this usecase.
Sorry, I though my comment was sufficiently self-humerous 😅
Of course custom configs are not suitable for anyone but the config-urator. Hence, custom configs :D
I'd at Mate to the list as well.
XFCE and Cinnamon its in the Desktop as a experimental option
Last time i tried XFCE, i had a terrible experience
But that might be because i was playing minecraft with 300 mods on a laptop that could barely open the launcher
I feel exactly the same
GNOME peaked with 2 which is why I prefer MATE.
Gnome has the best kbm experience out of the box
But this meme doesn’t make sense because Gnome is also really high in the accessibility community
It's funny because GNOME was the first OSS X11 desktop environment to get actual usability testing from corporate developers (Sun Microsystems).
I'm not sure if they still have a user interface design guideline document, though. They probably burned it when GNOME 3 development started. Haven't checked. I've mostly used Xfce since then (and very recently KDE).
https://developer.gnome.org/hig/
I'm happy with xfce4.
same with Cinnamon (Not in Linux Mint)
I can't wait for Wayland support
– Is supporting tray icons important? – What icons? Let the plugin community worry about that. – You're hired!
What's better?
Fluxbox, obviously. \s
EXWM. With evil mode, obviously, I'm not a complete monster
Did you fight in the Vim Emacs wars? 👩🏻🔧
I've bridged the gap, I have A S C E N D E D
I am a veteran of that war. I shitposted for Vim. The scars that war left will never heal. The nice doctor here is trying to get me to use nano. Baby steps she says. But she say says soon I will be using Kwrite.
:q No wait! I think I meant :q! Crap, I wanted to save that. :wq
Clearly TWM
my sway setup is cozy, i've never used GNOME so i wouldn't know if it suits my needs. i dislike client-side decorations, so i avoid GNOME apps.
We'd like you to head up our project to tailor our new CLI for thumb-typing.
It's a pity that the dont improve touch experience. Especially floating touch keyboard situation - there is none (working well).
My only complain in (default PopOs/Gnome's?) Dolphin file explorer there is no "space" to right click in the "current" directory... Otherwise IMHO it's no worse than Windows!
That's a pretty low bar!
Compiz, XFCE, and GNOME <40 (now Cinnamon and MATE) proved quality UI design 15+ years ago.
It is actually insulting to Linux desktop that the default DE on the top distros don't even have minimize and expand buttons by default, and that any extra features require DE plugins.
GNOME 40+ is like Wayland. Years of development for practically no real user improvements. Every update shows off features DEs had over a decade ago.
GNOME 47's first listed big change is accent colors. wtf??????? What the f*** do you think we've been using GTK and Qt for???????
At least with KDE, the ram usage is justified. GNOME eats system resources just to give you a shitty ChomeOS UI that feels just as cheap.
The moment XFCE ports to Wayland, I'll happily swap Compiz for Wayfire and use my computer like a normal person.
Gnome is amazing for laptops, the touchpad gestures are incredible, on PC it's aight.
Thankfully Gnome is ridiculously customisable. The native experience is shit, but installing a few extensions fixes all the issues I had with it at least.
Hmm... I found it very difficult to customise Gnome. So I switched to Plasma.
That's fair. A couple of programs I use are more compatible with Gnome so I had an incentive to get it working. My desktop is pretty much identical to KDE/Windows with a start menu (ArcMenu extension), a taskbar (Dash to Panel extension) and I've removed all keyboard shortcuts to the Overview eyesore and have prevented it from showing up at launch (No overview at start-up extension).
IMHO KDE is a better option than gnome. No need to tweak the UI to solve those issues.
I've been a big fan of gnome since the gnome2 days. I was ok with Gnome3 when it came out. Typically preferred it over plasma.
Having recently tried plasma, yeah it's certainly the better desktop environment. They have done a fantastic job, very impressive.
I suspect QT is simply a better toolkit, however I have limited experience with gtk as qt fits my needs better for work. I'm excited to see where Iced and Cosmo goes, just wish iced had a stable webview (although a web socket is probably good enough for my needs anyway. )
Moksha Desktop is Even better
I agree, but a couple of programs I use were specifically made compatible with Gnome. It only took me three extensions to make my UI look like KDE though, so it wasn't too bad.
5 minutes with extension manager in Bazzite and i had Gnome exactly how i wanted it. I also haven't used Gnome in like 20 years.
I prefer gnome. It feels like Linux to me. I don’t want a windows clone like every other DE
My KDE setup is neither like Windows nor like MacOS.
Stock options are often laid out similarly to Windows to make transition smoother. But many of them are powerful enough to make the UI look radically different according to your needs.
Show me
Not on my PC rn, but here's the previous iteration, arguably in between two styles (and also with broken font size in one place, which was fixed later). I like how Mac organizes panels on the top, but I hate the dock panel. The desktop also has KRunner activate near the screen center whenever I type when I'm focused in desktop, so that I could find any apps or perform simple actions super quickly. Still, I decided to not have it open when it's not running, as I prefer minimalism.
Looks great!
Thanks :3
Took Edna custom style as a starting point
Also, here is a strikingly unique but lovely desktop taken from r/unixporn
GNOME feels like Mac. I prefer i3wm because it actually feels like Linux (I use Arch btw).
Gnome is so much better than Mac OS but the similarity are fairly limited.
lol no, it's not. MacOS has a system tray, sensible window management and good default touchpad gestures.
Honestly that looks worse when I search it from the fedora side. May I see your desktop?
I don't use i3wm. It's a joke about what you said about GNOME "feeling like linux" not really making much sense.
Gnome was standard to my fedora distribution so to be it does feel like Linux. Similar to whatever Ubuntu runs but better.
I get you though, there is nothing standard. It is how I feel though ;)
True to some extent, and I do this, but some aspects are unavoidable. For example the GTK save/open dialogue is used by Firefox, and it sucks (why can't I type the fucking path in?). There aren't good and popular alternative browsers that use Qt or any other toolkit with a decent dialogue.
If you're on Plasma, rt-click the start menu and Edit Applications. Find Firefox and into the environment line add
GTK_USE_PORTAL=1and save it.This is something I do on every new install because the GTK dialogs with their buttons at the top and every other thing wrong with them hurts me deep inside to witness.
Thanks you! Just got around to trying this. Very good too know!
Have you considered that maybe people actually like the thing and wanna use it but can't because of a stupid design choice made by the dev team headquartered all the way inside their own asses?
Every time I try kde I get pissed off that every time I make a settings change I have to hit apply as well. Gnome I just change the settings and close the window. Plus I can never figure out how to switch workspaces. I like super+scroll wheel or swiping on a laptop.
Nevermind that you can configure it to do whatever you want. Swiping is literally the default in KDE.
Yeah, but... gotta hit apply so. Nah. lol
How did the maker of that comic fuck up the very first sentence that badly? It makes no sense. The closest I can guess is it should be "forcing touch design on desktop users" and not "in", but even that is idiotic grammar. It's like they don't know what any of the words really mean.