You can easily get away with more than one or two. I typically run between eight and ten and have rarely had any issues surrounding updates.
It's really just as simple as waiting a week or two after a new Gnome version drops before you update. By then, the vast majority of the more popular extensions will have already fixed any compatibility issues or, if not, there's a very good chance that an outdated extension can be replaced by a newer alternative.
Don't try to turn Gnome into something it wasn't designed to be.
Don't tell me what to do. We all have our own preferences, that's the beauty of Linux.
Personally, I have tried many different desktop environments with various customizations. I still think that GNOME + Extensions is the most beautiful and productive desktop experience for me.
Even despite the obvious flaws of GNOME, I still find it easier to customize and configure to my personal preferences than other desktop environments.
I think the point they were making was that Gnome is made for a touchpad / keyboard driven approach, so complaining that it's not something else or that it requires multiple extensions is pointless.
If you use 15 extensions to get your perfect desktop and don't say a word, no-ones going to care, just don't complain when it breaks.
If only KDE was as seamless as GNOME on my Optimus laptop… I’ve tried gaming on Wayland (I need wayland for games) on KDE and performance was awful. On GNOME Wayland it’s as good as Windows
This comment reads like you've never actually tried Gnome with proper extensions (like arc menu and dash-to-panel), because those aren't even comparable in quality. I mean that when comparing to KDE as well.
I want to love XFCE, but whisker-menu doesn't support opening it on meta key release, which is baffling to me. Also the lack of night mode, which redshift is just throwing a random program into the mix. Which if you don't mind that, then you wouldn't have a problem with Gnome extensions in the first place.
Install 10 Gnome extensions to get KDE Plasma but worse. Well to each their own I suppose. At least Gnome looks nice, I can't deny that. IMHO that is the one advantage they do have over KDE Plasma.
Yeah, if I can't use dash-to-panel, I'm not using GNOME lmao. It feels like such a basic feature and a complete oversight that it isn't part of GNOME on its own.
It's not, it's a rock solid, slow moving desktop that emulates a familiar experience for every Windows user and dose so awesome, my dad couldn't use KDE or Gnome and XFCE is great too but far closer to that ancient description and harder to use than Cinnamon for most normal people, it's simply perfect for people like my Dad even compared to Windows!
Could you help me set whisker-menu to open on meta key release? This is default behavior on every other DE, yet seems completely unsupported on XFCE. It needs to explicitly be on key release, otherwise it breaks every single keyboard shortcut that relies on the meta key.
I'm glad there's discussion for it at least. This is a really annoying thing for me. Otherwise it pretty much nails most things for me. I have some other small issues, but those don't prevent swapping over to it. But right now it competes with dash-to-panel extension on Gnome for me, and Gnome is winning there. But once XFCE does have that, it's nice jumping to it for consistently, since you know your work flow won't change even from a year from now.
I just don't get the vendetta GNOME has against background processes. GNOME devs just don't use email clients, cloud sync applications, chat clients...? GNOME treats my Nextcloud sync app (which I NEED to be running at all times) as if it was malware or something.
If you minimize a window, it goes into a list of "Background Apps" in the charms menu where the only option you have is to close it. There's no native systems tray.
there's a tray, it's just in the activities tab. press the super key (or click activities in the top left) to bring up the activities view, then the tray is at the bottom
I'm confused. I have a bar of all active applications at the bottom of my screen. Even if I minimise or "hide" the window it still shows that app as an active one that I can re-fullscreen
Yeah, if you need to install extensions to make GNOME usable, GNOME is not for you. Seriously, there are other options. I can't stand using GNOME, but they have a vision they are sticking to and I can respect that.
Cinnamon is so close to the way I configured Gnome with extensions. Just that Cinnamon does not need any extensions for that. Best GTK based DE I think.
Conversely, after I tried vanilla gnome, I can't go back. It gets out of my way, is pretty bug free, visually consistent, and the workflow is lightyears ahead of anything else I've used.
The Win95 UX paradigm that pretty much everybody uses just seems so clunky to me.
I don't understand people calling GNOME keyboard-driven, it doesn't even support keyboard shortcuts for more than 4 workspaces, and it doesn't support tiling other than left and right.
I also feel like the plugin system is not great. The plugins break on every.single.update and you have to beg the maintainers to update them.
I agree about a dock/taskbar miss me with that :P
What frustrates me about GNOME is that it's otherwise so well-polished and smooth but just refuses to be easily customizable.
Sure, but this is exactly my biggest problem with GNOME, it's one specific workflow and anything that is even just slightly different is out of the box.
Don't get me wrong I have many positive feelings about GNOME but they've recently been overtaken by the negative ones :P
That's what I fucking hate about it, great extensions, couldn't fucking settle on an API that doesn't break every update. When will the gnome devs ever be content with themselves
there is no API, which is the problem. It's just straight code injection. That's why extensions can be so powerful. A stable API would compromise their freedom for sure
Okay then, I'm never gonna update gnome again I guess. The machine I use it on is for work, so I care about stability. Or should I have never chosen gnome in the first place?
I'm not sure that is a fair reaction. If your workflow relies heavily on many complex extensions that have a history of updating slow it is probably worth just... waiting a bit? You don't HAVE to be on the bleeding edge of Gnome releases. With a fairly minimal extensions list I've not had problems updating to new releases for a long long time
Worth a try. However, the Debian Gnome my university offers has similar delays, so Gnome at least tends to get slow in the environments it normally gets used in. Based on obersavtion. I also don't remember noticing those delays when I tried other flavors of Manjaro like i3
I kinda had the opposite experience, switching from gnome to plasma for the more experimental features it supports on Wayland.
So far, plasma needs like a literal minute after logging in before any app can open.
That came with other weird issues, like alt-tabbing with a Fullscreen game being very finicky, sometimes refusing to alt-tab, and sometimes the taskbar breaks and stays frozen for most of the time, only unfreezing for a few seconds every minute or so.
I would sum up my experience as GNOME being more polished, working more consistently, while Plasma is perhaps better designed, more full-featured, including cases where GNOME is waiting on something to be implemented/standardized.
(Tiling) window managers like i3, dwm or sway open apps instantly. If not, then this is mostly because the app you want to open is bloated/ too complex.
Why would they open them faster? They do the exact same shit. It takes a long time because the OS has to load every file into memory, and especially the first time things line the whole gtk library is loaded is taking its time.
Gnome on Wayland shits on anything and everything for how well they've done touchpad gestures. Even MacOS. Definitely Windows as well as other Linux DEs.
Its mostly the devs and the bad decisions they make around GNOME, for me i use a lot of apps that require Server Side Window Decorations (SSD) to be useful, specifically apps like Foot terminal (default gnome console or gnome terminal is not featureful enough and neither have sixel support, whereas foot terminal does have sixel) and gnome doesnt have any SSD on wayland, and GNOME also lacks customization features and doesnt have a standardized theming API and the GNOME devs consider themes to be "unsupported". Unlike on KDE Plasma where themes have a standardized API through the toolkit (qt) and are officiall supported. Also GNOME in general lacks basic features that require extensions whereas on other desktops you have things like a systray as a default.
running in the background isnt a system tray. every other desktop on the face of the earth has a system tray. It's a basic espected feature and i use system tray functionality all the time.
I get why that thing isn't implemented because it's really ugly and most of the icons there serve literally no purpose but they need a proper replacment because some apps simply need it!
They've actually been talking about this for ages, but they won't unless it's cross-compatible with other DEs, using freedesktop standards. I wish we'd make headway on it soon.
I love vanilla gnome. I totally understand how some users prefer the flexibility of KDE, but a clean, minimal interface with easy access to workspaces is just the thing for me.
Most of those require some configuration out of the box and target power-users who are comfortable with manually editing text-based config files (or editing header files and then recompiling from source if you're one of those people). One of Gnomes big selling points is accessibility, which none of the tiling WMs offer in any significant way.
If it still allowed me to do everything I wanted to in an easy enough way, I wouldn't be opposed. I would say in short, I don't know enough about it to know whether I'd like it.
I'm tired of GNOME messing with it's API but hopefully this is the last time since they're switching to a standard system. Besides that, it's my favorite DE on Linux. I have to give plasma 6 a shot when it comes out but right now GNOME feels just right compared to other desktops.
Gnome is phenomenally stable considering it's a modern desktop.
You only really get more stable by going to XFCE or something, which is basically on life support at this stage.
Literally the reason why the Linux world went from Plasma being the standard to Gnome being the standard is because KDE was an unstable mess and Gnome was super stable.
Gnome doesn't have an extension API. That is why it is prone to breakage, since the code is injected into the actual shell. The upshot of this is that extensions can do pretty much anything. The downside is there is no stable API.
The reason I don't use Gnome is because it's only usable after you've installed a bunch of extensions yet after every update, half the extensions are always broken.
I don't understand how you could say it's like Windows 8? I don't really see any meaningful similarities. Gnome is very much just its own thing.
It's the other DEs that are like windows. Start button bottom left that opens a cramped app menu. Taskbar on bottom. Clock on bottom right. Minimise, maximise, close buttons on the top right of each program. The Win95 UX paradigm, basically.
I don't like desktop GUIs that aren't designed for a mouse and make you memorize keyboard shortcuts to be usable. Keyboard shortcuts are nice to have but shouldn't be mandatory, IMO.
Yeah, this is a big shame. I don't have context on the technical details but JS runtimes have been supporting CJS and ES modules in parallel for a decade now. Was it really too much work to support both for some time?
Of course I say this as someone who has contributed zero time to adding this support.
Liking the fullscreen app search thingamafuck is your prerogative even if I feel this kind of UX is only at home on a mobile phone (also I'm fairly sure Plasma can also do that with some fennagling--)
The thing people (me included) detest about GNOME has very little to do with that anyway, peeps don't like how locked down it is and how it refuses to support certain features thought to be 'basic', so you have to use extensions.... Which can be janky on occasion -- And definitely will get abandoned by their creators and disabled when you upgrade GNOME version.
Valid. I'm a pretty new Linux convert (6 months or so) and gnome is what I landed on. I tried KDE Plasma and it was okay, maybe I am not giving it enough of a chance. I noticed the desktop and windows were kind of flickering as well, not sure why. Nvidia graphics card, so it's already a bit janky anyway.
You can change out the Windows-style start menu on Plasma for the "Application Launcher" button which will be a fullscreen app launcher like in GNOME. Or are you wanting something different?
I also prefer a larger app launcher. Like why should it be small, how is that actually better for usability? Why have it cramped in the bottom left, what's that all about?
It seems to me that people do it that way because that's how they're used to it ever since Win95. Not because it's actually better. But idk.
I love the design, but it seems in my machine there are zero animations (not even a fade in when opening it) is this intentional or something wrong with my setup? Not a deal breaker, but a bit jarring with how smooth the rest of the desktop is.
Sounds like Ubuntu underneath your Plasma. I've had the exact same experience when using Neon, Kubuntu, and Ubuntu+KDE. I install any non-Ubuntu based distro with KDE (like openSUSE) and whiz bang everything is working again.
The last time I tried it it crashed just from moving the panel around on the desktop. After a reboot it didn't do it again. Plasma just does odd things like that sometimes.
And if you used Plasma 4 all the way up to around Plasma 5.15/5.16, Plasma was practically unusable due to instability. It's why Plasma stopped being the default DE of choice and Gnome took over.
Plasma has improved a lot over the past year or two in particular, but it's not close to as stable as, say, Gnome or Cinnamon.
GNOME is basically the Apple of desktop environments. "You're wrong to want this super common thing, we know what's better for you and don't you defy us!"
I don't always use Fedora, but when I do it's always Fedora KDE. Sometimes I forget that the default is GNOME which leads to confusion when posting about issues I run into on Fedora lol.
I can write and run hundreds of different server and service configurations, tooling, and standardized install experience though multiple packages, run ML, do ETL, etc, and it's 90% the same and a mostly sane process that's easy to learn, and quite marketable.
DE isn't that. It's garbage. It's overly complicated, you need an indepth understand of the eco system and tons of components and even if you end up learning the stack shit is still just going to break because of the absurdly broad nature of the entire stack. And frankly none of that is a particularly good skillet to have if you want to be paid well.
There are 3 reasons to use Linux DESKTOP.
Mandatory from your org.
You fundamentally do not support Microsoft and Apple for whatever reason.
You want to tinker in an endless loop if you want anything remotely beyond the default.
The former is predictable and well managed. The latter is chaos and pain.
I like Gnome because it looks sexy and sleek, and comes default on my Ubuntu. I have a little experience with XFCE and LXDE on Proxmox and Raspberry Pis, and they're perfectly functional and great, so I don't want to besmirch them. But they give me a kinda uneasy sensation like I'm using a tamagotchi or something. I don't know if this is only because I'm using them on low-power potato computers or without proper display drivers, but they just look a little crude by comparison.
I just can't get used to GNOME. I've been using "classic" DEs for too long, so every time I try GNOME I start customizing it and end up withh a worse version of KDE
I struggled with that for ages, eventually someone said I should give a serious go of vanilla Gnome for a while and if it doesn't work out, get something else because I was trying to force Gnome to be like the Win95 UX paradigm that pretty much everyone else uses, when that's not what it was made for.
I took their advice. I tried vanilla gnome and was infuriated by it. It made me angry to use my PC. Until after a couple of days, it just clicked all of a sudden and made so much sense.
Now I find the workflow amazing. It just gets out of my way and puts the actual programs I need to use centre-stage. Honestly, lightyears ahead of anything else I've used.
I'm glad KDE has added an experimental activities view option, because that's the main thing I miss when I'm not using Gnome.
I tried to do that as well but I realized, that my main use of my Linux desktop which is gaming and having a second screen for whatever else on the side, so usually two fullscreen applications at all times isn't that well served. I'm sure if I used my PC for more serious multitasking and had limited screen space I would be avle to appreciate Gnome better.
I'm not gonna lie, I really hated the direction that Gnome went after Gnome 2. Shell just felt way too constricting for my taste. Thankfully, Cinnamon and Mate released to fill in the void.
It's ancient history now, but gnome didn't used to look like poor imitation of Apple's design. Then the dev decided that macOS UI was superior and you will like it unconditionally.
I mean, it is probably not a bad idea to take a look at one of the most well-loved DEs for ideas.. and Gnome did take only good things from it and my subjective opinion is that they have a proper vision taking many of the good things from OSX.
I use two extensions in gnome I cannot live without. Currently travelling, so I don't know their names by heart. One is for vertical workspaces, the other to visualize CPU/memory/network/disk.
I've had to use a Macbook for a month now, and let me tell you. The world of "I need some functionality = install third party stuff" is infinitely worse.
Want to launch custom terminal with global hotkey? => third party app
Want to manage window layout with keyboard shortcuts? => third party app
Want to add support for normal keys on an external keyboard? (like, home key not being dead) ? => third party app
Want better screenshot support? => third party app
Want to be able to navigate workspaces without waiting 2 second with 120Hz refresh rate monitors (because developers implemented it wrong)? => third party app
Want an alt+tab functionality that isn't a mix between bugged and useless? => third party app
The situation of gnome would be a godsent. It's so bad that I don't care about system monitoring or vertical workspaces. But, once I do, those too would be third party apps.
For me the only shell extension that matters is material-shell which gives me nice window tiling. When it works it works when there’s an update it breaks 90% of the time. I almost always have to do some hacky shit with js to get it working.
Is there another desktop with nice macOS style animations other than gnome? I mean, for me, Gnome is clearly for people who would choose macOS if no linux was available to them (me included)
Not yet, but Pantheon looks indeed promising for macOS users. But after watching this ( https://youtu.be/mBxtGVoYEws?si=mxHxl72L4f4qGGd4 ) I am sure, that it is not the distro of my choice… I find gnome (with manjaro / fedora) visually way more appealing. Also for me, elementary looks like pre bigsur macOS and feels a bit outdated where gnome feels very modern, like some recently released macOS.
Why are they doing this? Because they want to envolve and don't be stuck with old things. However, if they did the transition in a good way by giving the developers time to adapt, that I don't know
Well, most extensions still break on every GNOME major version. Some are actively maintained and will be updated quickly-ish, others not.
IMO if a lot of the small extensions were just integrated into GNOME, some of them could be a single toggle somewhere in the settings. Like a clipboard manager or Launch New Instance, or Wallpaper Switcher.
Extensions are amazing if you need one or two small fwatures but if you mod something too much it will break eventually even if there is no update to the API. This time it's a easy fix again but it's also quite universal breakage sincee they switch from GJS to some more normal JS implementation and that changes some syntax but I expect developers to implement that quickly, maybe most of it could even be done with scripts I guess.
Is it just me who has never experienced any issues with gnome extensions whatsoever? Sure, a lot of them errored out and just wouldn't work, but it wouldn't affect my system.
I mean if you are running Debian you are a-ok. So that's nice. Debian 12 has Gnome 43 I believe. Nice and stable, no extensions breakage is gonna happen there.
It just works nicely and efficiently and you can customize it in every way possible. Hell you can change the compositor or even run a subset like xfce-panel.
The only real downside is XFCE doesn't have wayland support, which in of itself is already an arguable need.
GNOME is like using a chromebook which is insulting to the ability of a computer.
This is unlikely to break GNOME Extensions. Debian and Ubuntu only ship breaking changes in new releases, so you won't get a new GNOME version without explicitly changing your sources and doing an apt full-upgrade
then you're using gnome wrong?
seriously, extensions like Dash to X go against gnome philosophy and you should probably use kde instead in that case.
extensions are intended be used for little "nice to have" features
You can easily get away with more than one or two. I typically run between eight and ten and have rarely had any issues surrounding updates.
It's really just as simple as waiting a week or two after a new Gnome version drops before you update. By then, the vast majority of the more popular extensions will have already fixed any compatibility issues or, if not, there's a very good chance that an outdated extension can be replaced by a newer alternative.
I usually stick to two or three and don't try to findmentally change the workflow but you are right, especially for small changes like this one!
Don't tell me what to do. We all have our own preferences, that's the beauty of Linux.
Personally, I have tried many different desktop environments with various customizations. I still think that GNOME + Extensions is the most beautiful and productive desktop experience for me.
Even despite the obvious flaws of GNOME, I still find it easier to customize and configure to my personal preferences than other desktop environments.
I think the point they were making was that Gnome is made for a touchpad / keyboard driven approach, so complaining that it's not something else or that it requires multiple extensions is pointless.
If you use 15 extensions to get your perfect desktop and don't say a word, no-ones going to care, just don't complain when it breaks.
If only KDE was as seamless as GNOME on my Optimus laptop… I’ve tried gaming on Wayland (I need wayland for games) on KDE and performance was awful. On GNOME Wayland it’s as good as Windows
Try with X11. Performance is great for me.
This comment reads like you've never actually tried Gnome with proper extensions (like arc menu and dash-to-panel), because those aren't even comparable in quality. I mean that when comparing to KDE as well.
I want to love XFCE, but whisker-menu doesn't support opening it on meta key release, which is baffling to me. Also the lack of night mode, which redshift is just throwing a random program into the mix. Which if you don't mind that, then you wouldn't have a problem with Gnome extensions in the first place.
Install 10 Gnome extensions to get KDE Plasma but worse. Well to each their own I suppose. At least Gnome looks nice, I can't deny that. IMHO that is the one advantage they do have over KDE Plasma.
Yeah, if I can't use dash-to-panel, I'm not using GNOME lmao. It feels like such a basic feature and a complete oversight that it isn't part of GNOME on its own.
It's not, it's a rock solid, slow moving desktop that emulates a familiar experience for every Windows user and dose so awesome, my dad couldn't use KDE or Gnome and XFCE is great too but far closer to that ancient description and harder to use than Cinnamon for most normal people, it's simply perfect for people like my Dad even compared to Windows!
Could you help me set whisker-menu to open on meta key release? This is default behavior on every other DE, yet seems completely unsupported on XFCE. It needs to explicitly be on key release, otherwise it breaks every single keyboard shortcut that relies on the meta key.
I'm glad there's discussion for it at least. This is a really annoying thing for me. Otherwise it pretty much nails most things for me. I have some other small issues, but those don't prevent swapping over to it. But right now it competes with dash-to-panel extension on Gnome for me, and Gnome is winning there. But once XFCE does have that, it's nice jumping to it for consistently, since you know your work flow won't change even from a year from now.
I just don't get the vendetta GNOME has against background processes. GNOME devs just don't use email clients, cloud sync applications, chat clients...? GNOME treats my Nextcloud sync app (which I NEED to be running at all times) as if it was malware or something.
Context for not-Gnome users? How does a desktop care about anything not desktop?
If you minimize a window, it goes into a list of "Background Apps" in the charms menu where the only option you have is to close it. There's no native systems tray.
there's a tray, it's just in the activities tab. press the super key (or click activities in the top left) to bring up the activities view, then the tray is at the bottom
That's an app launcher, not a systems tray
Well, it's where minimized apps go
I wasn't sure, what that screen looks like these days. Well, it wasn't terribly helpful to type into image search "gnome activities". 🙃
I'm confused. I have a bar of all active applications at the bottom of my screen. Even if I minimise or "hide" the window it still shows that app as an active one that I can re-fullscreen
Yeah, if you need to install extensions to make GNOME usable, GNOME is not for you. Seriously, there are other options. I can't stand using GNOME, but they have a vision they are sticking to and I can respect that.
Cinnamon is probably the best DE to give that old GNOME feel. At least in my opinion.
Gnome also has their own GNOME Classic for people yearning for the old GNOME experience. Cinnamon is probably better though.
Cinnamon is so close to the way I configured Gnome with extensions. Just that Cinnamon does not need any extensions for that. Best GTK based DE I think.
Or you just wait a little before you update or keep the extensions to small changes that are easier to update!
Nah, dash-to-panel is really good and makes it 10x better for me personally.
Conversely, after I tried vanilla gnome, I can't go back. It gets out of my way, is pretty bug free, visually consistent, and the workflow is lightyears ahead of anything else I've used.
The Win95 UX paradigm that pretty much everybody uses just seems so clunky to me.
Most distro maintainers disagree as they also ship Gnome with extensions pre loaded. Gnome with some extensions is an awesome DE.
I like and use it each day. Now who wins?
I've used GNOME for a year now.
I don't understand people calling GNOME keyboard-driven, it doesn't even support keyboard shortcuts for more than 4 workspaces, and it doesn't support tiling other than left and right.
I also feel like the plugin system is not great. The plugins break on every.single.update and you have to beg the maintainers to update them.
I agree about a dock/taskbar miss me with that :P
What frustrates me about GNOME is that it's otherwise so well-polished and smooth but just refuses to be easily customizable.
Heh, this is literally my workflow. I've been using gnome3 since release, and gnome2 before that.
They need to make the Audio switcher and gTile extensions part of "core" gnome, and then it would be perfect.
What's the keyboard shortcut for switching to workspace 5? There isn't one. And you can't configure one either. That just blows my mind
Sure, but this is exactly my biggest problem with GNOME, it's one specific workflow and anything that is even just slightly different is out of the box.
Don't get me wrong I have many positive feelings about GNOME but they've recently been overtaken by the negative ones :P
That's what I fucking hate about it, great extensions, couldn't fucking settle on an API that doesn't break every update. When will the gnome devs ever be content with themselves
there is no API, which is the problem. It's just straight code injection. That's why extensions can be so powerful. A stable API would compromise their freedom for sure
Okay then, I'm never gonna update gnome again I guess. The machine I use it on is for work, so I care about stability. Or should I have never chosen gnome in the first place?
I'm not sure that is a fair reaction. If your workflow relies heavily on many complex extensions that have a history of updating slow it is probably worth just... waiting a bit? You don't HAVE to be on the bleeding edge of Gnome releases. With a fairly minimal extensions list I've not had problems updating to new releases for a long long time
shortcuts for >4 workspaces work fine, they're just not in the default settings app https://superuser.com/a/1732752
Use pop shell for tiling and keyboard shortcuts in gnome
I guess I should give it a try. But it feels like yet another extra layer on top of GNOME. High hopes for Cosmic DE!
Why is there noticeable delay tho when you open apps like Nautilus or Settings? Not even the terminal opens instantly
Running Manjaro Gnome on a thinkpad from 2020. This is the ootb experience for me
Worth a try. However, the Debian Gnome my university offers has similar delays, so Gnome at least tends to get slow in the environments it normally gets used in. Based on obersavtion. I also don't remember noticing those delays when I tried other flavors of Manjaro like i3
I kinda had the opposite experience, switching from gnome to plasma for the more experimental features it supports on Wayland.
So far, plasma needs like a literal minute after logging in before any app can open.
That came with other weird issues, like alt-tabbing with a Fullscreen game being very finicky, sometimes refusing to alt-tab, and sometimes the taskbar breaks and stays frozen for most of the time, only unfreezing for a few seconds every minute or so.
I would sum up my experience as GNOME being more polished, working more consistently, while Plasma is perhaps better designed, more full-featured, including cases where GNOME is waiting on something to be implemented/standardized.
Is there any desktop OS that open apps instantly? Because I have never seen any, my phone definitely beats any of them.
(Tiling) window managers like i3, dwm or sway open apps instantly. If not, then this is mostly because the app you want to open is bloated/ too complex.
Why would they open them faster? They do the exact same shit. It takes a long time because the OS has to load every file into memory, and especially the first time things line the whole gtk library is loaded is taking its time.
That's just my experience
nah i think gnome is great for touchpad navigation
Gnome on Wayland shits on anything and everything for how well they've done touchpad gestures. Even MacOS. Definitely Windows as well as other Linux DEs.
Its mostly the devs and the bad decisions they make around GNOME, for me i use a lot of apps that require Server Side Window Decorations (SSD) to be useful, specifically apps like Foot terminal (default gnome console or gnome terminal is not featureful enough and neither have sixel support, whereas foot terminal does have sixel) and gnome doesnt have any SSD on wayland, and GNOME also lacks customization features and doesnt have a standardized theming API and the GNOME devs consider themes to be "unsupported". Unlike on KDE Plasma where themes have a standardized API through the toolkit (qt) and are officiall supported. Also GNOME in general lacks basic features that require extensions whereas on other desktops you have things like a systray as a default.
running in the background isnt a system tray. every other desktop on the face of the earth has a system tray. It's a basic espected feature and i use system tray functionality all the time.
Exactly! Just integrate the bloody notification tray /running apps extension.
Found the suckless user!
I get why that thing isn't implemented because it's really ugly and most of the icons there serve literally no purpose but they need a proper replacment because some apps simply need it!
If they didn't serve a purpose, people wouldn't constantly ask for them back.
That's not at all what my comment claims...
They've actually been talking about this for ages, but they won't unless it's cross-compatible with other DEs, using freedesktop standards. I wish we'd make headway on it soon.
I love vanilla gnome. I totally understand how some users prefer the flexibility of KDE, but a clean, minimal interface with easy access to workspaces is just the thing for me.
The only thing I really use is dash to dock
Me too, but tbh it should at least include vitals and gsconnect.
It's there a reason you don't use a tiling WM with no desktop environment if those are the three things you are looking for?
Most of those require some configuration out of the box and target power-users who are comfortable with manually editing text-based config files (or editing header files and then recompiling from source if you're one of those people). One of Gnomes big selling points is accessibility, which none of the tiling WMs offer in any significant way.
If it still allowed me to do everything I wanted to in an easy enough way, I wouldn't be opposed. I would say in short, I don't know enough about it to know whether I'd like it.
I'm tired of GNOME messing with it's API but hopefully this is the last time since they're switching to a standard system. Besides that, it's my favorite DE on Linux. I have to give plasma 6 a shot when it comes out but right now GNOME feels just right compared to other desktops.
Haha, gnome becoming stable. What a bunch of malarkey
Much more stable and polished than KDE and I am running KDE myself. I think it only makes sense to run GNOME if you like the vanilla experience.
Gnome is phenomenally stable considering it's a modern desktop.
You only really get more stable by going to XFCE or something, which is basically on life support at this stage.
Literally the reason why the Linux world went from Plasma being the standard to Gnome being the standard is because KDE was an unstable mess and Gnome was super stable.
Gnome doesn't have an extension API. That is why it is prone to breakage, since the code is injected into the actual shell. The upshot of this is that extensions can do pretty much anything. The downside is there is no stable API.
Personally, I like the current system. I am biased, I am a trusted review on https://extensions.gnome.org
The reason I don't use Gnome is because it's only usable after you've installed a bunch of extensions yet after every update, half the extensions are always broken.
Same. I don't understand why it is the most popular desktop on Linux. It's like the Windows 8 of Linux GUIs.
I don't understand how you could say it's like Windows 8? I don't really see any meaningful similarities. Gnome is very much just its own thing.
It's the other DEs that are like windows. Start button bottom left that opens a cramped app menu. Taskbar on bottom. Clock on bottom right. Minimise, maximise, close buttons on the top right of each program. The Win95 UX paradigm, basically.
GNOME feels to me like it's designed for a tablet, not a keyboard and mouse. That's part of why I don't like it.
Gnome is extremely keyboard focused. Less so mouse, though.
I don't like desktop GUIs that aren't designed for a mouse and make you memorize keyboard shortcuts to be usable. Keyboard shortcuts are nice to have but shouldn't be mandatory, IMO.
That's why I prefer KDE and XFCE.
It is designed for a mouse, and they don't make you memorise keyboard shortcuts. It's very usable. It's not mandatory.
I really don't know where you're getting this from.
First you say it's tablet-focused, then you switch to saying it's solely keyboard-focused?
You can prefer Win95 UX all you want, nobody is stopping you.
It looks to me like it's designed for a tablet, and its fans tell me it's designed around keyboard shortcuts. I hate it.
Same, Cosmic looks very promising. I'm looking for Budgie 11 too, that could be something good.
COSMIC has been just about the only thing keeping me from my usual distrohopping. I'm so hyped for system76 to release it.
Funny, GNOME 45 will break every extension without exception
Yeah, this is a big shame. I don't have context on the technical details but JS runtimes have been supporting CJS and ES modules in parallel for a decade now. Was it really too much work to support both for some time?
Of course I say this as someone who has contributed zero time to adding this support.
GNOME bad
Plasma good
XFCE better
I couldn't get used to plasma. I dunno why. I really like the gnome style applications window over a start menu.
Liking the fullscreen app search thingamafuck is your prerogative even if I feel this kind of UX is only at home on a mobile phone (also I'm fairly sure Plasma can also do that with some fennagling--)
The thing people (me included) detest about GNOME has very little to do with that anyway, peeps don't like how locked down it is and how it refuses to support certain features thought to be 'basic', so you have to use extensions.... Which can be janky on occasion -- And definitely will get abandoned by their creators and disabled when you upgrade GNOME version.
Valid. I'm a pretty new Linux convert (6 months or so) and gnome is what I landed on. I tried KDE Plasma and it was okay, maybe I am not giving it enough of a chance. I noticed the desktop and windows were kind of flickering as well, not sure why. Nvidia graphics card, so it's already a bit janky anyway.
Yeah, NVidia+Linux means some jankiness.
NVidia+Linux+Wayland and at that point you're just engaging in self-flagellation.
I'm a plasma user and I would also prefer a fullscreen start menu. Ideally a fullscreen krunner with all its amazing bells and whistles.
We each have to make the compromise that suits us best. I doubt most people think one desktop or another is perfect.
You can change out the Windows-style start menu on Plasma for the "Application Launcher" button which will be a fullscreen app launcher like in GNOME. Or are you wanting something different?
I also prefer a larger app launcher. Like why should it be small, how is that actually better for usability? Why have it cramped in the bottom left, what's that all about?
It seems to me that people do it that way because that's how they're used to it ever since Win95. Not because it's actually better. But idk.
Thank you! I wasn't aware of Plasma Drawer.
I love the design, but it seems in my machine there are zero animations (not even a fade in when opening it) is this intentional or something wrong with my setup? Not a deal breaker, but a bit jarring with how smooth the rest of the desktop is.
How so?
Sounds like Ubuntu underneath your Plasma. I've had the exact same experience when using Neon, Kubuntu, and Ubuntu+KDE. I install any non-Ubuntu based distro with KDE (like openSUSE) and whiz bang everything is working again.
I've experienced desktop crashing on Plasma, never happened on other DEs.
The last time I tried it it crashed just from moving the panel around on the desktop. After a reboot it didn't do it again. Plasma just does odd things like that sometimes.
And if you used Plasma 4 all the way up to around Plasma 5.15/5.16, Plasma was practically unusable due to instability. It's why Plasma stopped being the default DE of choice and Gnome took over.
Plasma has improved a lot over the past year or two in particular, but it's not close to as stable as, say, Gnome or Cinnamon.
GNOME is basically the Apple of desktop environments. "You're wrong to want this super common thing, we know what's better for you and don't you defy us!"
You are free to fork it at anytime. I really can’t hate them for having a cohesive vision they plan on developing.
That's fair, and people have.
Yep. GNOME is terrible. Unfortunately, it's the default desktop for most distros, so it's most new users' experience of "what Linux is".
I don't always use Fedora, but when I do it's always Fedora KDE. Sometimes I forget that the default is GNOME which leads to confusion when posting about issues I run into on Fedora lol.
Setting up and adding things to linux until you break it is nature's way of teaching you linux. there's a bunch of other DEs you can try!
Big old case of Stockholm syndrome.
I can write and run hundreds of different server and service configurations, tooling, and standardized install experience though multiple packages, run ML, do ETL, etc, and it's 90% the same and a mostly sane process that's easy to learn, and quite marketable.
DE isn't that. It's garbage. It's overly complicated, you need an indepth understand of the eco system and tons of components and even if you end up learning the stack shit is still just going to break because of the absurdly broad nature of the entire stack. And frankly none of that is a particularly good skillet to have if you want to be paid well.
There are 3 reasons to use Linux DESKTOP.
The former is predictable and well managed. The latter is chaos and pain.
Covered in the simple use cases. It's fine if you want a desktop in is absolute most basic state.
I'm just saying, so this garage "it's about tinkering".
Me, casually running Mate and enjoying on stable and customizable it is. I'll let you guys fight while I enjoy my polished experience!
I would love Wayland support tho...
Same, I love Mate but cannot use it due to it not supporting fractional scaling (I use a 4K TV as my monitor).
I would have thought a 4K TV was enough to use 200% on, no?
No, since it's far too big for me to use
Depends wythey have a 4K TV. If it's beccause they want to see more apps at the same time, no
base gnome + blur my shell is enough for me
This is the way👌
I like Gnome because it looks sexy and sleek, and comes default on my Ubuntu. I have a little experience with XFCE and LXDE on Proxmox and Raspberry Pis, and they're perfectly functional and great, so I don't want to besmirch them. But they give me a kinda uneasy sensation like I'm using a tamagotchi or something. I don't know if this is only because I'm using them on low-power potato computers or without proper display drivers, but they just look a little crude by comparison.
gnome looks decent out the box the rest need work to look good but can look better imo
I just can't get used to GNOME. I've been using "classic" DEs for too long, so every time I try GNOME I start customizing it and end up withh a worse version of KDE
I struggled with that for ages, eventually someone said I should give a serious go of vanilla Gnome for a while and if it doesn't work out, get something else because I was trying to force Gnome to be like the Win95 UX paradigm that pretty much everyone else uses, when that's not what it was made for.
I took their advice. I tried vanilla gnome and was infuriated by it. It made me angry to use my PC. Until after a couple of days, it just clicked all of a sudden and made so much sense.
Now I find the workflow amazing. It just gets out of my way and puts the actual programs I need to use centre-stage. Honestly, lightyears ahead of anything else I've used.
I'm glad KDE has added an experimental activities view option, because that's the main thing I miss when I'm not using Gnome.
I tried to do that as well but I realized, that my main use of my Linux desktop which is gaming and having a second screen for whatever else on the side, so usually two fullscreen applications at all times isn't that well served. I'm sure if I used my PC for more serious multitasking and had limited screen space I would be avle to appreciate Gnome better.
chuckles in i3
Gnome has been rudderless since 3.x. I said it.
Xfce has been my daily driver for a reason.
Can you sell me on Xfce? Haven't really tried it. How does it compare to KDE in terms of customization?
I'm not gonna lie, I really hated the direction that Gnome went after Gnome 2. Shell just felt way too constricting for my taste. Thankfully, Cinnamon and Mate released to fill in the void.
Gnome devs: you will take what we make and you'll like it!
Also gnome devs: Apple did nothing wrong
What is the context for "Apple did nothing wrong"? When did they say that?
It's ancient history now, but gnome didn't used to look like poor imitation of Apple's design. Then the dev decided that macOS UI was superior and you will like it unconditionally.
I mean, it is probably not a bad idea to take a look at one of the most well-loved DEs for ideas.. and Gnome did take only good things from it and my subjective opinion is that they have a proper vision taking many of the good things from OSX.
I use two extensions in gnome I cannot live without. Currently travelling, so I don't know their names by heart. One is for vertical workspaces, the other to visualize CPU/memory/network/disk.
I've had to use a Macbook for a month now, and let me tell you. The world of "I need some functionality = install third party stuff" is infinitely worse.
Want to launch custom terminal with global hotkey? => third party app
Want to manage window layout with keyboard shortcuts? => third party app
Want to add support for normal keys on an external keyboard? (like, home key not being dead) ? => third party app
Want better screenshot support? => third party app
Want to be able to navigate workspaces without waiting 2 second with 120Hz refresh rate monitors (because developers implemented it wrong)? => third party app
Want an alt+tab functionality that isn't a mix between bugged and useless? => third party app
The situation of gnome would be a godsent. It's so bad that I don't care about system monitoring or vertical workspaces. But, once I do, those too would be third party apps.
For me the only shell extension that matters is material-shell which gives me nice window tiling. When it works it works when there’s an update it breaks 90% of the time. I almost always have to do some hacky shit with js to get it working.
Use KDE, it's stuffed with features to begin with
I love Gnome and Adwaita, the quick settings are awesome.
<3 some xfce.
Is there another desktop with nice macOS style animations other than gnome? I mean, for me, Gnome is clearly for people who would choose macOS if no linux was available to them (me included)
Have you tried Elementary OS?
No wayland.
Not yet, but Pantheon looks indeed promising for macOS users. But after watching this ( https://youtu.be/mBxtGVoYEws?si=mxHxl72L4f4qGGd4 ) I am sure, that it is not the distro of my choice… I find gnome (with manjaro / fedora) visually way more appealing. Also for me, elementary looks like pre bigsur macOS and feels a bit outdated where gnome feels very modern, like some recently released macOS.
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Why are they doing this? Because they want to envolve and don't be stuck with old things. However, if they did the transition in a good way by giving the developers time to adapt, that I don't know
Well, most extensions still break on every GNOME major version. Some are actively maintained and will be updated quickly-ish, others not.
IMO if a lot of the small extensions were just integrated into GNOME, some of them could be a single toggle somewhere in the settings. Like a clipboard manager or Launch New Instance, or Wallpaper Switcher.
Extensions are amazing if you need one or two small fwatures but if you mod something too much it will break eventually even if there is no update to the API. This time it's a easy fix again but it's also quite universal breakage sincee they switch from GJS to some more normal JS implementation and that changes some syntax but I expect developers to implement that quickly, maybe most of it could even be done with scripts I guess.
My extensions work fine on fedora
Mine did too until I updated to Fedora 38 and got GNOME 44
I installed the Gnome 45 beta and everything seems to have already been updated to work.
I have a few extensions to change Gnome in Fedora and have a great experience with them.
So did I until I updated my GNOME to 44 and all my extensions stopped working
Change scary, my extension I used that is unmaintained won't work in Gnome 45 and it's Gnomes fault.
I like Vanilla GNOME. Nothing compares.
I have abandoned the DE. It is nothing but bloat now.
No reason to besmirch all DEs when it's Gnome devs specifically who have been on a crusade to amputate Gnome for a decade now.
Considering I'm shitposting on a meme, username checks out
Is it just me who has never experienced any issues with gnome extensions whatsoever? Sure, a lot of them errored out and just wouldn't work, but it wouldn't affect my system.
(Those are issues)
I mean if you are running Debian you are a-ok. So that's nice. Debian 12 has Gnome 43 I believe. Nice and stable, no extensions breakage is gonna happen there.
This is like the primary reason I use XFCE
It just works nicely and efficiently and you can customize it in every way possible. Hell you can change the compositor or even run a subset like xfce-panel.
The only real downside is XFCE doesn't have wayland support, which in of itself is already an arguable need.
GNOME is like using a chromebook which is insulting to the ability of a computer.
Laugh in Cinnamon..
I was grow up using windows xp and 7 btw.. XD
Just write them yourself.
Me on my way to put "45", "46", "47"... in every manifest so I can break my desktop more efficiently
apt update; apt upgrade
This is unlikely to break GNOME Extensions. Debian and Ubuntu only ship breaking changes in new releases, so you won't get a new GNOME version without explicitly changing your sources and doing an
apt full-upgradegnome loves to change its api
When you update GNOME, extensions that aren't explicitly compatible, break.
I don't blame the extension developers. A lot of extensions should just be native features of GNOME.
Yeah but some extensions are central to me being productive with GNOME at all
then you're using gnome wrong?
seriously, extensions like Dash to X go against gnome philosophy and you should probably use kde instead in that case.
extensions are intended be used for little "nice to have" features
I'm not talking about Dash to Dock or sth like that. I'm talking about