Beer snobs by any other name run KDE.
I like Gnome
Fight me
When Gnome 3 first came out, it was comically unusable, but now a lot of the big issues have been fixed and I find it only mildly idiosyncratic. I like the KDE user experience more but I also think KDE is much buggier. I switched to gnome last year after getting tired of dealing with my desktop freezing/crashing and it’s been pretty smooth sailing. My main complaints are:
- Switching applications instead of windows on alt-tab (has any computer user ever wanted this?)
- Modal dialogues have window decorations that inexplicably move the parent window when dragged
- Typing in Files starts searching instead of navigating to a file/directory with the typed name
- Opening an archive extracts it automatically instead of looking inside
The default gnome applications are also quite inferior to their KDE counterparts (Dolphin is leagues ahead of Files, Kate is much better than Gnome’s text editor). But I guess you could install dolphin on gnome if you really wanted, so I won’t hold that against the DE itself.
Points 2 and 4 drive me nuts. For 2 in particular there must be some rationale, but the amount of times I’ve needed to see something behind the dialog, to have to cancel after having navigated the filesystem… Just bonkers.
iirc (gnome) tweaks has a toggle for separating dialogs from parents.
That sounds like it should be controlled by a modifier key. Like click and drag just moves the current window while ctrl+drag moves the parent window as well and shift+drag moves all windows owned by that same program. Right click to cancel the whole move operation from the start of the click, then allow dynamically switching modes mid-drag.
When did you last try out KDE? Plasma 6 improved UX a lot. And based on the current roadmap, it’ll keep improving faster than Gnome
Every day from 2021-2025. The UX is already great I just found it very unstable and buggy
Surprisingly recent usage. I haven’t seen bugs in my usual workflows since forever. Maybe I just internalized better? I definitely haven’t seen any crashes due to plasma
Gnome being the default in most major distros for the last 30 years is why Linux hasn’t taken over the desktop market.
CMM.
are you sure its gnome and not the hundreds of other problems that appear on kde and xfce too?
MacOS lovers might try but we don’t have a lot of them who switched over to Gnome
Idk I gave it to my sister and she had 0 complaints. I don’t think it’s perfect, but a sane default choice.
Sarcastic comment or not, not knowing that you could use something other than Gnome (or what Gnome is in the first place) was the reason I avoided Linux as much as possible when I was forced to use it during my first year in university
Yah, I’m not even being sarcastic. I think it’s over-simplistic interface and disinterest in keeping extensions working over the years has been a major pissoff of people that stuck their nose in and then noped out. Maybe former Mac users could handle it since they’re used to being herded around, but expecting Windows users to come into that bullshit and feel at home was a big mistake.
I loved it when I first encountered it. It was simple, elegant, and easy to use. Over time though, things got bad. I relied on an extension to show the taskbar on all monitors as well as the “Other locations” tab in the file manager to see disk usage plus some other things but these two broke the camel’s back. Every upgrade the extension stopped working for a few months, but at least I could delay upgrading for a bit. That was until the extension maintainer went AWOL, so no update was made for at least a year.
The “other locations” tab showed disk usage just a click away from my usual workflows. As someone who has a habit of making high utilisation of my disks, keeping an eye on disk usage was required. That was until Gnome decided we were too good for such an easy location so now the only place to see disk usage is in the disk usage analyzer that 1) is rarely used 2) takes a while to start up while it’s scanning the entire disk. My habit of checking disk usage thus died. Until I had to upgrade to the new distro version. And it turned out I didn’t have enough storage left to carry out the installation so my laptop bricked itself halfway. I was lucky that I could boot with a rescue image to clear some space and continue the upgrade but the first thing I did when it was finished was to install Plasma and kill Gnome.
I bought a mac mini to run some cad software as everything else I have is Linux KDE. Hated it so much after a few months I bought a laptop and win 10 IoT LTSC license… Gnome is the only desktop environment that pissed me off as much as macOS, and that’s after giving it a good try recently in Ubuntu Pro while working out a new auto roll out solution for work.
Pretty art, but this meme is really getting boring. I think people are just regurgitating “GNOME bad” because they heard it from some tech youtuber instead of actually trying GNOME for themselves. IMHO GNOME is awesome. It’s a bit different, but very comfortable when you get used to it. And definitely reliable.
I often see people using some h4x0r i3wm setup scrolling through workspaces and windows for literal minutes trying to find some app they were using earlier, while on GNOME you can just see everything spatially organised in the activities view. They think they have it “tailored for their needs”, but they end up with an unmanageable config file with bits copy-pasted from the internet that is getting harder to understand over time and keeps breaking. I know it from my own experience too, I got tired of it and came back to GNOME.
But if you wanna go down that route, GNOME is also highly customisable. There’s lots of extensions that let you change every aspect of it. If you know some JavaScript, you can make your own, there’s a decent community and documentation. Things like Niri or Cosmic actually started off as GNOME extensions.
Customisable isn’t an adjective I’d use for gnome. It might be more hackable but UX customization is broken in Gnome.
Nah, it’s ok, if you fit exactly into the niche Gnome envisions. Which i don’t.
Also, fuck anything outside Gnome using their software.
Cough cough server side decorations in wayland being sabotaged cough cough
I have certain little foibles with gnome nothing major. If I had a laptop it would be the desktop I use on it. For my main rig it is KDE or maybe Cosmic when that becomes stable enough.
My god, I really don’t like Gnome.
I love Gnome but it fucking sucks
I’m the guy who actually likes and uses gnome as my daily driver.
It’s for people who want to spend less time complaining about desktop environments and more time actually doing stuff.
Hilarious, thank you
Agreed. It’s prettier then KDE. More same fonts, those are all over the place in KDE. Differentt fonts and different sizes… no thanks.
Gnome is perfect for me.
Agreed, the workflow is good for me.
So that’s why they went “you liked vertical desktops? now you will like horizontal layout. Don’t thank us”
Oh, you didn’t want to be disoriented by all the apps flying apart in every direction when ever you wanted to use the task bar? Oh you wanted a system tray not hidden behind a menu?
Oh, well you can just use a plug in … just pray we don’t update and break all the plug ins anytime soon.
Gnome is quite good with dash-to-dock and the system tray plugins, but it does kinda suck both of those need to be plugins.
as somebody who used gnome, its cool but only if its installed on good hardware. my potato pc was so slow under gnome, so i just installed lxqt on it lol
Coming from MacOS into Linux and landing on Debian/Gnome encouraged me into the world of keyboard-driven navigation.
I got into customising keybindings and moved to a split programmable mech keyboard not too long after. Three years ago I made the switch to Sway and now on Niri (all transitions switched off) on my laptop. My desktop workstation still is on Gnome and I switch between the two machines (with full keyboard-driven navigation) seamlessly.
Yes, some extensions do break on updates but I use extensions very minimally and they get patched relatively quickly. For the experience Gnome provides, I dont mind the couple of days that “blur my shell” is broken. The DE remains stable and the keyboard-driven workflow is fast.
Now that I daily drive a WM (on my laptop) I am thankful I started on Gnome upon landing in Linux. It still remains the best keyboard-driven DE out of the box for Linux first-timers. Perhaps Cosmic will be the other DE in a few years.
I hope Gnome sticks to its phislosphy as it truly provides something unique, stable and a great entry point into the world of keyboard-driven workflows out of the box.
I don’t really see how GNOME is any more keyboard focused than, say, KDE. If anything, other DEs give you much more freedom for a keyboard workflow.
I think their point was that MacOS -> GNOME was a another transition than a diffetent desktop environment would have been, which led to them naturally discovering more keyboard-oriented workflows. Not that GNOME is any more keyboard oriented than other DEs.
I took sort of the opposite route. Lifelong windows user. Tried Linux out several times from like 08-12/13. Moved to Linux full time, and landed on Fedora, and absolutely loved it because of Gnome. It was different enough from Windows that it felt like a fresh start. Have been daily driving it since then.
Two weeks ago I got my first ever apple device because I wanted something genuine reliable for school that didn’t have any weird hiccups, and I just could not stomach the idea of going back to windows. It’s similar enough to gnome that I am adjusting pretty well. Still have fedora on my desktop and backup laptop, though
Hey, at least it doesn’t run windows.
Things can always be worse
