Facts
3mon 27d ago by pawb.social/u/OwOarchist in linuxmemes from pawb.social
(If you know where I stole this from, I love you.)
It deserves all the criticism.
And it is by far my favorite DE.
As a GNOME user since forever, I find it fascinating how much time KDE users spend thinking about GNOME. They seem so obsessed with customization, yet seem incapable of understanding that people could have preferences different from their own.
yet seem incapable of understanding that people could have preferences different from their own.
Perfect description of Gnome developers.
"What's the use case?" Issue closed itself to shit.
And that's why they're so out of touch.
Oh yes, I forgot about that time they tracked down and kidnapped KDE contributors never to be heard of again, depriving the poor FOSS community from their freedom of choice.
So apps look the way they are made?
When I use KDE apps in GNOME they also look like KDE apps. Obviously - that's the way they are made. If I want something else than what someone else created I will use something else, not complain about how they didn't create it the way I personally prefer.
Lmao you hyperbole'd your own statement quoted back at you.
Or have there been cases of KDE preferers/devs doing this to gnome preferers/devs?
I was talking about users, not developers.
I'm under the crazy opinion that developers are free to develop whatever they want, and users are free to use whatever they want. If they are unhappy they can use something else or become developers.
If I develop something you do not want to use I do not restrict your freedom. GNOME developers are not restricting your freedom by creating a product that's according to my preferences. They are giving us both freedom to choose what we prefer. The fact that GNOME is so different from KDE increases freedom of choice.
I don't get what is so hard to understand here.
Just want to remind everyone that the point of this scene is that Draper is an unstable and insecure man that is actually obsessed about how everyone around him are perceiving him, all the time. So this line is just stupid bravado, because he thinks the phrase projects the image he wants others to have of himself. He is lying because he actually thinks about what others think of him constantly. He works in advertising ffs.
We don't, except for when gnome is installed by default.
Exactly, or when they forced their tools as "standard" forcing KDE to adapt.
As both a Cinnamon and KDE user, you can tell you're using an app made for Gnome because it either outright doesn't do anything, or it does the barest least nuanced most stereotypical version of that thing. Oh great, another empty fuckpuke window that doesn't respect the system theme with an empty hamburger menu and one button in the very top-left that says "Do Something".
I don't know of a package manager with a GTK filter.
I don’t know of a package manager with a GTK filter.
This I could agree with, but the problem here is a lacking feature in package managers, not the fact that apps that you don't personally enjoy using exist.
I don't particularly enjoy using KDE apps, but thankfully the K-centric naming convention make them really easy to avoid.
It's because we wasted so much time on the Gnome side of the fence, cracking jokes at KDE, and now we know what we were missing and we want our wasted time back.
The criticisms I've heard:
- You can't customize it!
- Hey, extensions don't count, because sometimes they break between major version upgrades!
- The developers are mean! They didn't even take my suggestions!
- The design philosophy is bad! It doesn't even want to be windows!
I have been using versions of GNOME for about 5 years now and I have always been able to customize my DE to a very high degree. Out of every random extension I've tried, probably 80% work, and that is even counting unmaintained ones that haven't seen an update in years. And out of those extensions I chose to keep using, I've only have an occasional stability issue. I think I've actually experienced that once since 2021 when I switched to Linux as a daily driver.
Maybe I'm just asocial but I don't expect to reach out to my software devs and influence them at all. Unless I reported a bug and they were a dick about it, I'd probably never complain about the devs. And lastly I think the design philosophy is excellent. Maximizing screen real estate while being quite flexible, rejecting everything shitty about windows and incorporating everything good about macOS.
Every problem I've had is so far outweighed by the positives that it's not remotely close. It makes sense to me that it's so popular. KDE on the other hand... I am glad it exists but I wish it were better. I feel like it literally wants to be windows. People say it is SO customizable and I was convinced to give the latest version a chance recently. It does not feel like finished software to me, tbh. Before I could really give it a shot I needed to customize the UI to be more minimalist. I found the UI to do that quickly. Within five minutes I had crashed the desktop several times, and I felt unable to achieve what I wanted at all. The drag and drop UI for the taskbar area wasn't stable in my experience. It kept crashing AND wouldn't do what I wanted.
What criticism of GNOME is so well deserved? I just don't see any criticism of it that I feel is deserved. Meanwhile KDE seems janky to me and to this day I haven't once seen anyone hate on it. You'd think it was basically perfect.
When saying it deserves "all" the criticism, I might have been hyperbolic
I agree with most of what you said.
The keep it simple philosophy I agree with, but there are a few UI decisions, a few missing features I couldn't wrap my head around. They tend to be rectified in the end because it's common sense, but it takes a very long time and it can be frustrating. I'm sorry my memory is shit so I only remember the sentiment and don't have specifics. I do have one recent example, I needed to change a very simple shortcut. The system doesn't allow it and it feels arbitrary.
Extensions are really great. Some are absolute gems, and they tend to work perfectly. But the fact some are almost mandatory to have sane default is an issue. Especially when you have multiple devices. I don't think most people want a useless popup telling you the program has launched (or the window is activated, what is it again?), popup which once clicked won't even open said program. The extensions graveyard is hard to see though. I had recently a good one that wouldn't be ported to latest gnome, killing my linux tablet workflow. and can anyone tell me what the app menu with icons in seemingly random order is for?
I've used KDE for 4 years and mostly liked it, but I had tons of issues, and very few with Gnome.
KDE users I know your experience might be different but I'm telling you how it went for me. Gnome, while imperfect in this regard, has been much better. I tried Plasma 6 when it came out and it was pretty much the same for me, but I will give it another try at one point.
You seem to have a really balanced point of view and that's good. I wanted to like KDE but on the other hand it reads as windows 2000 to my eyes and it bothers me. I did like some things about the interface but overall it felt too busy for me. I hadn't tried it in years until the recent plasma update and people raving about it and its customizability convinced me to give it another shot. One of the first things I did was try to customize the top bar and task bar to be cleaner. It crashed several times very quickly. That's a really bad first impression. The bugs I experienced immediately were as many as I'd seen in years of GNOME experience.
In a perfect world though, yes, GNOME would be more customizable, particularly the overview mode. I do not like it at all. On the other hand, it's not so bad I wouldn't just live with it if I didn't have other options. I do though. To launch any app not common enough to put on my dock, I use ulauncher. It's not the best but it usually works well as an alfred-style launcher app.
I hated macs until OSX and since then I've hated windows more. Just mentioning because I'm sure someone will read what I've written and think I'm a Mac guy. Which was true for a bit but I've grown to dislike macs a lot as well. Their OS is still better than windows though!
ulauncher
Out of curiosity: why is it you don't like the overview? That's one of my favorite aspects of Gnome, and the first thing I tried to replicate in KDE
Edit: I do customize it a bit with extensions though. For example when I start typing and the search bar is immediately focused. And a few other things, like middle click to close windows
What I dislike about the overview is that it takes over the whole screen and also feels a little sluggish. I like the ulauncher loads really quickly and on top of the current UI, blocking virtually nothing from view. Also I like having a few bells and whistles that ulauncher has, like the ability to type a quick math problem and it functions like a basic calculator.
edit: I just realized that I'm mislabeling the thing I dislike. It's the "show all applications" feature in reality. I use overview a lot just to keep track of what I have open, and I like it, but it serves a different purpose than what I want, which is just a very quick and unobtrusive way to launch an app not on the dock.
Indeed I see how the "take over the whole screen" could be annoying.
It does simple math as well though! As for the sluggishness I don't notice it. You can speed up animations with "Just perfection", but again an extra extension (although this one is very well maintained)
What version of KDE did you try on what distro?
The second to last time last time I tried it, when I had all the trouble with crashing, it was in a vm. I think it was on fedora. It was a pretty current version at the time. Maybe 6 months ago. Then a few days ago I installed it as an alternate DE on the current version of pop os. I had some bizarre scaling issues. Didn't check the version that time. Got frustrated and immediately uninstalled it.
I remember looking at some point, and Gnome had roughly 4x the number of developers that KDE had. If you want the best (most stable, most well tested, most feature full, etc.) programs, you basically have to use some Gnome programs. That was one of the deciding factors that pushed me to go with Gnome. If I was going to have to use Gnome programs anyhow, and they worked best with Gnome, then I thought I should use Gnome. My experience was that Gnome programs don't really play well with KDE, but that KDE programs generally work OK on Gnome.
I really like the customizability of KDE, but I like many of the defaults of Gnome. Unfortunately, if you don't like some of Gnome's defaults, it's real pain in the ass to change them. Personally, even though I liked a lot of Gnome's defaults, I absolutely hated some other ones. If it weren't for extensions there's no way at all I could use it. Luckily, some of the biggest misfeatures are so widely recognized that there are dozens of extensions to choose from to fix them. OTOH KDE's customizability led to some issues too. I remember having some weird interactions between things because settings A, B and C don't necessarily work well together. But, at least those settings are built into the desktop environment, and you're not relying on some random dude's hobby project for a critical system setting.
At the moment, I'm pretty happy with Gnome, and most days it just gets out of my way and lets me do what I want to do. That's something I never ever got with Windows. It was always a pain in my ass. And, it's something that was only ever 90% true with OSX. Great defaults, but that last 10% is a real pain in the ass. Gnome's extensions let me get much closer to 100%. I have to admit though, that I do dread the day that I have to upgrade it and all the extensions break.
I agree about stability, but people swear KDE is super stable nowadays so I think I will check it again.
I have to admit though, that I do dread the day that I have to upgrade it and all the extensions break.
Many get updated quite fast, a few you can simply fix by changing the version in the conf file. Still, it’s annoying.
I'm happy I'm not the only one to experience KDE like that. I've had far better experiences with XFCE than with KDE, but I keep going back to GNOME because of the user experience. I'm happy people enjoy KDE though, so I don't generally feel a strong need to trash it online. But my god can the user base be insufferable at times.
Yeah, a part of me wants to vent my frustration with kde since I truly wanted it to be good, but it wasn't, ime.
Now for some reason I just had an idea. It would be pretty awesome if there could be a desktop layout standard configuration format such that on any DE that supports it, you could just load up a config file and get a very similar UI on any DE. I know, it's a pipe dream but it would be cool.
Edit: and yes I know, GNOME haters. GNOME devs would be the first to reject this idea.
KDE on the other hand... I am glad it exists but I wish it were better. I feel like it literally wants to be windows.
KDE's approach was ‘Windows, but with even more dialogs and crammed lists’ for at least twenty years. And it also felt clunky way back then. People on Lemmy keep saying that Plasma is good now, but I read the complaints and it's like nothing changed.
I find gnome easier to customize, something always messes up with kde for me when setting up my ui, gnome also lets you use your computer and watch videos while customizing, kde plasma takes over your screen and you cant see your windows.
Been using GNOME since ~ 3.8/3.10 (so i guess a while now) and out of the box it mostly just works for me. I have maybe 3-4 extensions none of which I desperately rely on (although TopIcons is clutch) and I agree with most design choices. I've thought about switching some times but I think all I would do is try to replicate my GNOME workflow elswhere so why bother?
I started my Linux journey about 5 years ago on mint with the cinnamon DE. It's not the fanciest but it got the job done, no real complaints.
Recently I made the change to debian without too much thought on the DE and I was presented with gnome. Took me about 5 minutes before I was looking up alternatives.
Now on KDE plasma, and out of the 3 I've tried it's definitely my favourite.
Plasma has improved A LOT in the past year. Like a year ago I hated it. now? I daily drive it. I hate to use this phrase but everything just works.
I was kinda disappointed with the 6.6 release as I really just want dedicated virtual desktops per monitor but their compromise actually isn't that bad. I just had to turn off animation for changing workspaces and it's fine. Even tiling works A LOT better on Plasma than it used to and dare I saw kinda works better/is more smooth than Sway and the like and I'm not even using krohnkite. you can quickly toggle the splits for windows and even do vim style navigation between windows. you can even do vim navigation with windows that aren't tiled.
Plus the stuff they have packaged in is just better than most alternatives out there. I love Konsole. it has everything I need. and Kate is also a fantastic IDE you can REALLY customize that is slept on by many people. Dolphin is great too. It's nice having a DE that just has all the stuff you need right out of the box and you don't really have to change any of the defaults.
Dolphin is surprisingly powerful. I was using a tool (SshPilot) to handle my remote connections and it had an option to browse a remote computer's filesystem. I was curious what that would look like and it just used my local Dolphin windows and opened up my remote computer and easily browse the files there. I'm so used to using an external program like FileZilla for stuff like that.
Full per-display virtual desktops is actively being worked on, currently aiming for 6.7 hopefully.
Yeah I agree. GNOME 3 is hideous, completely unusable. I don't know why they had to ruin the perfection of GNOME 2.
I also liked GNOME 2 a lot. Current GNOME is okay for what it is, but it feels too dumbed down for my tastes. For example the default editor has basically no features compared to gedit back in the day. The desktop is kind of nice on a laptop with a good touchpad and gestures though.
It was developed and released during a time where people obsessed with touch interfaces thanks to deficient computing devices like phones and tablets. So many people were wholly convinced that these things were going to completely replace general purpose computing, so projects like Gnome, which were being run by Red Hat, had to follow along one way or another, though they probably did so willingly.
In any case, I am SO glad those days are over. It was far, far worse than the AI hype that we have to put up with today.
You have a right to that opinion but Gnome 4(0) was released a year and a half ago, and we're on 49 now. Also, I think it's beautiful and elegant.
I bet it's lightweight as fuck, tho...
Yup! Still the default on HP-UX too!
I mean I don't dislike it.
I do dislike it. Sorry everyone.
Given that it isn't 1994 anymore, your opinion is extremely reasonable.
I don't really like real CDE, but NsCDE is one of my favorite desktops
Heavy dose of nostalgia there. I remember the Sun SPARCstations at uni and changing my desktop environment every other week.
That's what a computer should look like, imo
So tired of all this oversimplification and enlarging of UI elements so they don't disappear behind peoples' thumbs
I use a MOUSE, not a HAND
/s
Gnome is very competently made except it's made for a different genre of person to me, and their attitude towards customisation is outright disdainful. You install an extension or mess around in tweaks and gnome looks at you like you just used the salad fork for seafood.
I think it's made for people who like Macs or sth.
Wouldn't be a problem(people can use whatever makes them happy) if the gnome Devs shit attitude didn't trickle outwards and harm customizability in other environments.
I hopped from a fully customized AwesomeWM install on Arch to Gnome on Debian and... there is something to be said about having your OS look & work cleanly out of the box.
just used the salad fork for seafood.
What's wrong with using the same fork for salad and seafood?
Posh person nonsense. At fancy parties you're supposed to use different food weapons for each course and work your way from the outside in. Fairly sure the only reason it was invented was so rich ppl could show off how many fancy pieces of cutlery they owned.
Which is the vibe I get from Gnome's design and its devs' attitude in general. "Fancy party". A bunch of dumbass rules you have no influence over and which people will sneer at you for breaking.
Serious question. Why is there an expectation that your DE should be customizable? Isn't the fact that you can choose one in the first place a customization?
Why is there an expectation that your DE should be customizable?
Why wouldn't there be? It's Linux. Everything should be customizable.
And it is. If you don't like it fork it
I'm sure that's the attitude that will help make Linux a prominent desktop OS among the general population. /s
Because the point of Linux is I get to make it my own
If I wanted to use what the Devs tell me is the right setup and "just works", I'd not own a computer at all. I'd just get an iPad, which has that appliance like "no options, just does what it's made to do, works great under those constraints" thing going for it.
You have as much customizability as you will take for yourself. If you don't like it, fork it.
I don't think you understand the implications of what you're suggesting.
Forking a project as large as Gnome is a massive undertaking. Not only is it a lot of up-front work to implement the functionality, but you also have to stay up-to-date with all upstream changes, and there's likely at least a few Gnome developers that are paid to work on it full-time, so that is a lot to maintain. And not only do you have to build it for your own distro, but you also have to convince maintainers of other distros to adopt it as well and put it in their repositories, otherwise you have no community of users, which means no community of developers either.
Forking Gnome is wildly impractical. It's not a feasible suggestion to make at all.
Orrrr I can use something else. Which I do. Something that respects the fact that my computer is in fact mine.
And like i said. It'd be fine if gnome was gnome... If it stayed in its fucking lane serving the people that like it.
But the gnome Devs have a lot of influence on how things like Wayland are taking shape, so their "let's turn Linux into iPad" attitude does in fact affect me.
People did. That's how we got MATE and Cinnamon; much better desktop environments.
I don't care much about whether gnome is customizable, if people like it then great, but I hate how they're forcong terrible patterns that often break other DEs (window decorations)
Customization is necessary especially in the free software space because designers aren't good enough to make acceptable defaults.
I love KDE, but each new install takes a bit of fiddling to get it just the way I want.
I wouldn't have as much of an issue with GNOME's lack of customization if they didn't make stupid-ass decisions.
My main issue when I was using GNOME is that it needed a run ton of extensions to be truly useful, and most broke after a new release.
I'm using KDE basically out of the box, nothing bothers me enough to try to fix it.
Yes, GNOME 3+ is completely unusable. It looks like it's been designed for a tablet.
Plus, I can't stand client side window decorations.
I’m using KDE basically out of the box, nothing bothers me enough to try to fix it.
KDE : Plasma is the sleekest desktop we've come up with yet!
Just put the taskbar where I want it and shut up.
And here I am using gnome out of the box and beautiful while I'd have to spend time making KDE work for me.
Fair. It's a personal preference.
I like Plasma.
I know, real brave take
I love Plasma. It's fast, it's stable, it's beautiful, it's real simple and I intuitive, it's easily customizable via GUI, it's packed with great features (that stay completely out of your way if you don't need them). Even the KDE apps are awesome across the board.
It's all down to preference, yadda yadda, but I honestly don't understand why someone would use something like Cinnamon, XFCE or, god forbid, GN*ME instead of KDE Plasma.
That being said, just use what you wanna use.
I honestly don't understand why someone would use something like Cinnamon, XFCE or, god forbid, GN*ME instead of KDE Plasma.
RAM usage. I sometime restore machines that just wouldn't handle KDE. While GNOME is as heavy as KDE, cinnamon is lighter and xfce even more. An average finished KDE setup eats 4GB for me while a cinnamon one uses 1,5GB and an XFCE one 0,5GB. This makes KDE close to unusable on older 2 or 4GB systems.
Something's not right here. You must be using more features with kde than the other desktops. Agreed the xfce is lighter, but the comparison isn't that drastic. Kde will easily run on 4th ram systems. Configure it the same as xfce and you are at about 2GB ram.
Maybe, but 2GB would still be 4 times heavier than my XFCE average, I just wouldn't use it for a 2 or 4 GB system, other softwares need their RAM too.
Great point!
Might be especially important going forward unfortunately
I liked Gnome back when Ubuntu was brown.
The Gnome 2 days 👍
After Gnome shit the bed with Gnome 3 and beyond, MATE continued everything great about 2 and continues its legacy.
I genuinely hope history remembers the GNOME desktop as "it was good, and then they started making some really stupid decisions!"
Why would they ruin their very good software with so many stupid decisions?
How is MATE nowadays? Is it just Gnome 2 frozen in time or does it have modern features?
It's mostly Gnome 2 frozen in time - there have been small improvements here and there, particularly in Caja (the file manager). I think that's great though personally, and use it on most of my machines.
Wayland adoption has been slow, but it is getting there.
Sounds kinda nice, I mist admit.
Yeah mate, it was the best
Right now I use kde customized to look almost exactly like gnome.
I want to downvote you out of fear, yet I want to upvote you for the audacity
The beautiful thing, though, is if you want to, you can do that.
Now try to make Gnome look almost exactly like KDE. And then the real difference between them becomes obvious.
Now try to make Gnome look almost exactly like KDE.
... try to make a duck look like a camoflage octopus? mimicking what?
KDE does have a default stock experience you know.
Fair point
Care to share a screenshot?
why in the fuck is it pronounced guhnome
Because the "G" has gone silent for too long and will not take it anymore.
Because that’s how people speaking Old English would have pronounced it. And we all know how particular 10th century Saxons are about their Linux desktop.
Fuck that, I'll keep saying genome. Guhnome is much much worse than the jiff thing.
To match GNU
Guh-NU
So... Why is that pronounced "Guhnoo"?
Then it should be pronounced "Gee-nome" and be a homonym with "genome".
why in the fuck is it pronounced guhnome
It's not. There is no vowel between G and N. Watch an episode or two of Star Trek and listen to some Klingon or Vulkan names to learn how such a combination of letters is pronounced without adding a vowel.
lmfao gonna pass on the homework, teach
Lmao imagine taking that seriously
> he fell for the double cross
oh no no no no
It’s not expect for the few times I ever talk about desktop environments with people IRL
I don't pronounce it that way
Just use any Linux distro you like!
Stock Ubuntu with GNOME
This but for me it is KDE.
What? No… that is wrong.
"How dare someone have a preference different than me"
Seriously though, I don't get the gnome hate circle jerk. It isn't for everyone but works well for some.
Same. I've used Gnome, KDE and XFCE (and OS X and Windows) and Gnome is my clear favourite. Claiming that their decisions don't make sense is clearly false if it works so well for so many.
It isn't all sunshine and rainbows though. Gtk3 theming doesn't match libadwaita and gnome still lacks status bar support.
Gnome apps also tend to be overly minimalistic in some cases.
Oh this argument is just a meme and I'm here to enjoy that. But also KDE > Gnome, no question.
Gnome is the reason it took me so long to like Linux for daily driving, because it was the default DE on the distros I was trying. Thank goodness for Fedora+KDE Plasma. If someone else likes it, good for them - I like that they are using Linux.
I personally think gnome is way better than plasma. However, I understand why people don't like gnome.
Everyone has a right to be wrong.
It's extremely important we voice our opinion on bad design so that their decisions don't become mainstream or standard.
GNOME has been a dumpster fire since 3 and the developers only care about what will result in the least amount of work for them. They think they're as good as Apple, where they can be the sole authority on how their DE is used, but then they make incredibly stupid decisions like dictating where users can put the dock. Their design team is nowhere near the level of Apple and they should stop pretending otherwise.
Don't use gnome if you don't like gnome. No one is forcing you to use it.
I like gnome and so do many other people.
Don’t use gnome if you don’t like gnome. No one is forcing you to use it.
But I also don't want it to be the default DE on mainstream distros that could be frequently used by Linux newbies. I suspect a lot of the people out there who tried Linux and then hated it because it was weird and too hard to figure out ... came to that conclusion because the first distro they had defaulted to Gnome and they thought all Linux was like Gnome.
That's nice.
I will continue to voice my opposition to poorly designed products.
Yep, me too. But I really like KDE apps
I tried to use linux on a tablet, I've tried GNOME multiple times since it is apparently the best for touchscreen-only devices. This was hell.
As much as I'd love to be able to like that thing I just can't.
Zero customisability, everything has to be changed through extensions, but the extension manager isn't even part of GNOME's core and has to be installed separately.
The settings page is severely lacking so I had to configure everything in .conf files or through CLI directly.
And the whole thing is as stable as a one-legged chair on top of a unbalanced washing machine.
KDE extension crashing : "oupsie a part of your desktop crashed and restarted as fast as possible, hope you didn't notice"
GNOME extension crashing : "go fuck yourself, I burned your whole session to the ground, log back in and pray you weren't doing anything worth saving"
In the end I customized KDE to look and behave like GNOME, this way around was surprisingly easier than just making GNOME bearable.
Oh and to the taskbar haters out there : my first computer was running windows 95 so you'll be taking my taskbar from my cold dead hands, only KDE let me fulfill my dream of putting taskbars absolutely everywhere (even got two perpendicular ones on my bottom monitor)
I used a few different OSs before Windows 95 and I have also used a taskbar for the past 30 years. It's just a design that I like. It's like I feel grounded or something.
I just use a single taskbar at the bottom of my left-most monitor though. I ain't all fancy like you!
Gnome... isn't Gnome. Gnome 2.x/MATE is Gnome. Gnome 3.x and further is gnome shit (or dwarfen shit? We should ask DND specialists to clarify this moment)
Gnome's devs are insular and don't listen to suggestions from outsiders. That sounds like Svirfneblin to me!
I agree, GNOME 3+ is pure steaming shit.
I love open-source and I respect all free software projects. Except GNOME 3.
You can't come up with something so horribly designed unless you're trying to make it horrible on purpose.
Same place as the famous banana quote! How much could a banana cost, Michael? $10?
I've always had deep suspicion of GNOME because of de Icaza's involvement and the pretexts with which the project was started. Knowing that de Icaza ended up at Microsoft and is now a huge fan of MacOS and Apple confirmed my suspicions. Lucille Bluth is right, there I said it. 😍
I am unreasonably upset by this treating of Arrested Development as a deep cut 😠
I would be much more interested in GNOME if I could replicate my top bar with all extensions on both my monitors. I don’t want to only see the clock on my 2nd monitor.
I would be much more interested in gnome if it didn't feel like the offspring of 2010s mac and fisher price.
It is personal preference
Tbh I don’t mind the Mac look - in fact it’s one of the things that drew me to it as I use macOS for work - and the above complaint is my only real complaint.
I keep posting it wherever it’s relevant in case someone comes out of the woodwork with a solution 😅
I'm not sure if there is a way to actually do thus unfortunately
Gnome and KDE both suck but in opposite ways. Want to change a behavior in Gnome? Well you better hope there's an extension for that. Want to change a behavior in KDE? Sure. Good luck finding the fucking setting for it though. XFCE and Cinnamon are where it's at. We also give a pass to MATE.
NOTE: These are my personal opinions and not a personal attack on you if you enjoy Gnome/KDE. Freedom of choice! 😁
Good luck finding the fucking setting for it though
they literally have a search in the options
I don't think KDE sucks.
I'm very glad to have it. It's the closest thing I can get to Windows 7.
This made me laugh more than it should have. It perfectly captures how we all try to be neutral… until that one preference slips out. Classic moment.
Gnome has one great purpose and that is for tablets. Not a fan of their whole ethos though
Gnome has one great purpose and that is for tablets.
Doesn't work well on tablets, though.
Worked great on my old surface, though the surface for linux kernel definitely helps that
Kde is so ugly and buggy, requiring tons of setup n knowhow to fix. GNOME feels limiting and oversimplified, but honestly 9 out of 10 times its fine.... even if its setting menu infuriates on the regular.
Im old and i dont having 100 hrs to rice shit anymore
What is the last KDE you tried? Plasma is SO good, right out of the box.
Gnome people keep saying KDE requires so much 'setup' ... but it really doesn't. 95% of the time (unless you've got a really weird distro), the default settings your flavor of KDE ships with are ... just fine. And you can use the desktop just fine without ever touching any of the settings. It has lots of options, sure, but you don't have to screw around with all the options. It has sane defaults for a reason.
Kde is so ugly and buggy, requiring tons of setup n knowhow to fix.
Surely you confuse Plasma and Gnome. To get a sane setup on Gnome, you need to install Refine to enable the minimize button and then install Gnome Extension Manager and enable Dash to Panel or Dash to Dock.
That's an insane amount of setup work for someone who doesn't know about those things.
People always rave about dash to panel/dock and I just... don't get it?
Genuinely though, what is the purpose of the taskbar except to potentially you with notifications and take up valuable screen estate?
If I need to switch apps, I'm either opening the overview/mission control, switching workspaces, or the app is already on the screen for multitasking purposes.
Even on macOS I set the dock to autohide, and near exclusively just use swipe gestures, keyboard shortcuts, or spotlight.
But alas, maybe it's just one of those things that just not for me.
...if you want
For the max/min buttons you can just turn them on in gnome tweaks
For the max/min buttons you can just turn them on in gnome tweaks
Ah yes, using a different non-standard tool makes so much of a difference.
It isn't "non standard." It is literally a part of gnome.
Haters gonna hate I guess
It isn’t “non standard.” It is literally s part of gnome.
It's a stand-alone tool by the Gnome developers, it's not an integral part of Gnome.
The default UX of Gnome still make it hard for people migrating from Win10. No amount of nitpicking about irrelevant details change that fact.
Haters gonna hate I guess
I didn't expect any other response by a Gnome fan. Keep ignoring comments like https://lemmy.world/comment/22252682where I explained that I picked Gnome for an elderly man. I'm really such a hater that I pick Gnome for a certain use case.
Going to Refine instead of the age old Gnome Tweaks is an interesting way to tell how long someone has been familiar with Gnome.
That being said if you use Gnome how they want you to, you don't need those extensions.
That way isn't for everyone as it's very different from what many used to but when you do get used to it those extensions will feel unnecessary
I'm pretty sure you can live without the minimize button. I've used Gnome for 3 years and I've never felt the need to minimize a window. Even now after I switched to KDE Plasma a few days ago, I still don't minimize windows.
I’m pretty sure you can live without the minimize button.
I'm volunteering in a repair café where older people bring their Windows 10 computers and seek help migrating to Linux because their PC told them that Win11 isn't compatible.
I make recommendations based on each person, trying to realize what they wish for first if they have an idea what they want. A few months ago there was an >70y/o man. Let's be realistic here, at this age it might well be the last PC he ever owns. So I set him up with Alma Linux (extra long support cycle) and made its Gnome desktop as Windows-like as possible. He's not getting pressured into unfamiliar UX metaphors and no way I'm pushing software from EPEL or anything that onto him. I enabled Flathub and temporarily installed aforementioned tools to make the necessary tweaks, then uninstalled these tools again, and installed a few of Gnome's games, Celluloid, and Chrome off Flathub.
For the rest of the day he ate cookies and drank coffee and seemed pretty happy with that setup. We invited him to come back, should he have any further questions. Haven't seen him again.
I'm pretty sure you can live without the minimize button.
I know it's not a big deal, but this approach is absolutely insane to me.
"Sure there's a normal feature that a large portion of PC users use semi-regularly - but the GNOME devs don't like it, so why don't you just learn to live without it!"
KDE is way less buggy than it used to be. I still prefer gnome but I don't mind KDE from s stability perspective.
I haven't run into any bugs but also I'm not the most intensive user so maybe I just don't run into them.
Glad it works for ya. I know that some bugs seem to be distro-dependent, so i recognize its more stable on some... for me? Nightmare.
"Autohide" n dodge window feature of taskbar broken for several different apps, but not all. Sometimes displaces the border of the windows offscreen trying to hide
Start menu freezes regularly
Dolphin freezes n hangs a lot in general. God it took me all of 3 secs to say " I NEEd to disable that stupid bouncing "LOADING" animation ASAFP"
Sections of taskbar dead/unclickable suddenly... aka bluetooth quick acess or volume controll
Worst is a giant mesh of graphical glitching and artifacts upon waking from sleep, have to close windows, sometimes restart. Seems its a known issue w video caching for nvidia gpus (fucking nvidia, of course)
... Not a complete list. Anyway, I have GNOME installed on exactly the same pc, same distro, none of this bug shit happens.
The only bug I ever see is Dolphin having a delayed startuo, and I have a bunch of file shares mounted which NFS might be causing delays. KDE is awesome, and it's Tumbleweed so not even stable KDE.
That being said I put my family on Cinnamon.
Cinnamon is pretty solid. I can't wait for Wayland support.
It sounds like it has experimental support as of six months ago.
https://itsfoss.gitlab.io/post/cinnamon-60-release-debuts-experimental-wayland-support/
Cinnamon 6.0: A Bold Leap Forward with Experimental Wayland Support
Last update – 2025-08-12
I like gnome too. Its simple and works. The only extension I use is a weather widget. People who need a million extensions are going against the grain of the design.
People who need a million extensions are going against the grain of the design.
I don't want 'the design' to dictate how I use my computer.
That's fine.
I mean, those are nice addons, but the people that ive handed vanilla gnome to whove never used linux before didn't come screaming to me "how fo i dash to dock?!?!"
Like if thats the workflow you want, you just search extensions and customize... but none of these are required to just like sit down and do basic stuff.
Now KDE on the other hand.... Just trying to find out why bluetooth or clock or volume or whatever quick access isnt where i expect on the kde toolbar. or figure out that i right click the correct "separator" to go into a separate like "widget" menu THAT IS TOTALLY SEPARATE FROM THE BASIC SETTINGS APP, or whatever to set those up is just... bizzare.
I love GNOME but I found the default usage pattern aligned very well for laptops. And I don't mind they only implement finalized Wayland protocols. But Wayland moves so slow!
I use KDE on in my normal desktop because I want VRR and HDR for gaming. I like KDE but its default theme still looks rough around the edges and it has random bugs and kwin crashes when gaming and sometimes on resume.
Both have things I like and things I don't like and I wish I could take the best from both.
I like Cosmic DE a lot because of this. It feels light, efficient, and smooth like KDE. But it feels coherent, consistent, and laptop friendly like Gnome.
... But Cosmic still feels a bit too incomplete for me to daily.
I prefer GNOME for the UX but I do appreciate KDE's customization and settings. KDE seems more unstable though, I've had plenty of crashes from it vs GNOME
I do not know if this is a hardware thing but KDE has not been unstable for years.
🤷♀️ it seems good at recovering from crashes except for Dolphin
Sounds like it’s time for you to try danklinux.com
I prefer the default gnome experience to the default kde experience.
I also prefer the styling of most gnome apps, and actively dislike kde apps styling.
Gnome is less customizable, but customizable enough for what I want.
I'm also biased, because I was using Ubuntu since it came out, up until a few years ago 🤷♂️
I'm also biased, because I was using Ubuntu since it came out, up until a few years ago 🤷♂️
Yes. Same here. I'll complain about pain points in Gnome all day, but I owe the various gnome contributors many thanks. Gnome has been a more than good enough daily driver for me plenty of times.
I like gnome DE, I dislike the arrogance of the project team.
My straw was the login-to-exposé thing.
It was (and still is) the default input focus to the Search box on the Save dialog. Why? Just.... why? Why would I ever want to start typing in the Search box when I'm saving a file. I have never, ever thought to myself as I saved something that I should search for something to name this thing I'm saving after something else somewhere on this filesystem.
Why? Just… why?
Any time you ask the Gnome devs this, you can expect the answer to be "elegance". And then they block you.
Can you elaborate for the curious? I tried searching but couldn't find anything. What's the login to exposé thing?
Once upon a time, when you logged in you arrived at the desktop. Then typically you'd click a docked application icon or use the hot corner to open the overview (Apple calls it exposé on macOS) and search for an application to start. Some people would just hit the keyboard shortcut and start typing an application name. Very quick.
One day, the gnome team decided that since a lot of people do this, that immediately after logging in you'd arrive directly at this overview/exposé mode ready to type an app name.
Quite a few people didn't like this change, and requested a setting so they could enable/disable it as was their preference. The response from the gnome team was essentially 'get fucked' enshrouded by weak/nonsense justifications for the change and for not making it optional, apparently taking the request as some kind of personal attack.
It was a trivial minor change but the way the team handled it was... lacking.
Yeah, that sounds exactly like the GNOME3 team.
For years, they fought back against giving users the option to change where their dock is, forcing them to be stuck with an asinine vertical dock because "vertical space is at a premium."
They do this because they're lazy and incompetent. They simply do not want more work for themselves and will browbeat any of their users into doing things the "stupid gnome3 way."
Their designers are some of the dumbest people in the industry. Since they have a yes-man/echo chamber culture, they don't ever get to learn from their mistakes because nobody holds them accountable for failure.
GNOME was so great... Then GNOME 3 came out and it feels like it's been designed by a person with severe brain damage.
I think the key is to just not hate on someone else for having a preference for one you don't care for. (And not being an overzealous missionary for your own preference.) It's fun seeing the variety and people geeking out about the little intricacies they love about their favorites
That's just a good approach to life in general.
That's the right take. Every couple years I've given KDE a shot for a month and it just won't click no matter how much I configure it, this goes back pre plasma. I dislike gnome but it's closer to what I want out of the box, then popos came along and I realized I just wanted a tiling wm all along but needed the hybrid approach to enjoy adjusting.
I tried gnome once at the start of my Linux adventures and I couldn't figure out how to do most stuff as it seems really counter intuitive to me. I tried extensions to fix it and they just didn't work or broke and trying to install the extensions was a problem for me too. Idk it's just seems broken to me in a lot of ways
Then I tried another distro with basic life and it was easy and I didnt need to install anything extra because it was already all there.
Also why the fuck does gnome and Ubuntu have a app drawer take up the whole fucking screen. I'm on a computer not a tablet or phone. I just need a start menu like kde has. Its simple small and easily accessible when other apps are open
On Ubuntu's old Unity DE that top panel housed app menus and merged with maximized windows. And you could tap a button to search those menus. I wish they would reimplement those features.
XFCE erryday.
I like gnome and it's philosophy 😬
There's plenty of "customizability" friendly options out there. I like how gnome isn't afraid to break things to improve
Gnome haven't "improved" anything since gnome 2. Gnome 3 and above? Only downhill from there.
They thought they were doing opinionated design while all they really did was ignore valid user concerns
I use GNOME on my laptop because it's really nice for touch devices. It has a learning curve, I have to add extensions to do things I expect an OS to do and I'm still not sure what I'm doing, but it's nice.
I like Gnome's apps, and I think I would install Gnome on any non-techie user's computer.
But for myself ? I want all the options ! So I use KDE. Probably going to switch to a tiling WM, I'd like my whole desktop experience use tmux shortcuts, basically.
At some point gonna do the same. Which tiling manager are you looking at?
I myself identify as an equalist . I hate all of them DE equally. Standalone WM is superior (for me).
On Wayland, it's really a compositor rather than an X11-style window manager. Has to handle more tasks.
Though it looks like the River compositor is trying to reintroduce the window manager paradigm.
On Wayland, it's really a compositor rather than an X11-style window manager.
On Wayland it's both the window manager and compositor (compositing window manager).
In X11, you have to bring your own compositor or not use one. River is trying to separate it like in x11 but it's a compositor only. You have to bring a separate wm. And from what I understand, in Wayland it won't work without a compositor (but I could be wrong on that one).
Honesty I use the terminal for most things
Which ones do you like?
I’m partial to Niri, mangowc, and hyprland.
Was an i3 user, testing sway here and there but couldn't make the full switch. For some reason I couldn't find some replacement e.g. feh (minimalist image viewing and bg setting, something that works with RAW images), ranger's backend for image preview, devour (terminal swallowing).
Until last year when a teams chat leaked during an online course I am a TA. It wasn't too bad of a leak but still decided to find a replacement as I knew niri had something implemented. Switched to niri after that, the block-out-from is very useful. Found swayimg as a replacement for feh, managed to get ranger preview working with sixel (foot), found a work around for window swallowing (basically use niri msg action to consume-window-into-column then set the height to 0% and back). A lot of functionality of my 'DE' is based on rofi-scripts, which just works so didn't have to tweak much for functionality. Absolutely love the window switcher that was introduced last year. I did have a window switcher with rofi, which I still use but the fancy one is cool too.
When I first started using Linux over 20 years ago, I did try Gnome. Then went back to KDE immediately.
From what I have read in those 20+ years, the design philosophy hasn't changed.
I was fine with Gnome before they went v3.
KDE was/is my favourite. I don't play favourites tho. But it's def KDE.
(Xfce being second, but tbf I never gave a fair chance to the rest of them. DEs aren't really a thing that would hugely impact my life, unless they would be too buggy, but afaik we are past that if you aren't on a strict rice diet.)
I went the complete opposite. Hated KDE, loved gnome. Now KDE is my go to.
I don't love GNOME, but if you use it....whatever. Linux is all about choice and lack of lock-in.
If you want to compile CDE from the 1990s and use it as your DE.....you do you honey boo boo.
[EDIT]
JFC apparently CDE is still around and had a stable release 2 months ago. Holy fucking case-in-point right there.
I got to take this baby from 999 to 1K
on my normal desktop I use the flavor of the day DE, gnome is only used on my 40 inch touchscreen, because its the only one I could imagine being good on a touchscreen
All the JavaScript in gnome make it super icky to me as an ex-webdev, and unusable on hardware that is otherwise perfectly fine with other DEs. From high resource usage, memory leaks, and breaking extensions, I have a hard time believing that their userbase is anyone other than mobile native younger folk who are good at consuming via the iPad launcher paradigm. Just my humble opinion, nothing more.
KDE: "I just blue myself"
It may not be a perfect environment, but you know - DEs don't come with a handbook!
There are several manpages available in the terminal and online
In fact there were several manpages available in the terminal and online, but Lucille was in denial about that.
Well done. I read that in Ron Howard's voice.
I once bought a physical copy of SuSE back in the before times, when downloading would take a prohibitively long time on a shitty dial-up connection (and then you'd still have to burn it on an expensive CD-R in order to install).
It did, in fact, come with a handbook for the DE.
I remember a boxed CD set of SuSE sold in bookstores around the year 2000.
KDE literally comes with a manual. Hitting f1 almost anywhere will give you a help tool that explains everything in detail.
Ain't no need to preach to your fellow kde gang while I'm here memeing on guhhnome
GNOME feels great to use based on the 10 seconds I used it for.
But I don't like GNOME for many reasons.
Laughing in Sway
There are dozens of us!
I don’t like it when people pronounce it with a hard G
I can only ever pronounce it is 'Guh-nome'
I blame Linux Unplugged podcast tbh.
Which one’s the hard g? If that’s the one that sounds like j or “g as in giraffe”, then I’ve never heard anyone pronounce it like that. Jnome? Doesn’t really roll off the tongue very well.
like gif
Jnome
Criminal
I suspect that TemplaerDude@sh.itjust.works really meant to say "with a non-silent 'G'".
The word is typically pronounced ("There are gnomes in the forest!") with a silent 'g'.
I think as a [edit: former] GNU project, Gnome is an exception. That might be a bit of a hypercorrection though.
I think as a GNU project, Gnome is an exception.
Gnome isn't a GNU project any longer. They removed references to GNU from their website when Stallman was brought back as GNU leader after speaking in favor of pedophilia.
In typical Gnome fashion they didn't merely renounce GNU and Stallman, they lied and claimed that Gnome has never ever been a GNU project.
But it's there!
This is the main reason I stopped using it
So today I made a VM of Debian that has all the DE’s as a matter of experiment to try them all out back to back to get an idea of what each one feels like. And right out of the gate gnome feels, a bit too abstract? You don’t get the sense that one screen is the default homescreen over another.
It looks nice but it feels weirdly organised. (Which I’m sure I could get used too, but you know preferences)
If GNOME did a standard start menu style interface in 99% sure I’d be using that.
Which is funny because I don’t like start menus and wouldn’t use it
I find it weird how fixated people are in the start menu. To me it feels extremely clunky experience, no matter was it plasma or windows.
The way gnome has combined task switcher and "start menu" (rather comparable to finder in macos) just feels so much more natural.
Then there's the application menu thing that I've maybe used twice in the past 5 years lol
You know you're doing things right when there's 2.5 million downloads to change a core paradigm of your DE.
Most users come from a Windows background, so they’re used to the "simplicity" of its start menu. For unknown reasons, many still favor the limited Windows-like experience over the native GNOME shell...
Most users come from a Windows background, so they’re used to the “simplicity” of its start menu.
I think it's that it's jarring to go from "let me add a new thing to what I am doing" to "I need something new. EVERYTHING GO AWAY SO I CAN LOOK AT WHAT I WANT"
Are you just talking about the way the app launcher uses the whole screen? That seems like the silliest thing to care about… it’s there for 2 seconds while you type the name of the app you want, and letting you focus on that task. It’s not like I’m browsing the web in the background while I wait for the start-menu-equivalent.
Are you just talking about the way the app launcher uses the whole screen?
yep
That seems like the silliest thing to care about
well, I find it jarring. It's my preference/feeling/aesthetic and I'm entitled to it. There are enough ways to do that don't take up the whole screen that my opinion must be fairly common. Macs have spotlight, the start bar that has existed forever, Krunner...
Of course you’re entitled to your preference, no debating that.
I found the happily short-lived windows “metro” interface similarly jarring like you describe, but the gnome equivalent has never caused me any difficulty for some reason.
I found the happily short-lived windows “metro” interface similarly jarring like you describe, but the gnome equivalent has never caused me any difficulty for some reason.
That's interesting. what separates the two for you? Because I dislike them both for the same reason. Is it the subtle blur and transparency for gnome?
I think that’s it: simply blurring the background instead of just disappearing, it makes it feel like it’s not “gone”; just not the current focus, so to speak.
I also was on Ubuntu for a lot of the time while they were fooling around with “Unity” so I’m sure my experience is skewed compared to a clean pure gnome setup.
To be fair, I probably wouldn't feel the need to care about GNOME at all were it not for the fact that it still the standard DE for large, newbie-facing distros. I still favour the Windows paradigm, and a lot other people do too, and it doesn't really matter whether it's familiarity or actually preferring it (which I genuinely do). I don't really appreciate hearing the standard GNOME-user polemics about it, especially when both sides usually end up acknowledging that it's personal preference. I'm not saying you're using that argument out of bad faith, but it's the kind of thing I see a lot and it really bothers me, because it is/would be rightly criticised were it the other way round.
Point is, some people just genuinely don't like GNOME, and it doesn't have to be because of simplicity (Plasma is rarely referred to as simple), familiarity, or a hate-boner for GNOME or Mac.
I agree. There is basically nothing to learn on GNOME that would take more than 5 minutes to explain. Windows sucks and included in that is the UI. I really don't understand clinging to that UI so hard. If I didn't know Stockholm syndrome wasn't real, I'd call it akin to that ..
Because Gnome Shell is terrible! Or, people just want to use their computer and not have to learn a whole new way to do it. Most desktops understand this.
I don't get the gnome hate, it's my favorite
If it happens to be exactly what you want, then you're golden. If not, you have a fight on your hands.
Yeah I don't bother trying to customize any of them
I'll give KDE a try again when they provide a way to track all of my settings via dotfiles. I tinker with shit a lot and I need the ability to track it all with a VCS. I've always kept KDE as a backup but its accrued so much config junk over a decade that its actually a pretty janky experience, and I'm not comfortable just nuking all my dotfules.
I'm a gnomer.
These two statements do not contradict themselves.
I am not a bigot. I hate ALL people!
The #2 reason I'm still on a Mac is because I prefer the look of its UX. Can you recommend a good window manager/theme that replicates macOS Sequoia?
And also one that will replicate system 7 because I am an old and nostalgic man.
Making KDE look like a Mac is an entire genre of easily downloaded and installed themes:
https://store.kde.org/p/1400409
https://store.kde.org/p/1305006
System 7 stuff is going to look very small at 2026 screen resolutions. The widget dimensions on it mostly correspond to the original Mac's dimensions, from 1984.
That being said, it looks like archive.org has archives of kaleidoscope.net's --- the most popular third-party theme engine --- theme archives:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140423004746fw_/http://kaleidoscope.net/schemes/completelisting.shtml
So in theory, somone could make a bulk converter from System 7 themes to GTK or whatever.
checks
https://www.gnome-look.org/browse?cat=135&ord=latest&tag=macos
There's an "Mac OS" category of GTK themes on gnome-look.org, and I imagine that the KDE people probably have something comparable. I haven't used any myself.
Thanks! I’ll try these out tomorrow.
Sidenote: Is there a flying toasters screensaver?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Dark_(software)
A 3D version of the toasters featuring swarms of toasters with airplane wings, rather than bird wings, is available for XScreenSaver.
That being said, it looks like xscreensaver doesn't presently fully work on Wayland (or didn't as of six months ago):
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/07/xscreensaver-6-11/
XScreenSaver 6.11 is out now. This is a Unix-only release -- this version contains preliminary support for Wayland.
This is maybe not entirely ready for prime time, but I figured I'd get it out there so that some people who actually understand Wayland can poke at it.
I need to rewatch this. "Haha, marry me!"
I used KDE for a long time trying to do things that just worked in Gnome. I finally switched and don't seem to be hunting for anything KDE did
I actually kinda like gnome. I like most of the others too, but I default to gnome. Also I use the hot corners all the time
Also I use the hot corners all the time
🤮
I loved using multi desktop in Gnome. Hated using it anywhere else... Except i3. But still kinda like Gnome more. Though... Kinda hated my extensions constantly breaking.
I only use gnome. KDE and plasma reminds me of windows which is cringe
I like MATE. It's Gnome with the bugs ironed out. It's very nice.
In principal, Gnome is the archetype that we all seek in a desktop.
Ubuntu Mate sounds like what they call regular Ubuntu in Australia.
I don't get tiling window or desktop stuff but hyprland 🤤
They're all fine. You get used to one or another and that's what you want. They all have issues and they all have boons. More often or not, it came down to either what your distro defaulted to, or whatever had that one feature you needed when you first installed (factional scaling) and you just stuck there
Don't you take this nice flame war away from us!
LOL k
Could you please not excite cancel culture against a great DE?
Which one? The only thing mentioned by name here is gnome.
I'll make a deal:
You stop including Gnome as the default DE on mainstream, newbie-friendly distros, and I'll stop talking shit about it.
It is included because it is innovative, newby friendly (Windows and Mac are both more complex), It has efficient keyboard navigation by default. And it has pleasant, modern UI by default.
it is innovative
Nah, it's just weird. And doing a lot of things to be different for the sake of being different. Which steepens the learning curve for newbies. (And, worse, may make newbies think all Linux is weird and difficult to learn.)
Just because it's different doesn't mean it's better.
newby friendly (Windows and Mac are both more complex)
'Simplicity' does not necessarily mean it's user friendly. Especially when you're telling them to go download and install more things just so their desktop can do things that EVERY other desktop in the entire world does. I really really wish this paradigm of "removing options = user friendly" would just die already.
(It's not really user friendly, it's developer-friendly. Because there's less for them to build and maintain.)
It has efficient keyboard navigation by default
Every DE does this. Name a single Linux DE that doesn't have efficient keyboard navigation.
And it has pleasant, modern UI by default.
It has a blobby, plastic-looking, overstyled UI by default. But that's just a matter of taste.
(And if you don't like their default UI ... well, you're screwed, because they really don't want you to change it.)
If somebody is coming from a different DE he wants the same interactions that they used to do. It's easy to hate Gnome because people see that first. And they find:
- there's no tray
- what's that line at the top
- where's the start menu
- where are the opened apps
- is the app drawer really that ugly
And these are only expectations and you just learn to do things differently.
Just because it has a different workflow that big players implanted in people, Linux needs to match that?
The worst thing you can do is to install a dock extension to make it feel like you are in your previous DE. If you want to get the real Gnome experience, you need to let it be Gnome.
As for the design, it's indeed subjective, but we can agree that it is modern with balanced spacing. You can feel that a graphic designer worked on it. And if you don't like it, that's the same as with other DEs, install a theme. As you can't change QT apps to use titlebar you can't change GTK apps to use app menu instead.
And finally the keyboard efficiency: Indeed every major DE is keyboard efficient, but I wasn't expecting it for Gnome when I was learning it, because I'm videos, you always see clicks, so I mentioned it.
Just because it has a different workflow that big players implanted in people, Linux needs to match that?
For newbies? Yes. SO MUCH YES.
I don't care if you want to use Gnome on a distro for people who want weird and different. But for any mainstream distro targeted toward newbies, Gnome should not be the default DE. Precisely because it requires a lot of additional learning to use the DE, in addition to learning to use Linux.
Not at all. Newcomers want intuitive UI. And gnome is really that.
Examples:
One unified settings app. Containing all the settings that as a average user needs. It's always at the top right corner.
Change the wallpaper? Top right corner -> settings
Add a network? Top right corner -> settings
Extend display to projector? Top right corner -> settings
It's not weird at all.
What would be a better starter DE then?
What would be a better starter DE then?
Literally any other DE. Throw a dart at a bunch of DE logos pasted to the wall, and you'll hit one that's better for newbies than Gnome.
(And no, Gnome is not intuitive. You said yourself that using Gnome requires you "just learn to do things differently". If it was intuitive, you wouldn't need to learn it, and it wouldn't feel 'different'.)
Since all your examples of how intuitive Gnome is involve the same settings menu in the top right corner ... is that settings menu in the top right corner labeled at all? Or is intuition the ONLY way to know it's the settings menu? You know, maybe I'm starting to understand the disconnect here. When I say something is intuitive, I mean it's where you'd naturally expect it and does what you expect it to do. But when Gnome people call something "intuitive", I'm starting to suspect they say that because using intuition is the only way to figure out the interface. You just have to guess what that vague icon does...
Like KDE? It would be a lot more complex. I would fear giving KDE for newcomers. It's basically windows 98, but with frosty glass themes, fragmented apps.
Or Cinnamon? You upgraded to windows XP. Congratulations.
Deepin? Looks cool until you try to use it.
Xfce? That's stable and fast. But would you advertise Linux as that outdated?
Cosmic, still early.
Budgie, maybe.
I really think gnome is the best default.
Nevertheless, It's you mixing intuitive and familiar. Moreover, people who give Linux a trial, they wish for something different. And they really like Gnome from my experience.
Moreover, people who give Linux a trial, they wish for something different.
Says who? I think most people who give Linux a trial, they wish for Windows, but without the all the bullshit.
What I'm afraid of is newbies who get Gnome as the default without knowing any better, without even knowing what a DE is or that there's more than one. And when they find it weird and difficult to learn, they're not going to think, "Gnome is weird and difficult to learn, I should try a different DE." -- they're going to think, "Linux is weird and difficult to learn, I should go back to Windows."
I think you have to learn, but I don't think it's difficult to learn. As I said I find it intuitive. My mum could learn it and she is not techy at all. That's actually a very good example, because she couldn't print on Windows and now she can with Linux.
It also has nothing to make life useful. The innovation is removing everything and wasting space. You need to add in extensions for the most basic of tasks.
Gnome is tolerable on a laptop, but on a desktop it's just awful.