GNOME peaked with 2 which is why I prefer MATE.
nah gnome is great with ms+kb. as well as touch.
get outta here with this 2011 meme.
– Is supporting tray icons important? – What icons? Let the plugin community worry about that. – You’re hired!
Both Gnome and KDE are 100x better than win or macOS. I use KDE for me but I install Gnome on my familly 's stuff.
This is just wishful thinking. macOS is the GOAT of UI/UX.
Okay. Explain the global menu, then. Why would I want the menu at the top of the screen, always, instead of attached to the top of the window?
I mean, there’s some decent design principles behind it. For one, it just takes up space only once rather than for each window individually.
But much more importantly, it makes use of an implication of Fitts’s Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts’s_law#Implications_for_UI_design
TL;DR: Because you can slam your mouse cursor against the top of the screen, you can’t miss the menu vertically. It’s like an infinitely tall button. This makes it fast for users to move their cursor there.Having said that, this macOS design is from a time when the mouse and navigation menus were the primary user interaction method, which they’re not anymore. So, yeah, that’s why it was designed like that, but I doubt they’d expend this much effort to design it like that again.
I don’t have any issues with mouse precision, so having to navigate that extra distance every time is a pain in the ass.
I work on macOS 90% of the time. It’s super well design, but it gets worse with each release. The security options are way too intrusive. Gnome is much more intuitive these days.
I was about to agree on the macOS part, but Gnome is really terrible in terms of UX. They are good at eye candy and unfortunately don’t seem to know the difference between a pretty and a good UI.
It was pretty bad last time I used it
Why is it so terrible with multiple monitors then?
Idk, man, macOS is basically a tiling WM and isn’t even that far from GNOME. Windows’s window management (pun not intended) does suck.
MacOS use to be the best. Pretty sure Gnome is based on it, but macOS keeps adding security options that makes things more complicated. Every single plugin is now blocked by default, lots of drivers need you to modify security options in safe mode to be installed, it’s a pain. It use to be great but these day, Gnome is better IMO.
Sure, but then you’re comparing OS with window managers. As far as windows management goes, I honestly prefer the way Mac does it. It actually kinda reminds me to i3wm but friendlier. I even configured Plasma to work somewhat like it. GNOME honestly isn’t bad, it just has a couple of deal breakers I’m not willing to deal with and the devs are not willing to fix.
Thankfully Gnome is ridiculously customisable. The native experience is shit, but installing a few extensions fixes all the issues I had with it at least.
5 minutes with extension manager in Bazzite and i had Gnome exactly how i wanted it. I also haven’t used Gnome in like 20 years.
IMHO KDE is a better option than gnome. No need to tweak the UI to solve those issues.
Moksha Desktop is Even better
I’ve been a big fan of gnome since the gnome2 days. I was ok with Gnome3 when it came out. Typically preferred it over plasma.
Having recently tried plasma, yeah it’s certainly the better desktop environment. They have done a fantastic job, very impressive.
I suspect QT is simply a better toolkit, however I have limited experience with gtk as qt fits my needs better for work. I’m excited to see where Iced and Cosmo goes, just wish iced had a stable webview (although a web socket is probably good enough for my needs anyway. )
I agree, but a couple of programs I use were specifically made compatible with Gnome. It only took me three extensions to make my UI look like KDE though, so it wasn’t too bad.
Hmm… I found it very difficult to customise Gnome. So I switched to Plasma.
That’s fair. A couple of programs I use are more compatible with Gnome so I had an incentive to get it working. My desktop is pretty much identical to KDE/Windows with a start menu (ArcMenu extension), a taskbar (Dash to Panel extension) and I’ve removed all keyboard shortcuts to the Overview eyesore and have prevented it from showing up at launch (No overview at start-up extension).
I love GNOME and hate KDE
When i switched from Windows to Linux, i wanted actual changes, not just a slightly different look
Unrelated question: does anyone know how to show the time in fullscreen or merge the bar with window close button with the top bar with the screen so there arent 2 different bars in GNOME?
TBH both gnome and KDE are broken piles of crap. Cinnamon and XFCE are the only good DE’s left out there (at least for xorg, idk about wayland).
XFCE and Cinnamon its in the Desktop as a experimental option
All DEs are jank. The only good DE is the tiling wm I put 10k lines of config into.
Don’t get me wrong, that’s also janky, but it’s my
faultjank.Yes but what if you need to set up a computer for public use at a community center or a library or something? You shouldn’t expect the visitors to know your custom config. Until there’s a tiling WM that also has GUI elements that enforce the principle of discoverability, I think off-the-shelf DE’s are the only viable option for this usecase.
Sorry, I though my comment was sufficiently self-humerous 😅
Of course custom configs are not suitable for anyone but the config-urator. Hence, custom configs :D
Last time i tried XFCE, i had a terrible experience
But that might be because i was playing minecraft with 300 mods on a laptop that could barely open the launcher
I’d at Mate to the list as well.
I feel exactly the same
I used Gnome Shell 3 for 4 years before giving up on it and going to KDE.
The huge differentiator is that KDE may look like windows OOTB on most distros, but if you want you can easily make it look like Gnome, Mac, Unity… whatever. The panels and menus are infinitely configurable.
And that is why this meme is dead on the money. I’ve come to hate dev teams that have “visions” that they cram down users throats regardless of the experience. And the irony is that Gnome 2 used to be much more configurable than older KDE versions.
To be honest I have the opposite feeling, dev teams with no vision trying to support every single feature possible with no standards drives me bananas
I agree. The only time a strong vision is a problem is if there are no options. But now, the people who don’t want gnome can easily just use something else. I want the gnome devs to do their thing, and as long as I enjoy using gnome I will use it.
Not only that but gnome has a great extension portfolio. Even if they introduce breaking changes I’m happy because I’m glad they are making changes and moving forward rather then bloating with old features
dev teams with no vision trying to support every single feature possible with no standards
It’s no coincidence that C++ is the primary language used in KDE…
Idk why people are so against specialization…
KDEs vision is letting users have the experience they want. You can have a vision without limiting configurability and cramming bad UX down the pipe to your users.
The huge differentiator is that KDE may look like windows OOTB on most distros, but if you want you can easily make it look like Gnome, Mac, Unity… whatever. The panels and menus are infinitely configurable.
Is there a way to configure the look of all the apps running on kde? Because one of the main things that keeps my away from KDE is how ugly all the k* apps look out of the box.
In Plasma 6 there are a crazy number of ways to skin and change the look.
This video was a good way for me to learn some of the basics. https://youtu.be/R6C-RNhHMrE
I gonna be absolutely honest,gnome is fantastic for laptops.
Yes, everything (really, everything) just works, even on funky hardware like those tablet-pc things.
I use gnome too and I like it but that’s just not true. IME support (input of east Asian languages like Japanese) kind of sucks, especially as they only do ibus and not fcitx5.
Oh, I didn’t know about that. I luckily (for the purpose of using gnome and computers in general) only speak languages using the modern latin alphabet (and letters derived from it).
Agree,It looks really nice on Laptops
I used arch btw with latest gnome on amd c60 brazos apu laptop and laptop with i7 4700mq and gtx850m and laptop with Ryzen 5700u apu, so far gestures only worked on ryzen apu, on any other laptop without Ryzen features don’t work and no amount of tinkering makes it work
My laptop has an 8th gen i5 and so far everything works(except my pipewire beig constantly broken).
Why, did they add a “New Text Document” context menu option again?
Gnome users be like “Open in Terminal” > touch filename.txt
Can you not “just” add a “New Text Document.txt” template?
Why don’t they “just” add it for me so I don’t have to click it again to rename the file after it’s made?
I ended up switching to Gnome because KDE would always feel a bit jank to me. Something about it always feels slightly off, animations not working properly or being choppy like my desktop had an unstable framerate. Might just be it fighting with Nvidia, but I don’t have several hundred bucks lying around to upgrade my card and switch to AMD…
Kind of odd seeing the massive hate boner the community seems so have for Gnome, at least we have options for desktop environments at all.
I think the gnome haters are just the loudest. I’ve had all of the same issues with KDE and gnome has just always worked for me. Sure it’s not as customizable, but it gets the job done without annoying issues.
I don’t say much about it because it’s stupid to argue, but I’ve used a LOT of different desktop interfaces over the past 45+ years (yeah, really!), and GNOME…well, GNOME sucks. When Gnome3 was first released we all had high hopes for it improving on Gnome2 (which for those of us on Unix systems was a huge improvement over CDE), and instead it was buggy, clunky, awkward, and an enormous resource hog. Oh yeah, and it was massively unconfigurable. AND it continued to not improve for many many years, until most people I know switched to KDE or one of the other environments (MATE, Cinnamon, and xfce were very popular).
Gnome 4x added a touchscreen paradigm, whether you had a touchscreen or not, and made the experience worse in the process.
If you like it, great! Use it and love it all you want! I’ll play with it once every year or so just to see if someone has finally designed something that doesn’t suck so badly, but for a functional desktop, no thanks.
I think the fact that most of the ‘fringe’ desktops are well-known in the community because of people trying to escape GNOME is pretty telling.
Gnome x.x added a <whatever they got excited about lately> paradigm, whether you need it or not, and made the experience worse in the process.
There. The last couple decades of GNOME development in a nutshell.
My problem with Gnome is the foundation itself.
They act like they know best, and rarely listen to user feedback.
They act like Apple, and that is very bad.
Not only that, but they also act like they are the default and only desktop on Linux, and rarely if ever cooperate with other desktop groups to make things work smoothly.
They are dragged kicking and screaming into following standards, and were the biggest source of NACKs (effectively a “veto”) on the Wayland protocol and a huge reason why Wayland still isn’t complete after over a decade of design.
The gnome desktop is pretty, but it is not functional. You can make it functional by installing gobs of extensions, but those extensions don’t follow a cohesive workflow concept, and often break with updates. It’s like trying to mod Skyrim or Minecraft.
To contrast that, KDE:
-
Explicitly listens to its users and has scheduled times for specifically taking in user feedback (within the scope of broad goals)
-
Actively works to be interoperable with other environments
-
Follows standards and pushes them forward
-
Has all the functionality out of the box, and can be made pretty with extensions/assets (the inverse of Gnome).
-
Functionality mostly doesnt break on updates unless it’s major (like switching to Wayland as the primary development target).
-
If you used Gnome back in the day you know there was a lot of that configurability built in. Then one day the developer decided to start taking it away. Slowly but surely all the ability to configure Gnome was removed. If you experienced this arc like I did you were left scratching your head.
Yes KDE was always more configurable, but removing what configurability Gnome did have made it less useful. For power users this is a big deal. It is like a company taking away all your features and thinking you are going to like it.
Gnome has more in common with hyprland than it does with tablet interfaces
Fight me fight me fight me fight me
Gnome Mobile uses a near the same experience of workspaces for full view apps. That’s exactly how I use hyprland.
GNOME looks like it is touch friendly, but try to run it on a tablet and it’s really fucking not. I had to DL a bunch of tweaks tools to make it useable at all and now the tablet breaks whenever there’s a Gnome update that the tweaks weren’t designed for.
Honestly I’d say the worst part is the osk. They need to treat it a bit more like phosh does. It’s sooooo far behind when compared to modern device osks. Sure there’s some extensions to help it out, but they don’t go far enough to make it decent on a tablet. And it feels incredibly clunky to use with gdm when signing in, where no extension can help it…
And it feels incredibly clunky to use with gdm when signing in, where no extension can help it…
That’s true. Windows also did this badly, on the same tablet, so I didn’t notice.
If KDE does better, I might switch. I think I would use my tablet un-docked more often if logging in wasn’t so clunky.
Its not bad on a tablet. However I think the core design build around keyboard and mouse. (Mostly mouse/trackpad)
distro?
Fedora
k
I run Gnome on Debian on a tablet, and I find it wonderful.
Of course, my only points of comparison, so far, are iOS, Android and Windows tablets. Gnome is (per my own arbitrary last use of each) quite a bit nicer than any of those, at least.
They seem to be at war with the minimize and maximize buttons.
Tbf, you can maximize by double-clicking the titlebar or dragging the window to the top so the button is kind of redundant. You can also (un)minimize by clicking on the taskbar so the minimize button would too be kind of redundant if GNOME hadn’t gotten rid of the fucking task bar.
So the solution is I change my decades long habits. Sounds kinda like microsoft.
lol somebody woke up on the wrong side of bed. I’m just telling you the reasoning as to why it’s done because it’s a fun fact. I don’t care what you use. Chill.
Don’t push your emotional state onto me.
Did you just reply “no u”?
Its pretty standard thing to say to someone who thinks projects their emotional state onto someone else. Nothing about my statement suggested I ‘woke up on the wrong side of the bed’ It does however suggest you can’t take a rebuff and act childish about it.
Brother, what on Earth are you talking about? Rebuff to what? We’re not debating.
Really weird decision they make
Last time I’ve used minimize and maximize buttons was 20 years ago. And yet I think accessibility is more important than whatever the fuck designers that create clean dumb UIs think is important.
You can just toggle them back on
Except for this one Debian machine I have to maintain. They will still disappear on ever restart. They will still be turned on in tweaks and the only way to get them to appear is to switch them from right to left. Luckily I don’t have to use it much.
It’s always wild to me how these hateposts climb to the top, when all the complaints can be boiled down to “I don’t like the design choices”
Have you tried… Just not using it? No one’s forcing you to use it. Have you tried using a different DE instead?
True to some extent, and I do this, but some aspects are unavoidable. For example the GTK save/open dialogue is used by Firefox, and it sucks (why can’t I type the fucking path in?). There aren’t good and popular alternative browsers that use Qt or any other toolkit with a decent dialogue.
If you’re on Plasma, rt-click the start menu and Edit Applications. Find Firefox and into the environment line add
GTK_USE_PORTAL=1and save it.This is something I do on every new install because the GTK dialogs with their buttons at the top and every other thing wrong with them hurts me deep inside to witness.
Have you considered that maybe people actually like the thing and wanna use it but can’t because of a stupid design choice made by the dev team headquartered all the way inside their own asses?
most of the things in gnome extensions should be built in and available from the settings. that being said there’s nothing stopping me from just using something else, hence why I use kde.
What is the difference between adding a extension and enabling a setting other than that a disabled feature is just bloat?
I mean any distro can serve the extension it wants
extensions (in my testing, typically in a VM of fedora or openSUSE) are a pain in the ass to use. it’s also difficult to find the one that I’m looking for because there’s generally several with the same name. something like a system tray (iirc the extension is “app indicators”) or having the dock always visible on the desktop (idk what the extension is called) are features that most people who don’t already use gnome rely on to some degree. these things are core functionality of most desktops precisely because most people use and like these features, and adding a few of the most popular features won’t add enough extra data to really be bloat.
quick sidenote, while typing this I realized the way I have been phrasing things may sound a little aggressive. it's not meant to, this is meant to be more of a breakdown of why I think what I do about gnome as a desktop. I'm not sure how to rephrase this to be less aggressive, so I'm leaving this bit right where I noticed it instead.I personally am very big on having all the customization I can get (kde user, obviously) but I actually did almost stick with gnome once. I tried vanilla is because orchid has just come out and while I was messing with it I found out that it had the dock extension available by default (was new to Linux at the time and didn’t know how to actually use extensions yet) and with that dock extension I didn’t mind gnome as much. the thing with gnome is that it has a lot of good ideas but it ruins a lot of them by only half-implementing what everyone else is already doing. most people would probably find it a lot more usable if it just had features that have been standard since literally the beginning of GUIs, and used to be standard in gnome.
Im not si much a customisation guy, but ended up with KDE and global apple theme, after all 🤭
But I see what GNOME is doing and support them, I think the Linux community as a whole profits from the work they do.
I agree with your opinion that, right now, it is very time consuming finding the right extensions that one need, but I think the problem is more the extension store having bad UI than extensions being bad as whole.
And what I meant is not that distributions are doing a great job right now, choosing what extensions to preinstall, more so that they are able to and that it would be a nice feature of a distro having some essential GNOME extensions preinstalled, even if default disabled.
I don’t use GNOME, but from what I’ve read (and from experience with other software that has extensions) they often break when GNOME updates.
The features would break if they were built in.
GNOME has clear philosophy and they work for themselves, not for you so they decide what features they care to invest time and what features they don’t care about.
Having a standardised method for plugins is in my opinion good enough, nobody forces you to use extensions. And if you don’t want extensions to break, then wait till the extensions are ready prior updating GNOME.
The features would break if they were built in.
You can’t know that and I can’t imagine it would be true. If the plugins many folks find essential were incorporated into GNOME itself then they’d be updated where necessary as a matter of course in developing a new release.
GNOME has clear philosophy and they work for themselves, not for you so they decide what features they care to invest time and what features they don’t care about.
You’re not wrong! This is an arrogant and common take produced in poor taste though. A holdover from the elitism that continues to plague so many projects. Design philosophy leads UX decision making and the proper first goal for any good and functional design is user accessibility. This is not limited to accomodations we deem worthy of our attention.
Good artists set ego aside to better serve their art. Engineers must set pet peeves aside to better serve their projects. If what they find irksome gets in the way of their ability to build functionally better bridges, homes, and software then it isn’t reality which has failed to live up to the Engineer’s standards. This is where GNOME, and many other projects, fall short. Defenders standing stalwart on the technical correctness of a volunteer’s lack of obligation to those whose needs they ostensibly labor for does not induce rightness. It exposes the masturbatory nature of the facade.
Engineers have every right to bake in options catering to their pet peeves (even making them the defaults). That’s not the issue. When those opinions disallow addressing the accessibility needs of those who like and use what they’ve built there is no justification other than naked pride. This is foolish.
Having a standardised method for plugins is in my opinion good enough, nobody forces you to use extensions. And if you don’t want extensions to break, then wait till the extensions are ready prior updating GNOME.
I agree! Having a standardized method for plugins is good, however; the argument which follows misses the point. GNOME lucked into a good pole position as one of the default GNU/Linux DEs and has enjoyed the benefit of that exposure. Continuing to ignore obvious failures in method elsewhere while enshrining chosen paradigms of tool use as sacrosanct alienates users for whom those paradigms are neither resonant nor useful.
No one will force Engineers to use accessibility features they don’t need. Not needing them doesn’t justify refusing the build them. Not building them as able is an abdication of social responsibility. If an engineer does not believe they have any social responsibility then they shouldn’t participate in projects whose published design philosophy includes language such as:
Their walk isn’t matching their talk in a few areas and it is right and good to call them to task for it.
Post statement: This is coming from someone who drives Linux daily, mostly from the console, and prefers GNOME to KDE. All of the above is meant without vitriol or ire and sent in the spirit of progress and solidarity.
Gnome does some questionable things, and some are just personal preference, but there is at least one thing that they do that makes zero sense regardless of how you use your system…
The AppIndicator extension SHOULD be default. There is no reason for it to be an extension other than pure stubbornness. There are applications that literally require it in order to function at all.
There’s a new Wayland protocol that probably will land in the next gnome release. The new protocol is supported by KDE and other desktops as well.
The reason that it was removed is because it is extremely hacky and bad. There have been talks within the project to just reads support since the extension got so many downloads but the new API is better anyway
Would you mind providing a link or the name of the new protocol?
ext-tray-v1https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/355There’s no reason to expect GNOME to implement it, and I’m surprised they haven’t NACKed it.
It literally was developed by gnome. The merge request is coming from a gnome developer.
You don’t have to like gnome but it is silly to try to gate keep over it.
“I understand that some compositors have no interest in allowing clients to show arbitrary content in tray areas. GNOME, for example, doesn’t even have a tray area and it is my understanding that they believe that even the current SNI protocols allow clients too much freedom. Such compositors should not implement this protocol.”
–the page you’re referencing, by the creator of the protocol
Which I find to be a weird stance.
Gnome also believes that a window must have control over its own titlebar to draw it as it sees fit while simultaneously declaring it must not have control over a tray icon.
Also funny that Gnome seems to have objected to KDE proposal and wrote their own even though they seem to say point blank that while they are dictating how all the other DEs will do it, they themselves will be ignoring it. Why get in the business of a protocol you don’t even want to implement in the first place…
Their solution to a problem is to pretend like it doesn’t exist simply because it will go away in the future? It’s a reason, but it isn’t a good one.
I won’t disagree with you there. They should’ve had a replacement before deprecating it. In there defense there was a alternative being developed but it ended up stalling over disagreements between KDE and gnome. The whole thing is a dumpster fire honestly. I’m glad they are cleaning it up. KDE and Gnome want the same thing for the most part they just kept getting into pointless bickering.
Default the cursor to the Search field on a Save dialog is possibly the absolute fucking stupidest thing ever.
I love GNOME and everytime I tried an other DE I came back to GNOME. But the cursor in the search field is annoying and incomprehensible…
I’ll be honest, I could probably use Gnome if I had to, with a few addons. But when I try it, the second I get to that dialog and it does that, I just shut it down and install something else. To me, it just epitomizes the contempt the developers have for the users, that it continues to exist after this long.
I’m triggered. Why would you even mention that.
I think the lack of a system tray in gnome is a case of perfect of being the enemy of good.
That you need an extension to disable the overview at startup still boggles my mind and the arrogance of the developers in the thread that started it didn’t lessen my antipathy for Gnome at all.
Why wouldn’t you want the overview at startup?
In my case because I have my PC connected to the TV and Steam starting automatically in big screen mode. But according to the devs I’m doing it wrong and should get used to it because it’s the better experience when I can go and grab my keyboard to start typing the name of the program I want to start.
Because there is nothing to overwiew yet, obviously.
It provides easy access to search. I understand now though why you wouldn’t want it to open automatically (if you have startup programs you want to see instead).
actually, i just want to click one of my pinned panel favorites, but yeah, no need for search basically.
Because you already set firefox to autostart
We’d like you to head up our project to tailor our new CLI for thumb-typing.
