I ended up switching to Gnome because KDE would always feel a bit jank to me. Something about it always feels slightly off, animations not working properly or being choppy like my desktop had an unstable framerate. Might just be it fighting with Nvidia, but I don’t have several hundred bucks lying around to upgrade my card and switch to AMD…
Kind of odd seeing the massive hate boner the community seems so have for Gnome, at least we have options for desktop environments at all.
My problem with Gnome is the foundation itself.
They act like they know best, and rarely listen to user feedback.
They act like Apple, and that is very bad.
Not only that, but they also act like they are the default and only desktop on Linux, and rarely if ever cooperate with other desktop groups to make things work smoothly.
They are dragged kicking and screaming into following standards, and were the biggest source of NACKs (effectively a “veto”) on the Wayland protocol and a huge reason why Wayland still isn’t complete after over a decade of design.
The gnome desktop is pretty, but it is not functional. You can make it functional by installing gobs of extensions, but those extensions don’t follow a cohesive workflow concept, and often break with updates. It’s like trying to mod Skyrim or Minecraft.
To contrast that, KDE:
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Explicitly listens to its users and has scheduled times for specifically taking in user feedback (within the scope of broad goals)
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Actively works to be interoperable with other environments
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Follows standards and pushes them forward
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Has all the functionality out of the box, and can be made pretty with extensions/assets (the inverse of Gnome).
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Functionality mostly doesnt break on updates unless it’s major (like switching to Wayland as the primary development target).
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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 développement in a nutshell.
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.
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.
It’s funny because GNOME was the first OSS X11 desktop environment to get actual usability testing from corporate developers (Sun Microsystems).
I’m not sure if they still have a user interface design guideline document, though. They probably burned it when GNOME 3 development started. Haven’t checked. I’ve mostly used Xfce since then (and very recently KDE).
Gnome is amazing for laptops, the touchpad gestures are incredible, on PC it’s aight.
You know how you start hallucinating in a sensory deprivation situation? I feel a lot of UX people just aren’t talking to users directly and thus we get whatever they hallucinate is a good design, disconnected from any actual user needs. Any user feedback only comes after they’ve made their mind up and is seen as the users being wrong, as the alternative is harder to deal with.
It’s free so I can’t really complain, but I can use KDE instead.
Compiz, XFCE, and GNOME <40 (now Cinnamon and MATE) proved quality UI design 15+ years ago.
It is actually insulting to Linux desktop that the default DE on the top distros don’t even have minimize and expand buttons by default, and that any extra features require DE plugins.
GNOME 40+ is like Wayland. Years of development for practically no real user improvements. Every update shows off features DEs had over a decade ago.
GNOME 47’s first listed big change is accent colors. wtf??? What the f*** do you think we’ve been using GTK and Qt for???
At least with KDE, the ram usage is justified. GNOME eats system resources just to give you a shitty ChomeOS UI that feels just as cheap.
The moment XFCE ports to Wayland, I’ll happily swap Compiz for Wayfire and use my computer like a normal person.
It’s a pity that the dont improve touch experience. Especially floating touch keyboard situation - there is none (working well).
My only complain in (default PopOs/Gnome’s?) Dolphin file explorer there is no “space” to right click in the “current” directory… Otherwise IMHO it’s no worse than Windows!
Don’t even try to say GNOME is a touch screen design. I’ve used it with a touchscreen, it’s just bad design. What bothers me the most is that is close to being good if not for a couple of stupid decisions like having no system tray.
Just use dash to dock extension. But I agree the system tray not being there by default is a puzzling experience.
The system tray thing irks me to no end. Some apps still use one to control things and you have to use hacky plugins to get them to show. Other than that there’s a lot I do like about gnome. Plasma suits my needs more though. So much more you can do with it.
Yeah, at least with plasma I can change all the defaults I don’t like, but with gnome you have to hope there’s an extension that’s moderately up to date or make one of your own.
Yep. I don’t even want a proper system tray, just gimme a list with the apps that are still running with their windows closed. They can’t even do that.
Ive changed my entire work flow because of this. On my laptop I use paperWM for infinite horizontal scrolling/tiling and “vertical” workspaces for organizing windows. Instead of minimizing windows, I just switch workspaces. Windows that need to be next to each other are on the same workspace, anything else is treated like a full screen app. It’s a little weird, but for productivity with a TouchPad it’s been an absolute game changer. Ican have a workspace dedicated to programming, obe thats just documents, one for each of my courses, one thats discord and music players, etc.
For a normal mouse, it’s a kafkaesque nightmare.
Same workflow here but on KDE. I even have an extension that sends any maximized screen to its own desktop and deletes the desktop when it’s closed or no longer maximized.
I absolutely love (slightly tweaked) gnome. Fight me if you want, I’m sick in bed and have time.
well if you’re sick in bed this will be an easy fight…
I elbow slam your face, your turn
You activated my trap card! My sickness was but a simple ruse to lure you into complacency! Your attack was weak, unfocused! I jump up, standing on my bed, your face is now easy prey for my unnaturally sharp knees. The structural rigidity of your nose is now forfeit!
Your attack was weak, unfocused!
Much like the Gnome user experience! :-D
“Fight me if you want, I’m sick in bed and have time.”
I’m also sick and in bed, and this is such an appealing offer of a sparring match, but alas, I’ve never used Gnome
this makes you the ideal candidate for an internet argument !
Well, use the time to try it, I guess.
Man, they already said that they’re sick. Have some mercy!
Fight, fight, fight!
Yeah, it’s almost usable but I suspect most people don’t wanna deal with broken extensions every new release. Last time my extensions broke, all I had to do to fix them was changing the target version in the manifest. Clearly, there weren’t enough changes to the DE to warrant breaking them and they were just broken on purpose.
Yeah, it usually takes a week for the official versions of the extensions I use to work again after a gnome version update. It’s easily worked around, usually, but that hard break every update sucks.
I just dislike the way KDE structures it’s menus more, and while I suspect that I could tweak KDE to be something I like using, I also suspect that that would be much more annoying to fix for the next mayor Update.
I sometimes think about swapping over to i3, but I haven’t yet had the leisure to give it a try.
Do you mean the application menu? Not trying to evangelize here, it’s just that I almost never see it because Krunner is so integrated with everything in KDE that it feels like the intended way to launch stuff so I find it weird that the application menu bothers you.
If you mean the menus on the applications themselves, fair enough, I guess. I also don’t understand why they’re still just a regular app menu (File, Edit, etc…) but crammed into a single button.
Oh, yeah, that also annoyed me. I actually meant the settings menu, though. I have set up KDE for friends/family a few times, and depending on screen size and scaling, even in conditions that shouldn’t be edge cases, there where sometimes scrollbars in both directions.
I also just, kinda don’t like the vibe, I guess? That’s extremely subjective, I know, just something I noticed every time I worked with KDE.
Yeah, the single menu button is my biggest issue with KDE apps, I wish there was a way to turn that off system-wide instead of having to do it for every app.
prepare…smack!
Its good for people who like the one very specific workflow they go for.
My main problem with it is they cause problems for like every other DE. GTKs insistence on only supporting CSD makes any GTK app integrate so much worse on anything else. (Vice versa having no fallback ssd, so apps are just broken on gnome if the toolkit doesn’t support CSD)
Or all the problems it’s caused with various Wayland protocols by refusing to compromise or saying nothing until it’s almost finalized then coming out against them.
Like Valve explicitly calls out gnome as unsupported because they refused to implement DRM leasing for years.
I don’t dislike gnome because of the software itself, opinionated projects are good, even when I have different opinions. I dislike gnome because I think it’s a net negative to the Linux ecosystem as a whole.
They seem to be at war with the minimize and maximize buttons.
Really weird decision they make
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.
Last time I’ve used minimize and maximize buttons was 20 years ago. And yet I think accessibility is more important than whatever the fuck designers that create clean dumb UIs think is important.
Tbf, you can maximize by double-clicking the titlebar or dragging the window to the top so the button is kind of redundant. You can also (un)minimize by clicking on the taskbar so the minimize button would too be kind of redundant if GNOME hadn’t gotten rid of the fucking task bar.
So the solution is I change my decades long habits. Sounds kinda like microsoft.
lol somebody woke up on the wrong side of bed. I’m just telling you the reasoning as to why it’s done because it’s a fun fact. I don’t care what you use. Chill.
Don’t push your emotional state onto me.
Did you just reply “no u”?
Its pretty standard thing to say to someone who thinks projects their emotional state onto someone else. Nothing about my statement suggested I ‘woke up on the wrong side of the bed’ It does however suggest you can’t take a rebuff and act childish about it.
Brother, what on Earth are you talking about? Rebuff to what? We’re not debating.
Please don’t force touch design in me!
Please force touch design in me
I gonna be absolutely honest,gnome is fantastic for laptops.
Why, did they add a “New Text Document” context menu option again?
Gnome users be like “Open in Terminal” > touch filename.txt
Can you not “just” add a “New Text Document.txt” template?
Why don’t they “just” add it for me so I don’t have to click it again to rename the file after it’s made?
Yes, everything (really, everything) just works, even on funky hardware like those tablet-pc things.
I use gnome too and I like it but that’s just not true. IME support (input of east Asian languages like Japanese) kind of sucks, especially as they only do ibus and not fcitx5.
Oh, I didn’t know about that. I luckily (for the purpose of using gnome and computers in general) only speak languages using the modern latin alphabet (and letters derived from it).
I used arch btw with latest gnome on amd c60 brazos apu laptop and laptop with i7 4700mq and gtx850m and laptop with Ryzen 5700u apu, so far gestures only worked on ryzen apu, on any other laptop without Ryzen features don’t work and no amount of tinkering makes it work
My laptop has an 8th gen i5 and so far everything works(except my pipewire beig constantly broken).
Agree,It looks really nice on Laptops
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.
Why is it so terrible with multiple monitors then?
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
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.
Lets not be deliberately obtuse, you’re clearly meant to be using it with your feet.
Just the left foot only
TIL Gnome devs have (left) foot fetishism
Tarantignome
Oh! A Gnome hate thread!
I’m in!
FUCKING GNOME>!!!111!!!ELEVEN
I feel like the majority of DE developers are just back-end developers, which like, of course that’s not going to be a great user experience lol
