Gnome is amazing for laptops, the touchpad gestures are incredible, on PC it’s aight.
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!
That’s a pretty low bar!
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
IMHO KDE is a better option than gnome. No need to tweak the UI to solve those issues.
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.
Please don’t force touch design in me!
Please force touch design in me
GNOME peaked with 2 which is why I prefer MATE.
Gnome has the best kbm experience out of the box
But this meme doesn’t make sense because Gnome is also really high in the accessibility community
nah gnome is great with ms+kb. as well as touch.
get outta here with this 2011 meme.
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
I actually like Gnome. I like the way it looks and I have no problems with UX. I also don’t feel the need to use any extensions.
¯\_(‘_’)_/¯
Old gnome is nostalgic to me, because my first venture into Linux was Fedora Core 4. I was still using Win98 at the time, and gnome 2.10 felt so modern in comparison, with rounded corners and soft gradients.
Coming back to Linux after having not touched it for a very, very long time I tried gnome again and I just do not like it at all. It’s weird looking. Maybe too modern for me, i don’t know.
If you miss GNOME 2 try MATE. It is a continuation of GNOME 2.
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.
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.
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.
