– Is supporting tray icons important? – What icons? Let the plugin community worry about that. – You're hired!
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:
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 !
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
They seem to be at war with the minimize and maximize buttons.
I gonna be absolutely honest,gnome is fantastic for laptops.
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 more keyboard-focused than KDE. It just also happens to have much better touch support.
Get this meme to /linuxsucks where it belongs.
In my experience, KDE Plasma is surprisingly actually better than Gnome for tablet use. You would think that Gnome's more minimal and chunky UI would make it a better fit, but Plasma just has a lot more little usability QOL features.
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.
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.
Default the cursor to the Search field on a Save dialog is possibly the absolute fucking stupidest thing ever.
In a land where desktops can be ripped out and replace with ease - what's the point in arguing? GNOME isn't my thing but I'm glad it's an option.
i like gnome, it looks good, is smooth, and does it's job
Oh! A Gnome hate thread!
I'm in!
FUCKING GNOME>!!!111!!!ELEVEN
Gnome is not really touch-centric, it's more keyboard-crentric. Sure, the activity overview is great for touch. It's even greater for the keyboard though. And I don't like using the mouse a lot anyway
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.
Please don't force touch design in me!
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.
Hint: :q!
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