(If you know where I stole this from, I love you.)
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.
These two statements do not contradict themselves.
I am not a bigot. I hate ALL people!
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 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.
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.
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!
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 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.
Great point!
Might be especially important going forward unfortunately
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!
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.
Just use any Linux distro you like!
Stock Ubuntu with GNOME
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 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.
That’s just a good approach to life in general.
I got to take this baby from 999 to 1K
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
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.
KDE: “I just blue myself”
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.
just used the salad fork for seafood.
What’s wrong with using the same fork for salad and seafood?
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?
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.
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
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.
People did. That’s how we got MATE and Cinnamon; much better desktop environments.
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.
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.
