Hi,
I used to be a big fan of GNOME the way it got out of my way when I didn’t need it and no icons in the bottom to take up desktop space. But the top bar just seems so… useless. It holds a few useful icons in the right side (and you can get extensions to add more) but other than this, it’s just taking up space. After a trip past Xfce I’m now on KDE with the bar in the top.
Have I missed anything about the top bar in GNOME Desktop?
The bar is meant to be very minimal and not distracting.
It takes up space, sure, but it’s close to the minimal height while still having easily readable time up top
Is there any part of Gnome that isn’t “minimal and not distracting?” In my experience, the ideal Gnome applet is a blank window with no features, only a burger menu that only has the About info and a button that says “Do Nothing” in the top bar.
In my experience, many Gnome apps make doing complex tasks pretty easy compared to third party apps. However, it is at the cost of customization and questions like “why can’t I do this???”
But in general, Gnome’s simple design works for me, most things feel clean and polished. I don’t need the vast majority of features offered.
In the cases where Gnome’s default aren’t powerful enough, often times the KDE equivalent isn’t good enough for me either despite offering more features and customization.
As an example, Gnome Text Editor vs Kwrite and Kate. GTS has the basics I need like line numbers (Apple’s text editor does not have this…) and that fits 80% of my needs. But what about more advanced things? Well, no markdown support but I don’t think Kate has that either. What about coding? I’d rather use a dedicated IDE than Kate or GTS.
I’m especially talking about smaller utility programs, like a USB stick formatter. If Gnome even has one of their own, it’ll be an empty window with a single button in the top bar that says “Format Drive.” There will be no choice or indication as to the name, the format, or perhaps even which drive to format. Turns out it will always do the removable drive that was mounted first chronologically. What the pity fuck do you mean you want to format a USB drive while your external backup HDD is attached? Who could ever want to do that? Oh and it’ll be carefully designed to be unusable if you use any theme but light Adwaita. If you want to do something specific, open the terminal and use dd.
KDE’s USB stick formatter will include several different wiping algorithms, you can key in a custom string to fill the empty drive space with with unicode support, settings for physical disks and solid state memory, the weird features of SD cards, it’ll support formats only used by Sun Solaris and OS/2, you can specify a maximum write speed, and it’s got a full set of drive encryption tools built in. All of this is perfectly themeable, but the UI elements are crammed a little too dense and not quite lined up right so it has a little bit of amateurish Windows 98 jank to it.
Cinnamon’s USB stick formatter will be somewhere in the middle. It lets you choose which drive to format, what name to call it, which of about 8 formats to put on it, whether to do a “full wipe”, and that’s about it. Made in GTK for Cinnamon’s design language, it looks straightforward but competent, like it’s from Windows 7. Does what almost all users need, almost all of the time, without getting in the way. The only snag I can think of is likely the Cinnamon menu’s fault: They provide a USB Stick Formatter, and a USB Image Writer. And it will switch places in the order it presents so you can’t memorize “for the formatter, type “USB” and hit enter, for the writer, type “USB” press down and enter.” They use the same icon so you have to stop and process the written language to get the app you want.