(If you know where I stole this from, I love you.)
I don’t love GNOME, but if you use it…whatever. Linux is all about choice and lack of lock-in.
If you want to compile CDE from the 1990s and use it as your DE…you do you honey boo boo.
[EDIT]
JFC apparent CDE is still around and had a stable release 2 months ago. Holy fucking case-in-point right there.
I used KDE for a long time trying to do things that just worked in Gnome. I finally switched and don’t seem to be hunting for anything KDE did
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!
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.
Maybe, but 2GB would still be 4 times heavier than my XFCE average, I just wouldn’t use it for a 2 or 4 GB system, other softwares need their RAM too.
Great point!
Might be especially important going forward unfortunately
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 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.
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 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.
Just because it has a different workflow that big players implanted in people, Linux needs to match that?
For newbies? Yes. SO MUCH YES.
I don’t care if you want to use Gnome on a distro for people who want weird and different. But for any mainstream distro targeted toward newbies, Gnome should not be the default DE. Precisely because it requires a lot of additional learning to use the DE, in addition to learning to use Linux.
Not at all. Newcomers want intuitive UI. And gnome is really that.
Examples:
One unified settings app. Containing all the settings that as a average user needs. It’s always at the top right corner.
Change the wallpaper? Top right corner -> settings
Add a network? Top right corner -> settings
Extend display to projector? Top right corner -> settings
It’s not weird at all.
What would be a better starter DE then?
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?
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.
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
I’m sure that’s the attitude that will help make Linux a prominent desktop OS among the general population. /s
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 started my Linux journey about 5 years ago on mint with the cinnamon DE. It’s not the fanciest but it got the job done, no real complaints.
Recently I made the change to debian without too much thought on the DE and I was presented with gnome. Took me about 5 minutes before I was looking up alternatives.
Now on KDE plasma, and out of the 3 I’ve tried it’s definitely my favourite.
Plasma has improved A LOT in the past year. Like a year ago I hated it. now? I daily drive it. I hate to use this phrase but everything just works.
I was kinda disappointed with the 6.6 release as I really just want dedicated virtual desktops per monitor but their compromise actually isn’t that bad. I just had to turn off animation for changing workspaces and it’s fine. Even tiling works A LOT better on Plasma than it used to and dare I saw kinda works better/is more smooth than Sway and the like and I’m not even using krohnkite. you can quickly toggle the splits for windows and even do vim style navigation between windows. you can even do vim navigation with windows that aren’t tiled.
Plus the stuff they have packaged in is just better than most alternatives out there. I love Konsole. it has everything I need. and Kate is also a fantastic IDE you can REALLY customize that is slept on by many people. Dolphin is great too. It’s nice having a DE that just has all the stuff you need right out of the box and you don’t really have to change any of the defaults.
Dolphin is surprisingly powerful. I was using a tool (SshPilot) to handle my remote connections and it had an option to browse a remote computer’s filesystem. I was curious what that would look like and it just used my local Dolphin windows and opened up my remote computer and easily browse the files there. I’m so used to using an external program like FileZilla for stuff like that.
Yeah I agree. GNOME 3 is hideous, completely unusable. I don’t know why they had to ruin the perfection of GNOME 2.
It was developed and released during a time where people obsessed with touch interfaces thanks to deficient computing devices like phones and tablets. So many people were wholly convinced that these things were going to completely replace general purpose computing, so projects like Gnome, which were being run by Red Hat, had to follow along one way or another, though they probably did so willingly.
In any case, I am SO glad those days are over. It was far, far worse than the AI hype that we have to put up with today.
You have a right to that opinion but Gnome 4(0) was released a year and a half ago, and we’re on 49 now. Also, I think it’s beautiful and elegant.
I also liked GNOME 2 a lot. Current GNOME is okay for what it is, but it feels too dumbed down for my tastes. For example the default editor has basically no features compared to gedit back in the day. The desktop is kind of nice on a laptop with a good touchpad and gestures though.
It deserves all the criticism.
And it is by far my favorite DE.Been using GNOME since ~ 3.8/3.10 (so i guess a while now) and out of the box it mostly just works for me. I have maybe 3-4 extensions none of which I desperately rely on (although TopIcons is clutch) and I agree with most design choices. I’ve thought about switching some times but I think all I would do is try to replicate my GNOME workflow elswhere so why bother?
As a GNOME user since forever, I find it fascinating how much time KDE users spend thinking about GNOME. They seem so obsessed with customization, yet seem incapable of understanding that people could have preferences different from their own.
It’s because we wasted so much time on the Gnome side of the fence, cracking jokes at KDE, and now we know what we were missing and we want our wasted time back.
Just want to remind everyone that the point of this scene is that Draper is an unstable and insecure man that is actually obsessed about how everyone around him are perceiving him, all the time. So this line is just stupid bravado, because he thinks the phrase projects the image he wants others to have of himself. He is lying because he actually thinks about what others think of him constantly. He works in advertising ffs.
We don’t, except for when gnome is installed by default.
Exactly, or when they forced their tools as “standard” forcing KDE to adapt.
As both a Cinnamon and KDE user, you can tell you’re using an app made for Gnome because it either outright doesn’t do anything, or it does the barest least nuanced most stereotypical version of that thing. Oh great, another empty fuckpuke window that doesn’t respect the system theme with an empty hamburger menu and one button in the very top-left that says “Do Something”.
I don’t know of a package manager with a GTK filter.
I don’t know of a package manager with a GTK filter.
This I could agree with, but the problem here is a lacking feature in package managers, not the fact that apps that you don’t personally enjoy using exist.
I don’t particularly enjoy using KDE apps, but thankfully the K-centric naming convention make them really easy to avoid.
Maybe if gnome’s choices didn’t impact the part of the ecosystem that do not rely on gnome in any way, people would be less disgruntled about gnome. For example, the refusal of gnome devs to support server side decorations, forces app devs to implement client side decorations even when they design apps that don’t make use of the features enabled by client side decorations.
I don’t care if people use gnome, people should be free to use what they prefer. I do care if the mere fact that gnome exists complicates app development because gnome devs seem incapable of understanding that people could have preferences different from their own.
yet seem incapable of understanding that people could have preferences different from their own.
Perfect description of Gnome developers.
And that’s why they’re so out of touch.
Oh yes, I forgot about that time they tracked down and kidnapped KDE contributors never to be heard of again, depriving the poor FOSS community from their freedom of choice.
So apps look the way they are made?
When I use KDE apps in GNOME they also look like KDE apps. Obviously - that’s the way they are made. If I want something else than what someone else created I will use something else, not complain about how they didn’t create it the way I personally prefer.
Lmao you hyperbole’d your own statement quoted back at you.
Or have there been cases of KDE preferers/devs doing this to gnome preferers/devs?
I was talking about users, not developers.
I’m under the crazy opinion that developers are free to develop whatever they want, and users are free to use whatever they want. If they are unhappy they can use something else or become developers.
If I develop something you do not want to use I do not restrict your freedom. GNOME developers are not restricting your freedom by creating a product that’s according to my preferences. They are giving us both freedom to choose what we prefer. The fact that GNOME is so different from KDE increases freedom of choice.
I don’t get what is so hard to understand here.
The criticisms I’ve heard:
- You can’t customize it!
- Hey, extensions don’t count, because sometimes they break between major version upgrades!
- The developers are mean! They didn’t even take my suggestions!
- The design philosophy is bad! It doesn’t even want to be windows!
I have been using versions of GNOME for about 5 years now and I have always been able to customize my DE to a very high degree. Out of every random extension I’ve tried, probably 80% work, and that is even counting unmaintained ones that haven’t seen an update in years. And out of those extensions I chose to keep using, I’ve only have an occasional stability issue. I think I’ve actually experienced that once since 2021 when I switched to Linux as a daily driver.
Maybe I’m just asocial but I don’t expect to reach out to my software devs and influence them at all. Unless I reported a bug and they were a dick about it, I’d probably never complain about the devs. And lastly I think the design philosophy is excellent. Maximizing screen real estate while being quite flexible, rejecting everything shitty about windows and incorporating everything good about macOS.
Every problem I’ve had is so far outweighed by the positives that it’s not remotely close. It makes sense to me that it’s so popular. KDE on the other hand… I am glad it exists but I wish it were better. I feel like it literally wants to be windows. People say it is SO customizable and I was convinced to give the latest version a chance recently. It does not feel like finished software to me, tbh. Before I could really give it a shot I needed to customize the UI to be more minimalist. I found the UI to do that quickly. Within five minutes I had crashed the desktop several times, and I felt unable to achieve what I wanted at all. The drag and drop UI for the taskbar area wasn’t stable in my experience. It kept crashing AND wouldn’t do what I wanted.
What criticism of GNOME is so well deserved? I just don’t see any criticism of it that I feel is deserved. Meanwhile KDE seems janky to me and to this day I haven’t once seen anyone hate on it. You’d think it was basically perfect.
When saying it deserves “all” the criticism, I might have been hyperbolic
I agree with most of what you said.The keep it simple philosophy I agree with, but there are a few UI decisions, a few missing features I couldn’t wrap my head around. They tend to be rectified in the end because it’s common sense, but it takes a very long time and it can be frustrating. I’m sorry my memory is shit so I only remember the sentiment and don’t have specifics. I do have one recent example, I needed to change a very simple shortcut. The system doesn’t allow it and it feels arbitrary.
Extensions are really great. Some are absolute gems, and they tend to work perfectly. But the fact some are almost mandatory to have sane default is an issue. Especially when you have multiple devices. I don’t think most people want a useless popup telling you the program has launched (or the window is activated, what is it again?), popup which once clicked won’t even open said program. The extensions graveyard is hard to see though. I had recently a good one that wouldn’t be ported to latest gnome, killing my linux tablet workflow. and can anyone tell me what the app menu with icons in seemingly random order is for?
I’ve used KDE for 4 years and mostly liked it, but I had tons of issues, and very few with Gnome.
KDE users I know your experience might be different but I’m telling you how it went for me. Gnome, while imperfect in this regard, has been much better. I tried Plasma 6 when it came out and it was pretty much the same for me, but I will give it another try at one point.You seem to have a really balanced point of view and that’s good. I wanted to like KDE but on the other hand it reads as windows 2000 to my eyes and it bothers me. I did like some things about the interface but overall it felt too busy for me. I hadn’t tried it in years until the recent plasma update and people raving about it and its customizability convinced me to give it another shot. One of the first things I did was try to customize the top bar and task bar to be cleaner. It crashed several times very quickly. That’s a really bad first impression. The bugs I experienced immediately were as many as I’d seen in years of GNOME experience.
In a perfect world though, yes, GNOME would be more customizable, particularly the overview mode. I do not like it at all. On the other hand, it’s not so bad I wouldn’t just live with it if I didn’t have other options. I do though. To launch any app not common enough to put on my dock, I use ulauncher. It’s not the best but it usually works well as an alfred-style launcher app.
I hated macs until OSX and since then I’ve hated windows more. Just mentioning because I’m sure someone will read what I’ve written and think I’m a Mac guy. Which was true for a bit but I’ve grown to dislike macs a lot as well. Their OS is still better than windows though!
What version of KDE did you try on what distro?
The second to last time last time I tried it, when I had all the trouble with crashing, it was in a vm. I think it was on fedora. It was a pretty current version at the time. Maybe 6 months ago. Then a few days ago I installed it as an alternate DE on the current version of pop os. I had some bizarre scaling issues. Didn’t check the version that time. Got frustrated and immediately uninstalled it.
I’m happy I’m not the only one to experience KDE like that. I’ve had far better experiences with XFCE than with KDE, but I keep going back to GNOME because of the user experience. I’m happy people enjoy KDE though, so I don’t generally feel a strong need to trash it online. But my god can the user base be insufferable at times.
Yeah, a part of me wants to vent my frustration with kde since I truly wanted it to be good, but it wasn’t, ime.
Now for some reason I just had an idea. It would be pretty awesome if there could be a desktop layout standard configuration format such that on any DE that supports it, you could just load up a config file and get a very similar UI on any DE. I know, it’s a pipe dream but it would be cool.
Edit: and yes I know, GNOME haters. GNOME devs would be the first to reject this idea.
I find gnome easier to customize, something always messes up with kde for me when setting up my ui, gnome also lets you use your computer and watch videos while customizing, kde plasma takes over your screen and you cant see your windows.
KDE on the other hand… I am glad it exists but I wish it were better. I feel like it literally wants to be windows.
KDE’s approach was ‘Windows, but with even more dialogs and crammed lists’ for at least twenty years. And it also felt clunky way back then. People on Lemmy keep saying that Plasma is good now, but I read the complaints and it’s like nothing changed.
I like gnome DE, I dislike the arrogance of the project team.
My straw was the login-to-exposé thing.
It was (and still is) the default input focus to the Search box on the Save dialog. Why? Just… why? Why would I ever want to start typing in the Search box when I’m saving a file. I have never, ever thought to myself as I saved something that I should search for something to name this thing I’m saving after something else somewhere on this filesystem.
Why? Just… why?
Any time you ask the Gnome devs this, you can expect the answer to be “elegance”. And then they block you.
Can you elaborate for the curious? I tried searching but couldn’t find anything. What’s the login to exposé thing?
Once upon a time, when you logged in you arrived at the desktop. Then typically you’d click a docked application icon or use the hot corner to open the overview (Apple calls it exposé on macOS) and search for an application to start. Some people would just hit the keyboard shortcut and start typing an application name. Very quick.
One day, the gnome team decided that since a lot of people do this, that immediately after logging in you’d arrive directly at this overview/exposé mode ready to type an app name.
Quite a few people didn’t like this change, and requested a setting so they could enable/disable it as was their preference. The response from the gnome team was essentially ‘get fucked’ enshrouded by weak/nonsense justifications for the change and for not making it optional, apparently taking the request as some kind of personal attack.
It was a trivial minor change but the way the team handled it was… lacking.
Yeah, that sounds exactly like the GNOME3 team.
For years, they fought back against giving users the option to change where their dock is, forcing them to be stuck with an asinine vertical dock because “vertical space is at a premium.”
They do this because they’re lazy and incompetent. They simply do not want more work for themselves and will browbeat any of their users into doing things the “stupid gnome3 way.”
Their designers are some of the dumbest people in the industry. Since they have a yes-man/echo chamber culture, they don’t ever get to learn from their mistakes because nobody holds them accountable for failure.
KDE: “I just blue myself”
