(If you know where I stole this from, I love you.)
My main issue when I was using GNOME is that it needed a run ton of extensions to be truly useful, and most broke after a new release.
I’m using KDE basically out of the box, nothing bothers me enough to try to fix it.
Yes, GNOME 3+ is completely unusable. It looks like it’s been designed for a tablet.
Plus, I can’t stand client side window decorations.
Gnome… isn’t Gnome. Gnome 2.x/MATE is Gnome. Gnome 3.x and further is gnome shit (or dwarfen shit? We should ask DND specialists to clarify this moment)
Gnome’s devs are insular and don’t listen to suggestions from outsiders. That sounds like Svirfneblin to me!
I liked Gnome back when Ubuntu was brown.
The Gnome 2 days 👍
After Gnome shit the bed with Gnome 3 and beyond, MATE continued everything great about 2 and continues its legacy.
I genuinely hope history remembers the GNOME desktop as “it was good, and then they started making some really stupid decisions!”
How is MATE nowadays? Is it just Gnome 2 frozen in time or does it have modern features?
It’s mostly Gnome 2 frozen in time - there have been small improvements here and there, particularly in Caja (the file manager). I think that’s great though personally, and use it on most of my machines.
Wayland adoption has been slow, but it is getting there.
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 mean I don’t dislike it.
I bet it’s lightweight as fuck, tho…
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.
Yeah I agree. GNOME 3 is hideous, completely unusable. I don’t know why they had to ruin the perfection of GNOME 2.
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.
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.
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.
why in the fuck is it pronounced guhnome
Because the “G” has gone silent for too long and will not take it anymore.
Because that’s how people speaking Old English would have pronounced it. And we all know how particular 10th century Saxons are about their Linux desktop.
To match GNU
Guh-NU
why in the fuck is it pronounced guhnome
It’s not. There is no vowel between G and N. Watch an episode or two of Star Trek and listen to some Klingon or Vulkan names to learn how such a combination of letters is pronounced without adding a vowel.
lmfao gonna pass on the homework, teach
Lmao imagine taking that seriously
> he fell for the double cross
oh no no no no
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
People did. That’s how we got MATE and Cinnamon; much better desktop environments.
just used the salad fork for seafood.
What’s wrong with using the same fork for salad and seafood?
Posh person nonsense. At fancy parties you’re supposed to use different food weapons for each course and work your way from the outside in. Fairly sure the only reason it was invented was so rich ppl could show off how many fancy pieces of cutlery they owned.
Which is the vibe I get from Gnome’s design and its devs’ attitude in general. “Fancy party”. A bunch of dumbass rules you have no influence over and which people will sneer at you for breaking.
Just use any Linux distro you like!
Stock Ubuntu with GNOME
Right now I use kde customized to look almost exactly like gnome.
Kde is so ugly and buggy, requiring tons of setup n knowhow to fix. GNOME feels limiting and oversimplified, but honestly 9 out of 10 times its fine… even if its setting menu infuriates on the regular.
Im old and i dont having 100 hrs to rice shit anymore
Kde is so ugly and buggy, requiring tons of setup n knowhow to fix.
Surely you confuse Plasma and Gnome. To get a sane setup on Gnome, you need to install Refine to enable the minimize button and then install Gnome Extension Manager and enable Dash to Panel or Dash to Dock.
That’s an insane amount of setup work for someone who doesn’t know about those things.
…if you want
For the max/min buttons you can just turn them on in gnome tweaks
For the max/min buttons you can just turn them on in gnome tweaks
Ah yes, using a different non-standard tool makes so much of a difference.
It isn’t “non standard.” It is literally a part of gnome.
Haters gonna hate I guess
It isn’t “non standard.” It is literally s part of gnome.
It’s a stand-alone tool by the Gnome developers, it’s not an integral part of Gnome.
The default UX of Gnome still make it hard for people migrating from Win10. No amount of nitpicking about irrelevant details change that fact.
Haters gonna hate I guess
I didn’t expect any other response by a Gnome fan. Keep ignoring comments like https://lemmy.world/comment/22252682 where I explained that I picked Gnome for an elderly man. I’m really such a hater that I pick Gnome for a certain use case.
What is the last KDE you tried? Plasma is SO good, right out of the box.
Gnome people keep saying KDE requires so much ‘setup’ … but it really doesn’t. 95% of the time (unless you’ve got a really weird distro), the default settings your flavor of KDE ships with are … just fine. And you can use the desktop just fine without ever touching any of the settings. It has lots of options, sure, but you don’t have to screw around with all the options. It has sane defaults for a reason.
It deserves all the criticism.
And it is by far my favorite DE.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.
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.
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.
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.
yet seem incapable of understanding that people could have preferences different from their own.
Perfect description of Gnome developers.
“What’s the use case?” Issue closed itself to shit.
We don’t, except for when gnome is installed by default.
Exactly, or when they forced their tools as “standard” forcing KDE to adapt.
