The nice thing about open source and the X Windows protocol is that can just go and make your own desktop windows manager if you think you have a better idea, and if enough people agree with you they’ll help you build and maintain it.
Personally I find the hate for the ux sometimes a bit tiring. That said as an exclusive gnome user the Dev behavior and inability to play nicely with others in a space foundationally built on collaboration and prosocial project building is... Frustrating.
There definitley is a tendency to simplify a bit too far though in terms of UX. But ultimately, I can't really imagine using anything else, which sometimes is a bummer cause at times I'd rather be in the kde community 😅
As a long-time Gnome user, my frustration is less with the overall design philosophy, which is fine. It's with the tendency to remove features and the devs unwillingness to acknowledge usage patterns that deviate from it. Don't like the change we're making? That's because you're using it wrong!
One of my favorite examples is the removal of the "type-ahead" search in Nautilus, Gnome's file browser. You used to be able to quickly jump to files and folders by typing their names. The devs at some point decided to remove this feature and replace it with a recurrent search that requires a CPU heavy background process for indexing and would search the entire file tree for files whose name (or contents) matched what you type. It was orders of magnitudes slower than type-ahead and basically made it impossible to efficiently navigate with the keyboard. The feedback was overwhelmingly negative, but the feature never came back. I eventually switched to a different file browser (first Thunar, then Nemo).
Having a philosophy is all good and well. The point where it turns into dogma is when you stop listening to user feedback and start declaring everyone wrong who disagrees with it.
I can't understand what led to that decision. Rarely seen levels of stupidity and UX blindness. If I want a global search I can click on the search bar.
Its not about the UI, its about the decisions the dev team makes.
i really like GNOMEs UI
i tried to use KDE because everyone was saying its better, but i hated it
I've had in depth conversations with people on both sides of the fence and really dug down and made them explore and explain the why for either side.
What I found is that it boils down to whether or not you are fine with doing some initial setup. People who love KDE almost never use the OOTB configuration it is pretty much guaranteed that they have every intention of customizing the interface whether that's through themes changes in layout or add-ons that bring entirely different workflows. Almost every instance of a KDE desktop is unique when you dig into it.
People who love gnome do not want to configure anything ever, they are happy with the workflow as it is out of the box and thus happy with the environment. At the end of the day you can make KDE look and behave almost exactly like gnome, but if gnome already fits your desired work flow why bother? When you get the people that use gnome but do have complaints it's usually that there's only like one or two things they wish they could change slightly so it's not worth going to KDE and configuring everything to be how they want.
I fit into the first camp, i love KDE specifically because I can change virtually any piece of it to be exactly how I want. I do not use the out of the box configuration, I make a number of changes they are not major ones I get rid of the floating taskbar because I think it looks stupid like my graphics driver is broken or something, i make changes to the layout of the file explorer I make some context menu changes here and there change the theme change some things about how the windows behave. overall i don't think you would immediately notice sitting down at my computer if you were used to kde you would just discover things that broke your muscle memory as you went.
GNOME looks fantastic and consistent. KDE looks terrible and inconsistent. I want KNOME, a useful and good looking DE.
Gnome2 was the pinnacle of desktop environments. Simple, clean, fast, lean, light. Works with mouse and keyboard.
Gnome fucked it all up and I cant hate them enough for it. After that they've just continuously pissed on users' feet and removed features after features.
Oh why I dont use gnome2 forks and derivatives? Well I have for 15 years. But they simply do not have the momentum of being the single best DE, which gnome2 likely would've been. We would not have thousands of DEs if gnome wouldnt fucked up with gnome shell.
Yeah I use kde nowadays more than mate.
It's great that Gnome has its own UI paradigm, it's boring when every desktop looks and behaves the same by default. That's neither innovative nor much choice. I think the Gnome UI paradigm is great (and I've used it for quite a bit, so I know it's good when you're adjusted to it), there are however some bad aspects of Gnome which mostly have to do with the project behind it and how they tend to be less interoperable than the other desktops/compositors and focus on their own things a little bit too much which might have some negative consequences for users who don't just use Gnome-based applications. I don't remember specifics but there was some justified drama about the way Gnome handles window decorations for example. These are things that the Gnome project should be working on. They shouldn't be working on making the default look and behave more like the Windows desktop. That's unnecessary. If you want a Windows-like desktop simply use one of the many other ones which look more like it by default.
I really like GNOME but I just find desktop UI to be frustrating. Moving to the top left corner and then having to go to the bottom to see your apps is just dogshit. You can install mods and stuff to make it better but for everything you install you’re increasing the likelihood of bugs and incompatibilities that only increase over time, especially if the mods stop getting updated.
I do however like everything else. The settings are far more sensible, the KDE ones look like they started sensible and they’ve just kept on adding crap and moving stuff. It needs overhauling. The apps however are absolutely bang on and they’ve got totally the right idea. Included apps should be lightweight and cover everything you might need as a casual user, and if you want something more specialist you can go and find an alternative. All the KDE stuff is a mess; they’re all way too complicated, there’s overlapping functionality, and nothing gets updated. Unfortunately the GNOME apps just don’t look right outside of GNOME.
You don't have to move the mouse to the top left corner. Just press super key, once to bring a virtual desktops overview, twice for the app menu. People often forget that, but Gnome is actually very keyboard friendly.
I do think exactly like this, win 98 ui ux is just plain better than whatever gnome is doing
Then don't use it?
I'll bite!! I hate that Gnome apps have fucked up window decorations. They don't match the rest of the system. I forget which few I use but they are otherwise good enough to keep using in lieu of alternatives.
Easy fix: don't just use gnome apps. Use gnome and have matching window decorations ;)
Well, duh. The annoyance is that it doesn't go both ways. KDE apps are happy to use fat Gnome window bars but Gnome apps don't produce matching titlebars for other systems. That said I haven't used KDE or Gnome in a minute.
Note to self: do t use ;) as a substitute for /s
Sorry.
Laugh in Cinnamon 😜
Yes. Philosophy? I want click button. Preferably big friendly coloured button
Vanilla Gnome is best Gnome
Jokes on you, I like neither GNOME nor KDE :3
(But yeah, forcing GNOME into being windows-esque is silly, when there's already like 20 DEs that do that, and half of them are already based on GNOME)
Dude, just use extensions. Dash to Dock
Is the experience better these days? I stopped using Gnome because of the extension. The extensions broke basically with every update. This about 5 years ago though.
Since the 6-7 extensions I use can be slow to upgrade to the next version, I’m also trying to wait around a month before upgrading to the next Gnome version.
But sometimes I ain’t wise enough to wait😅
They still do, because extensions have to declare support for each versions (I wish there was a better way) and some maintainers don't test ahead of time. But most of the time you can make them work by adding the latest GNOME version into the extension's metadata.json (I personally open pull requests when that happens)
Hot edge. Simpler yet achieves the same result
I've spent the last few months putting way too much effort into hammering labwc into looking like my fvwm3 desktop, which in turn looks like a fever dream of PC/GEOS humping a garish Afterstep theme from the early 2000s. Bevels everywhere.
I'm literally working on desktop icons when you minimize windows.
You can say that again!
Sorry, this instance has reliability problems, it returns an error despite submitting sometimes.
Can you please say that again?
/S
i don't get it
gnome has both
I've spent the last few months putting way too much effort into hammering labwc into looking like my fvwm3 desktop, which in turn looks like a fever dream of PC/GEOS humping a garish Afterstep theme from the early 2000s. Bevels everywhere.
I'm literally working on desktop icons when you minimize windows.
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