Cross-posted from “It’s that time again” by @Atherel@lemmy.dbzer0.com in !linux_memes@programming.dev
This is why I stopped using Gnome. After every update most of my extensions stopped working. Some took ages to get up to date or were abandoned. And there was no simple way to enable all extensions that the update disabled, having to manually enable them one by one. Maybe that has changed now? It’s been yearsnow… Not that I would go back anyway, tiling managers is where it’s at.
GNOME is great but people recommending it to beginners need to make it clear that there is only minor customization, and that major customization / extensions will cause headaches.
Plasma is highly customizable out of the box. It’s personal preference in the end of course.
Then, after that, you can introduce them to Hyprland which is EVEN MORE customizable, at the cost of learning the hyprlang and jsonc if you also want waybar.
And then there is sway. Which makes you cry but respected.
Isn’t sway more limited in customization compared to hyprland?
(i know that swayfx is for that, but still not sure if it’a as good)
Bugs happen every gnome version change, it’s a given, now it’s autorotate not working, but it will be fixed. But extensions just need updating, normally they give an update right before the version launch.
But i never had seen the person on the second painel, gnome development works in this way, if you use a tablet on a bleeding edge distro, you are pratically on gnomes QA team hahahhaha
they don’t break due to bugs. They break because they are literally unsupported and ignored.
I was talking about gnome bugs, not that bugs affect extensions, my english is not the best.
About the extensions, idk if there are wildcards in the metadata.json, but I think it would solve this issue of updating and then extensions breaking, because I’ve seen that the only extensions that break put only specific versions, so you can add the current version on the file when you update or update the extension manually.
It’s your own fault you use GNOME
I used to be a Gnome fan. But I hate the direction they took from Gnome shell 4 onwards. Now I use KDE and I’m happy with it.
Dunno, I saw GNOME 3 run like molasses on my PC, went “ok, this might be lost cause”, went with LXDE and then XFCE, and now I’m like “if it’s a beefy proper PC I’ll go with KDEPlasma and if it’s, like, very obsolete system I’ll, dunno, go with XFCE”.
GNOME is just opinionated. I get it, it was kinda vaguely modeled after Mac OS, which is kinda an opinionated desktop environment, but the thing is, it’s even more opinionated than Mac OS ever was. The thing about (early!) Mac OS X was “hey, we have this slick desktop environment but also some power user features you might want to use. But we’re not forcing you to!” (Kinda like GNOME 2!) …GNOME has been kinda sweeping those under the rug, in my opinion.
Obligatory: just waiting a few weeks will cause you to not move fast and break things.
In Bluefin just use the stable branch which IIRC follows the CoreOS release cycle a few weeks behind Workstation & Silverblue
(might be mixing things up tho)
Also of you are on a rolling release distro, that really is on you, since rolling release is by definition “move fast, break things”
Try mediawiki for a change. You’ll soon be happy about the few update troubles you had with gnome.
I think Gnome is the most beautyful Desktop out there. But it’s UX drives me crazy. I tried it a few times but never could get used to it. I always needed extensions to customize it to my needs. But that’s also what I want to avoid because extensions might break in the future. Therefore, Gnome is simply not the right Desktop for me.
But I’m happy for everyone who likes to use Gnome. The great thing about Linux: We have a choice!
I remember seeing a very MacOS like demonstration of Gnome. Someone had themed a Gnome desktop with a kind of sunset in the forest kind of feel, and they were opening menus and launching Nautilus and such like that, and it looked absolutely amazing.
I don’t know how anyone lives with it. I’ve got Fedora Gnome on a tablet that I use basically to have FreeCAD and power tool manual PDFs in my wood shop, and at some point I’m going to try something else. “Opinionated” is the gentle way to put it.
It’s that time again… Pile more and more dependencies on top of a desktop environment, get shocked when it breaks, and take out your rage on people explaining that it’s free dev work and you’re welcome to contribute.
Nah. As far as I am aware of, Gnome went “this is it by default, want more customisability - here is API, install or write your own extensions”. Which is fine with me. Then they break API without announcement in advance, and their response to community is along the lines of “fuck you, deal with it”. Which is not fine with me, and I am not using Gnome ever since discovering it
As far as I am aware of, Gnome went “this is it by default, want more customisability - here is API, install or write your own extensions”
Not even that is true. They do not provide an API (specifically decided not to due to “extension developer freedom”), but allow Extensions to monkey-patch code in. That’s why it becomes unstable due to Extensions instead of just the Extension (or at least the Extension process) crashing. Imagine every change in KDE being a KWin script, or Firefox still relying on monkey-patching instead of the extension API. It’s wild.
Meeting criticism of this absurd way of doing things in something as important as the graphical shell with “it’s FOSS so either contribute or shut up” mentality some people show here is just dumb.
GNOME is great. Things break sometimes which is a Linux and a software thing. It’s free dev work to begin with.
Doesn’t mean being a dick is ok, even if a useful dick
I don’t know, I don’t choose my software based on the developer’s personal dispositions. I suspect I’d be unable to use any software if I did.
More or less this is my estimate too, but being developer myself has its consequences: some things I will never accept to the point of “I will rather code this myself than encourage this kind of attitude going on”
Just use KDE Plasma
I do at home, can’t choose at work (but we keep pushing the people in charge)
I heard of imposing operating systems (which I’m also against*), but never specific distros or DEs.
* at least for technical people who know what they’re doing and wont spam the IT support
My company started enforcing Macs this year but as a special exception they’ll let us use Windows or Ubuntu. No other distro and the CTO must still authorize it.
The reason? Meet some vague security guidelines that the PR team wants us to be able to say we meet, by forcing us to run a spying agent to ensure our OS is up-to-date so I’m not vulnerable to leaking data I don’t even have access to. But the tool doesn’t support anything that updates frequently.
I had just built a brand new laptop for work and I refused to sully it with Ubuntu so I installed it on an old desktop and just been putting zero effort into fixing Ubuntu shit. Wifi often can’t handle meetings, none of my cameras worked ootb - also can’t go to the office anymore since I can’t carry the desktop there.
Still a year away from being able to request the company buys me a machine again (last time there were no conditions for it) - but I don’t intend to stay here until then.
I’ll bet you 20$ that when some information finally leaks it is 100% some fuck ass exec giving away company secrets to impress a potential side piece or some geriatric board member ass fuck clicking a “Hot Dingles near you” ad
If it is a larger company that defintly would make maintenance easier.
This is what I concluded in the end…
What distro do you use with it? So far I liked mint with cinnamon but looking to switch my main PC to Linux and ditch windows on October 23rd.
cinnamint is great. i think you may have already found what to put on the ‘main pc’.
if you’re at all interested in ‘atomic’ variants, kinoite is what is running a couple of kde desktops here.
I use SpiralLinux (basically Debian with some tweaks). I like it a lot! If you want to stay in the Debian/*buntu lineage, consider it.
EndeavourOS
☺️such a joy
I’ve been enjoying CachyOS myself lately.
I’m tempted to try it since I’d like to move away from fedora (kde), would you recommend it?
Does it require too much tinkering?
Does it breaks often with updates?A buddy of mine and I have been using it for a bit, he more than I. Haven’t noticed any major issues with it. Proton works well for gaming. Overall pretty solid. I’d say spin it up and give it a test drive.
With KDE, you can go with Fedora if you like something “closer” to mint experience. I use it with Endeavor OS and I’m very happy
I use Arch, but you can’t go wrong with Plasma + Debian. Ubuntu has weird bugs which keeps me from recommending it. I wish Mint still had a Plasma edition. endeavouros is Arch with a user-friendly installer, so that’s an option as well. CachyOS is great too. Mint is good but Cinnamon doesn’t support HDR which keeps me from recommending it to anyone using an HDR display. Debian is probably best seeing as you are used to Mint.
Debian primarily, though I also have arch running on another box. But I basically only run Debian across the board. Almost all stable, with some Trixie and Sid for testing. I also won’t touch Gnome unless I’m forced to, so keep in mind I’m opinionated and hold grudges when you see my recommendations.
no :3
I love how Ubuntu looks and feels
You mean GNOME? Ubuntu ships KDE too as Kubuntu.
I meant ubuntu’s customization of GNOME
Kubuntu FTW!!!
Tried it. You supposedly can customize it any way you want, but after struggling for like an hour trying to make it look clean, I wondered why I was trying to force that. The UI in KDE is not clean. It’s messy and has exposed many options I would never use. People love to hate on GNOME but I think they’re only doing that because they know it’s so popular. And it’s popular for a reason.
I have a seemingly yearly tradition where I manage to convince myself to try out KDE then am usually back on GNOME after a week. I genuinely don’t get the hate for GNOME. It looks clean, has great defaults (especially the keybinds) and mostly stays out of the way. I don’t hate KDE, it’s just not for me and that is okay.
Yeah, I’ve tried KDE a couple of times. If it was the only option I may be able to get used to it, but knowing there is a much cleaner option makes me dislike it actually. I also don’t get the GNOME hate, I agree with what you said about it.
I don’t like the defaults of any the common DEs, so I always end up customizing whatever I use. Last time I tried KDE Plasma I was still running into bugs too often. I’ve been using gnome which is generally more stable, but it has a lot less stuff on it so I end up Frankensteining everything.
It’s probably time for me to try Plasma again though.
The keybindings in Gnome never made sense to me. I’ve got decades worth of muscle memory moving windows around, minimizing them and such, and my experience with Gnome was it was made specifically to frustrate that workflow. The app drawer thing, first of all was always two clicks away not one, and wouldn’t automatically sort by category like most Linux app menus will.
I’m on KDE right now, I’d prefer to be on Mint Cinnamon, but it didn’t really play well with my monitor setup and Wayland wasn’t well implemented in Cinnamon yet, so I’m on Fedora KDE. KDE has a problem where, well…
The clock widget and the temperature widget. No matter what, I can’t get them to match each other. Something something different authors, they offer customization, but not in a way that can get them to match font sizes or spacings. The entire goddamn OS is like that. You can get it to do anything you want, but expect an 80 grit polish.
I don’t hate on gnome because people can use what they want but coming from windows the UX was so unintuitive i had to switch to a different session without a DE to get rid of gnome. I’m sure it’s learnable and then depending on your preferences pretty great.
I also don’t think plasma is messy though. To me there’s nothing worse than a system hiding options out of the assumption that I don’t need them (see also: windows over time, which is a big part of why I made the switch to linux in the first place).
There’s a huge difference in hiding options and putting them into a menu that looks nice. KDE UI strikes me as busy and ugly. Crazy re: windows. It’s the busiest UI of all.
People love to hate on GNOME but I think they’re only doing that because they know it’s so popular
You sound like Honey Boo Boo.
My take is GNOME is Mac-inspired, and KDE is Windows-inspired. I never liked MacOS. Therefore, GNOME does not appeal to me. KDE feels familiar, so naturally I used it after switching from Windows.
I’m having a great time on GNOME, even without any extensions at all!
That is sort of the thing with Gnome. If you like it it’s great, but if you don’t there is nothing you can do to really change it. Like I think it’s okay, but there are things I don’t like and it is just too much effort to try to adapt it to my preferences.
there is nothing you can do to really change it
So far from true
See: the above meme
You’re right. The several extensions I have used for years don’t exist because: meme. The many settings you can easily change in 2 minutes also fake. Meme.
I’m sure that’s what they meant. That you literally cannot change a single setting in Gnome. What a good-faith interpretation.
Ah yes, the real good faith argument here is saying you can do nothing to customize GNOME because sometimes extensions break. Great point.
Your reading comprehension is severely lacking.
I used it for a while, because KDE was so buggy. Gnome gives you no functionality and it’s still buggy, though.
Once KDE improved I switched to it, though
So you’re not on Wayland you say?
I’ve been running native Wayland exclusively for ages. I disabled XWayland by running gnome-shell with the
--no-x11flag.What makes you think I wasn’t?
There are bugs in Gnome 49 using xwayland like caps lock and other keys not working. But if you don’t use x11 at all (and therefore applications relying on it) you won’t encounter them.
Good for you. I broke my GNOME Pop OS build, I assume because of extensions and pop not updating anything for 2 years. GNOME goes against the Linux philosophy of user customisation.
They don’t develop GNOME for you, they develop GNOME for them
They don’t earn more with more users
If it’s only for them then they shouldn’t mind getting their Wayland protocol veto privilege taken away 🤷
Yea I agree, that seems fair 🤔 but it is for wayland to decide l, I guess
There are so many things the Linux kernel project does just right. One of them is “never break user space”.
Unfortunately most projects completely fail to get why this is important.
I think one of the worst examples is the enormous setback it caused when Python was “upgraded” from 2 to 3, which meant breakage of huge amounts of libraries, that were never fixed, and was extremely detrimental to Python.The kernel respects user-space, but actual user front ends do not!?!?!
KDE generally does the same when they upgrade to new versions of QT.python 2 to 3 is actually an enormous change
You can make improvements without introducing breakage.
staying on an end of life unsupported programming language does not spark joy.
open source projects are (often) maintained by unpaid volunteers. unpaid volunteers doing something for the passion of it often don’t want to build with one hand tied behind their back
The kernel equivalent of shell extensions would be kernel modules. Out of tree modules break all the time. There’s no stable in-kernel ABI, just like there’s no guarantee that shell internals never change.
Which is why Plasma is better
Yeah I very much like dislike the culture of Gnome… maybe I’ll try something else someday. KDE isn’t for me but Cosmic maybe.
