Cross-posted from “It’s that time again” by @Atherel@lemmy.dbzer0.com in !linux_memes@programming.dev
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.
I’ve only ever used DEs that aren’t gnome. And that wasn’t really by choice - it was a workplace. But after hearing about how gnome treats their users… fuck that. I went so far recently as to try to make a nix system that was 100% free of gnome shit and I have actually hard a really difficult time because it has wormed its way into other dependencies.
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”
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
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”
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.
Just use KDE Plasma
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 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 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.
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 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.
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.
Kubuntu FTW!!!
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.
I’ve been enjoying CachyOS myself lately.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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
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.
EndeavourOS
☺️such a joy
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.
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.
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
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.
I use Gnome with extensions and are quite happy. But it’s true. the worst part is when they break after a new version comes out.
Fun Fact: You can just add the new version number to some file (can’t remember which) for each extension and many of them work just fine. It’s from a list of version numbers where they decide whether an extension can be run on a given Gnome Version. And new versions are not automatically added to that list.
Metadata.conf
Or just wait a while before updating, increasing the chance of extentions being updated
I just had a look and I think I edited “metadata.json” for every extension in “$HOME/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/”. I got it from this tutorial.
Yeah I once waited but I think it took multiple months for each maintainer to update. I don’t blame them tho. They update their projects when they can. I just wish it would not necessarily break since it apparently doesn’t really need to be broken.
It depends. Sometimes there are major changes, which would need changes. But most of the time, yes, it’s not necessary.
I like how GNOME looks and functions for the most part, but I really wish the world provide more options instead of whatever design philosophy they think needs enforced.
Obligatory mention that Linux Mint’s dev team have forked some GNOME apps into their own XApps* project. Part of the reason is so that those apps retain the user’s window manager’s look and feel rather than GNOME’s enforced interface design. That might even be the main reason, but they also throw in their own improvements to the apps where they feel they’re necessary.
They’ve not yet forked all GNOME-looking applications in Mint, and I’m not even sure they intend to, but it’s a noble effort.
* Yes, it really is called that. Like I’ve said before, they probably could have chosen a better name, but they chose it before Wayland was a real threat and before Twitter got lobotomised.
X referred to a display server since long before Twitter was born.
I installed Debian + gnome today for the first time in years, I hate it even more now then I did back then.
If it had a taskbar it’d be a 10/10 for new users though
The other week had a GNOME dev reply to a thread of mine on mastodon stating that the users desire to select a default terminal emulator was an “edge case” and it was beneath GNOME. then all the GNOME fanboys came out to his defense.
It’s an insufferable DE and community.
Such a GNOME thing to say
I checked your Mastodon timeline but I don’t see the post, only the one where you relate the story.
I deleted it because the GNOME users were getting annoying.
As insufferable as KDE users always shitting on gnome?
I’ve generally found gnome users just use it. New KDE releases don’t have gnome fanboys bashing it, etc.
But new GNOME releases? Directly the opposite.
Really wish people would just chill.
At least for a time, many of the big distributions focused exclusively on Gnome, and for KDE users it was kind of frustrating as everything would be all wired up for Gnome, and either KDE wasn’t packaged at all and you had to go third party, or it was a clearly second class citizen where the packagers just didn’t bother to wire up equivalent features. You would look it up and see how KDE had the same capability implemented, but the packager just hadn’t included some dependency or configured something to manifest it.
Now I feel like the distributions take Plasma more seriously and so it’s easier to just ignore whatever Gnome is doing… Except for the occasional horrible UI presented by a Gnome app in your otherwise credible desktop. Since Gnome is both a DE and a UI framework, the UI framework gets to rear its head even if you largely ignore the DE.
Then of course you have the tiling window managers/compositors, but those projects tend to be less ambitious anyway, and what the audience wants is pretty much what they can get from packages, even if the packagers aren’t quite as invested to know what can be done.
I find that Penis Stroker 2000 never has users bashing it when a new release comes out.
But every single new release of Scrotum Puncher 5000 that comes out, it’s getting criticized. I’m sick of it!!
New KDE releases don’t have gnome fanboys bashing it
There is a lot less hate for KDE… Because KDE doesn’t break the user experience every time it updates. Gnome is the Apple of the Linux world. The entire dev team embodies the Apple attitude of “we know better than you, and you’re wrong for wanting to use anything except the default settings.”
You’re essentially getting the “iPhone user seeing all of the hate from android users every time iOS updates” experience. Because every time a new iPhone feature comes out, all of the android users go “lmao iOS didn’t have that feature until now? Android had it three years ago. Apple fucking sucks.”
Yeah, there is way less hate and mockery towards KDE. Now let’s think why that might be
To me it speaks more of the users, less of the DE.
Either somehow every GNOME user is a saint and everyone else is just an asshole, or GNOME is laughably bad and every new release is also bad. It’s either of those two.
As insufferable as KDE users always shitting on gnome?
This 100%
I’ve generally found gnome users just use it
lol
I use a script for paprwm-like behaviour, and is signcantly hamstrung as well - cannot work with multiple screens. Karousel: https://store.kde.org/p/2045724
This is what got me to drop Gnome from my laptop. Karousel is excellent.
I will use niri wm primarily on most machines, but kde&karousel have some advantages on a notebook.
At this point, what did you expect to happen?
Running 14 extensions on Gnome, literally never had had an issue, even through major version upgrades with Fedora. KDE and Qt are gutter garbage trash, fight me
Same experience here. Running 9 extensions without issues. On NixOS BTW.
I am pretty much in the same boat. I think I have had one or two extensions break, but they weren’t ones I depended on and they didn’t seem that well maintained to begin with.
You guys are incredibly lucky then. I ran about 7 to 8 extensions and had the whole shell crash 3 times on me over a time of a few weeks, making me lose progress. The journal logs weren’t helpful, the gnome-shell just crashed and bailed.
GNOME only makes it possible to make Extensions via directly patching shell code and refuses to create an API. They can say whatever they want, this way of doing things is inherently unstable and will always break at some point, and it’s not primarily the fault of extension devs or users if that happens given there literally is no other way of doing it. Even something as simple as the RunCat extension is potentially able to crash your whole desktop. This is comparable to every single modification you do in KDE being a KWin script (that settings window does have a warning in front of it for a reason). Another comparison: This is also similar to how Firefox did Extensions until they adopted the common extension API in Firefox 3 (?), before then that browser was known to be crashing a lot and become sluggish quickly since any extension was monkey-patching code into it - exactly what Gnome extensions do to work.
It’s one thing to have a clear design idea, but Gnome took away so many freedoms (even basic theming) while merely providing an absolutely ridiculous way for even the smallest customization to then blame users and extension devs when something breaks or becomes unstable. It’s no wonder people are upset. System76 outright began to work from scratch, meanwhile Linux Mint is providing libadapta as drop-in replacement for libadwaita to patch basic theming features back into programs that use it.
If Cosmic drops its version 1.0 and keeps its promises I’d bet a lot on Gnome slowly but surely declining. It does what Gnome doesn’t want to.
You clearly know a lot about how it works and I do not. I am curious though – what extensions are you using that break?
I am hoping cosmic is all it’s cracked up to be. I’d definitely consider switching for the performance benefits alone
I had some debates with Gnome devs about it which I primarily take my points from. One of them told me they actively decided against an API, for the mentioned reason.
Looking at some old screenshot, before I cleaned out a lot in an attempt to stop the crashing I had these (don’t know which ones were still active when it crashed the third time, I only know it was about 7 to 8 and that I immediately began looking up how to install KDE out of frustration).
- Dash to Dock
- GSConnect
- Media Label and Controls (Mpris Label)
- Net Speed (definitely deleted this one later)
- Next Up
- RebootToUEFI
- RunCat
- Tray Icons: Reloaded (This is a freaking technical necessity)
- TwitchLive Panel (definitely deleted this one later)
- UPower Battery
- User Avatar In Quick Settings
- User Themes
- Wifi QR Code
Ah ok. I have not heard of most of those. Here’s what I’ve been using:
Come to think of it, I did have some issues with open bar and dash to dock a while back, but I’m pretty sure it was because 1) I was using dash to dock with pop_os’s cosmic dock and those two do sort of the same thing so they probably conflicted and 2) pop_os is pretty behind on Gnome in general. Right now I think the are 6 major versions behind! Since a few months ago, the issues cleared up.
Also, I do realize that theming on Gnome isn’t officially supported on an OS level, and I don’t fully understand it all, but I do have a fairly consistently-used custom theme installed using Gnome tweaks. GTK3 iirc.
Gnome may have some issues, but I still think it’s a much cleaner UI than KDE, and I’m pretty used to it at this point.
You’re in a rather special position regarding the extensions in this case because except for 3 of them, they’re all directly maintained by your distro of choice. Which, additionally, is super slow with updating due to focusing on getting Cosmic ready and therefore extremely stable (and outdated) given nothing changes. Distro-specific extensions really are one of the few places where this kind of unstable extension system makes sense, since your distro maintainer also controls the update flow of Gnome for you and can do proper QA on it w/ those extensions before making updates available. It’s not a mix’n’match of code.
Also, I do realize that theming on Gnome isn’t officially supported on an OS level, and I don’t fully understand it all, but I do have a fairly consistently-used custom theme installed using Gnome tweaks. GTK3 iirc.
Modern Gnome applications using libadwaita instead of GTK3 or 4 will happily mostly ignore those, and the “User Themes” extension you need on modern Gnome to enable theming likes to cause problems. Usually one of the first “recommendations” you’ll hear when Gnome starts misbehaving is to disable your themes as Gnome just does not want to have them. I was just straight-up told to “not use Extensions if you want a stable system” (after losing about 40 minutes of work, again).
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.
