4w ago

now I know why

269 comments

Lets not be deliberately obtuse, you're clearly meant to be using it with your feet.
- Just the left foot only
- TIL Gnome devs have (left) foot fetishism
  
  Tarantignome

GNOME is more keyboard-focused than KDE. It just also happens to have much better touch support.
Get this meme to /linuxsucks where it belongs.
- In my experience, KDE Plasma is surprisingly actually better than Gnome for tablet use. You would think that Gnome's more minimal and chunky UI would make it a better fit, but Plasma just has a lot more little usability QOL features.
  
  This has been my experience as well. Fedora KDE is easier and more intuitive than Fedora GNOME on my Surface Go 2.
  
  Did something change on the keyboard front? I love KDE but I can only use it comfortably on my Steam Deck with a horrible combination of Steam's keyboard, Onboard and Maliit and all of them suck in their own little ways.
  
  Not everyone is the same
- GNOME is more keyboard-focused "in the way the devs thought it's good". If users want to change the way, they gonna use tweaks, dconf editor or gsettings and navigate a jungle of key-value pairs like Windows Registry
- Yeah, this meme is a complete whiff, just seems edgy/hipster-y while ignoring the fact that nobody really cares because GNOME is a great DE.
  
  Horrible meme but it sparked some interesting discussion.
- How is KDE less keyboard-focused? I spent like ten minutes setting up kwin shortcuts and now have the same level of keyboard-only interaction as with any WM.
  
  Well, I guess because you don't need to do the ten minutes of setup.
- GNOME doesn't have nearly enough keyboard shortcuts for me as a keyboard focused user. IMHO, keyboard use is all about customizability, which GNOME is not.
  
  You can set keyboard shortcuts by the main navigation is designed to be done via mouse gestures.
- Slightly off-topic, but this annoyed me during the Win 8.1/10 start screen era as well. Just because an interface is touch-friendlier doesn't mean it can't also be an improvement for keyboard/mouse users as well.
  Then they ditched all that and made it a worse experience for everyone in Win 11, so un turn I ditched their mess and fully switched over.
  
  Classic shell has been installed on all of my windows machines as part of my "make windows usable" loadout since i was basically forced to upgrade* from w7 to w10
- And it can be even more keyboard focused with Pop Shell over the top. That adds tiling and window focus by shortcut, similar to i3-wm.
- Lmao that community is hilarious - it's all the most blatantly biased low-brow cheap shots about Linux I've ever seen and is just being spammed by 1-2 haters all the time 🤣

Gnome does some questionable things, and some are just personal preference, but there is at least one thing that they do that makes zero sense regardless of how you use your system...
The AppIndicator extension SHOULD be default. There is no reason for it to be an extension other than pure stubbornness. There are applications that literally require it in order to function at all.
- That you need an extension to disable the overview at startup still boggles my mind and the arrogance of the developers in the thread that started it didn't lessen my antipathy for Gnome at all.
  
  Why wouldn't you want the overview at startup?
- Default the cursor to the Search field on a Save dialog is possibly the absolute fucking stupidest thing ever.
  
  I love GNOME and everytime I tried an other DE I came back to GNOME. But the cursor in the search field is annoying and incomprehensible…
  
  I'm triggered. Why would you even mention that.
- I think the lack of a system tray in gnome is a case of perfect of being the enemy of good.
  https://youtu.be/ejqNCbE42cg
- There's a new Wayland protocol that probably will land in the next gnome release. The new protocol is supported by KDE and other desktops as well.
  The reason that it was removed is because it is extremely hacky and bad. There have been talks within the project to just reads support since the extension got so many downloads but the new API is better anyway
  
  Their solution to a problem is to pretend like it doesn't exist simply because it will go away in the future? It's a reason, but it isn't a good one.
  
  Would you mind providing a link or the name of the new protocol?

In a land where desktops can be ripped out and replace with ease - what's the point in arguing? GNOME isn't my thing but I'm glad it's an option.
- Can you swap out desktop environments in Linux like launchers on android?
  
  Yeah pretty much. Or have multiple installed and pick which to use when you log in
  
  Yes
  
  Yes
- My main complaint with how Gnome does stuff is in environments where it is the only option (e.g. RHEL).
  
  Which then is no longer an issue with GNOME but rather RHEL. But again, it's not like we can't figure out a way to install whatever in Hanna Montana's dreams is allowed. 🤙
- Mainly because gnome is harder to ignore than a lot of other opinionated DEs.
  It's been the default target for fedora and red hat, and like other choices rh makes, it propagates throughout the broader ecosystem.
  Even if you ignore them, they dictate how Linux desktops are broadly allowed to work by largely asserting authority over FreeDesktop and by extension Wayland.
  One of these is that they absolutely hate the concept of server side decorations, as a result even as they begrudgingly allowed it as a Wayland protocol, they insisted that it must not be mandatory and they are allowed to ignore it. This means applications that do not care about their decorations otherwise now must care about their decorations. As a user, the consequence is that any GTK application you might use is likely to just pop out as a gnome looking window among a bunch of otherwise consistent windows.
  
  I avoid all of the modern gnome apps now as a result of this.
  Even Windows allows the equivalent of server side decorations...

GNOME looks like it is touch friendly, but try to run it on a tablet and it's really fucking not. I had to DL a bunch of tweaks tools to make it useable at all and now the tablet breaks whenever there's a Gnome update that the tweaks weren't designed for.
- Honestly I'd say the worst part is the osk. They need to treat it a bit more like phosh does. It's sooooo far behind when compared to modern device osks. Sure there's some extensions to help it out, but they don't go far enough to make it decent on a tablet. And it feels incredibly clunky to use with gdm when signing in, where no extension can help it..
- I run Gnome on Debian on a tablet, and I find it wonderful.
  Of course, my only points of comparison, so far, are iOS, Android and Windows tablets. Gnome is (per my own arbitrary last use of each) quite a bit nicer than any of those, at least.
- Its not bad on a tablet. However I think the core design build around keyboard and mouse. (Mostly mouse/trackpad)
- distro?
  
  Fedora

I gonna be absolutely honest,gnome is fantastic for laptops.
- Why, did they add a "New Text Document" context menu option again?
  Gnome users be like "Open in Terminal" > touch filename.txt
  
  Can you not "just" add a "New Text Document.txt" template?
- Yes, everything (really, everything) just works, even on funky hardware like those tablet-pc things.
  
  I use gnome too and I like it but that's just not true. IME support (input of east Asian languages like Japanese) kind of sucks, especially as they only do ibus and not fcitx5.
- I used arch btw with latest gnome on amd c60 brazos apu laptop and laptop with i7 4700mq and gtx850m and laptop with Ryzen 5700u apu, so far gestures only worked on ryzen apu, on any other laptop without Ryzen features don't work and no amount of tinkering makes it work
  
  My laptop has an 8th gen i5 and so far everything works(except my pipewire beig constantly broken).
- Agree,It looks really nice on Laptops

Don't even try to say GNOME is a touch screen design. I've used it with a touchscreen, it's just bad design. What bothers me the most is that is close to being good if not for a couple of stupid decisions like having no system tray.
- The system tray thing irks me to no end. Some apps still use one to control things and you have to use hacky plugins to get them to show. Other than that there's a lot I do like about gnome. Plasma suits my needs more though. So much more you can do with it.
  
  Yeah, at least with plasma I can change all the defaults I don't like, but with gnome you have to hope there's an extension that's moderately up to date or make one of your own.
  
  Yep. I don't even want a proper system tray, just gimme a list with the apps that are still running with their windows closed. They can't even do that.
  
  Ive changed my entire work flow because of this. On my laptop I use paperWM for infinite horizontal scrolling/tiling and "vertical" workspaces for organizing windows. Instead of minimizing windows, I just switch workspaces. Windows that need to be next to each other are on the same workspace, anything else is treated like a full screen app. It's a little weird, but for productivity with a TouchPad it's been an absolute game changer. Ican have a workspace dedicated to programming, obe thats just documents, one for each of my courses, one thats discord and music players, etc.
  For a normal mouse, it's a kafkaesque nightmare.
- Just use dash to dock extension. But I agree the system tray not being there by default is a puzzling experience.

I absolutely love (slightly tweaked) gnome. Fight me if you want, I'm sick in bed and have time.
- well if you're sick in bed this will be an easy fight...
  I elbow slam your face, your turn
  
  You activated my trap card! My sickness was but a simple ruse to lure you into complacency! Your attack was weak, unfocused! I jump up, standing on my bed, your face is now easy prey for my unnaturally sharp knees. The structural rigidity of your nose is now forfeit!
- "Fight me if you want, I'm sick in bed and have time."
  I'm also sick and in bed, and this is such an appealing offer of a sparring match, but alas, I've never used Gnome
  
  this makes you the ideal candidate for an internet argument !
  
  Well, use the time to try it, I guess.
  
  Fight, fight, fight!
- Yeah, it's almost usable but I suspect most people don't wanna deal with broken extensions every new release. Last time my extensions broke, all I had to do to fix them was changing the target version in the manifest. Clearly, there weren't enough changes to the DE to warrant breaking them and they were just broken on purpose.
  
  Yeah, it usually takes a week for the official versions of the extensions I use to work again after a gnome version update. It's easily worked around, usually, but that hard break every update sucks.
  I just dislike the way KDE structures it's menus more, and while I suspect that I could tweak KDE to be something I like using, I also suspect that that would be much more annoying to fix for the next mayor Update.
  I sometimes think about swapping over to i3, but I haven't yet had the leisure to give it a try.
- prepare....smack!
- Its good for people who like the one very specific workflow they go for.
  My main problem with it is they cause problems for like every other DE. GTKs insistence on only supporting CSD makes any GTK app integrate so much worse on anything else. (Vice versa having no fallback ssd, so apps are just broken on gnome if the toolkit doesn't support CSD)
  Or all the problems it's caused with various Wayland protocols by refusing to compromise or saying nothing until it's almost finalized then coming out against them.
  I don't dislike gnome because of the software itself, opinionated projects are good, even when I have different opinions. I dislike gnome because I think it's a net negative to the Linux ecosystem as a whole.

I like gnome personally. It is all about simple inclusive design
- I get distracted/overwhelmed fairly easily, so GNOME is a godsend. minimalistic top bar + on demand workspaces to throw my extra windows into = I can actually get stuff done.
- That's ok, we don't kink shame around here.

They seem to be at war with the minimize and maximize buttons.
- Really weird decision they make
- Last time I've used minimize and maximize buttons was 20 years ago. And yet I think accessibility is more important than whatever the fuck designers that create clean dumb UIs think is important.
- Tbf, you can maximize by double-clicking the titlebar or dragging the window to the top so the button is kind of redundant. You can also (un)minimize by clicking on the taskbar so the minimize button would too be kind of redundant if GNOME hadn't gotten rid of the fucking task bar.
  
  So the solution is I change my decades long habits. Sounds kinda like microsoft.
- You can just toggle them back on
  
  Except for this one Debian machine I have to maintain. They will still disappear on ever restart. They will still be turned on in tweaks and the only way to get them to appear is to switch them from right to left. Luckily I don't have to use it much.

Wh-what? Have you used GNOME before or just mad because they don't have the shitty main menu copied from MS Windows?
- One more, gnomes interface change from classic is like the Windows 8 interface but for linux :-D
  
  Makes me wonder, how much of the hate on GNOME is because it reminds people about Win8.
  I never used Win8 but used to administer some 2012 and 2012R2 servers. On the former the only issue caused by the start screen was the fact that there was no button to open it. This was very annoying when RDPing to the servers, but the issue wouldn't matter on desktop since you have super key for it.
  Besides that, it was everything else in that OS that made me hate it
- Gnome is terrible, if I keep it I install cinnamon - if Idon't its running xfce.

I thought it was going to be a joke about Windows 8
- Or 11
- I was expecting gnuImp.
  
  Happy cake day

i like gnome, it looks good, is smooth, and does it's job

most of the things in gnome extensions should be built in and available from the settings. that being said there's nothing stopping me from just using something else, hence why I use kde.
- What is the difference between adding a extension and enabling a setting other than that a disabled feature is just bloat?
  I mean any distro can serve the extension it wants
  
  I don't use GNOME, but from what I've read (and from experience with other software that has extensions) they often break when GNOME updates.
  
  extensions (in my testing, typically in a VM of fedora or openSUSE) are a pain in the ass to use. it's also difficult to find the one that I'm looking for because there's generally several with the same name. something like a system tray (iirc the extension is "app indicators") or having the dock always visible on the desktop (idk what the extension is called) are features that most people who don't already use gnome rely on to some degree. these things are core functionality of most desktops precisely because most people use and like these features, and adding a few of the most popular features won't add enough extra data to really be bloat.
  undefined
  
  quick sidenote, while typing this I realized the way I have been phrasing things may sound a little aggressive. it's not meant to, this is meant to be more of a breakdown of why I think what I do about gnome as a desktop. I'm not sure how to rephrase this to be less aggressive, so I'm leaving this bit right where I noticed it instead.
  I personally am very big on having all the customization I can get (kde user, obviously) but I actually did almost stick with gnome once. I tried vanilla is because orchid has just come out and while I was messing with it I found out that it had the dock extension available by default (was new to Linux at the time and didn't know how to actually use extensions yet) and with that dock extension I didn't mind gnome as much. the thing with gnome is that it has a lot of good ideas but it ruins a lot of them by only half-implementing what everyone else is already doing. most people would probably find it a lot more usable if it just had features that have been standard since literally the beginning of GUIs, and used to be standard in gnome.

Gnome is not really touch-centric, it's more keyboard-crentric. Sure, the activity overview is great for touch. It's even greater for the keyboard though. And I don't like using the mouse a lot anyway
- There's a gnome for mobile branch that has what you'd expect from a good touch experience. Pretty sure the plan is to bring some of that work over to the main desktop branch at some point.

Oh! A Gnome hate thread!
I'm in!
FUCKING GNOME>!!!111!!!ELEVEN

I'm going to roll your machine back to KDE4
- Hell yeah, Oxygen

They need to stop messing with things that work. Feature creep is how Windows XP turned into the dumpster fire it is today. Does the interface have a working file explorer? Does it support add-ons? Does it have a file search? You're done.
"But . . . "
You're DONE.
- Windows XP is EOL...
- You can't be against feature creep and for add-ons. Those two are entirely antithetical.
  
  Sure you can, because those are two different things. Feature creep applies to functionality that is there straight out the box. Add-ons are things that are built ontop of the out the box solution.
  To put it in hardware, if you buy a PC then a PC is what you get out the box. If every PC had to come with a dedicated graphics card that would be a PC feature creep, because every PC doesn't need a dedicated graphics card. However, that doesn't mean you want mobo manufacturers to remove the PCIe slot, because you might want to add on (pun intended) a graphic card.
  Just because I think something shouldn't be in the baseline for everyone doesn't mean I also don't want to those things to be available for the people who do want those things in their system
  
  Not at all. OS should just be core functionality, all bells and whistles should be add-ons so they can be added, replaced, or done without if not needed.
- No feature creep is how we got the shit that was Windows XP. It is so weird to me that people look back fondly at the OS that pushed me out of liking windows at all.
  
  I really liked XP. I still have a machine running it.
  
  Friendly reminder: before people liked XP, people hated XP. Much of the criticism that applied to Vista at launch also applied to XP. Guess which one is looked back at more fondly.
  And I actually thought Vista was good. Leagues better than XP even. It served me well for 3 years. Now I don't even use Windows anymore.

As long as I can still customize Gnome with some extensions for improved focus, it'll stay my DE of choice.
- I did that for a while, but ultimately got too frustrated due to a few things:
  Having to explore extensions in the first place for fairly basic functionally that I would have expected gnome to naturally implement
  Every update would break extensions, and I'd have to wait for the extension author to update it, and about a fourth of the time the extension was abandoned and I would just have to go without or search for a similar.
  At their best I always felt a lot of the extensions were having to settle for a lesser experience due to limitations of the extension mechanism.
  Ultimately, I found that experience I was trying to get to that gnome never would normally support and would evaporate on updates and never be quite right anyway was just a natural featureset of Plasma. So I just do that and haven't had to sweat updates nearly as much as when I kept trying to make a go of it with gnome shell. I kept giving it a shot because of my gnome 2 experience (admittedly augmented by compiz), but gnome 3/mutter have not been a good fit for me.
  
  A lot of the hate seems to come from the people who spend an hour tweaking everything. For me I want it to work and be easy to use out of the box.

I feel like the majority of DE developers are just back-end developers, which like, of course that's not going to be a great user experience lol

I love GNOME and hate KDE
When i switched from Windows to Linux, i wanted actual changes, not just a slightly different look
Unrelated question: does anyone know how to show the time in fullscreen or merge the bar with window close button with the top bar with the screen so there arent 2 different bars in GNOME?
- I used Gnome Shell 3 for 4 years before giving up on it and going to KDE.
  The huge differentiator is that KDE may look like windows OOTB on most distros, but if you want you can easily make it look like Gnome, Mac, Unity.. whatever. The panels and menus are infinitely configurable.
  And that is why this meme is dead on the money. I've come to hate dev teams that have "visions" that they cram down users throats regardless of the experience. And the irony is that Gnome 2 used to be much more configurable than older KDE versions.
  
  To be honest I have the opposite feeling, dev teams with no vision trying to support every single feature possible with no standards drives me bananas
  
  The huge differentiator is that KDE may look like windows OOTB on most distros, but if you want you can easily make it look like Gnome, Mac, Unity… whatever. The panels and menus are infinitely configurable.
  Is there a way to configure the look of all the apps running on kde? Because one of the main things that keeps my away from KDE is how ugly all the k* apps look out of the box.
- TBH both gnome and KDE are broken piles of crap. Cinnamon and XFCE are the only good DE's left out there (at least for xorg, idk about wayland).
  
  I'd at Mate to the list as well.
  
  All DEs are jank. The only good DE is the tiling wm I put 10k lines of config into.
  Don't get me wrong, that's also janky, but it's my ~~fault~~ jank.
  
  Last time i tried XFCE, i had a terrible experience
  But that might be because i was playing minecraft with 300 mods on a laptop that could barely open the launcher
  
  XFCE and Cinnamon its in the Desktop as a experimental option
- I feel exactly the same

I ended up switching to Gnome because KDE would always feel a bit jank to me. Something about it always feels slightly off, animations not working properly or being choppy like my desktop had an unstable framerate. Might just be it fighting with Nvidia, but I don't have several hundred bucks lying around to upgrade my card and switch to AMD...
Kind of odd seeing the massive hate boner the community seems so have for Gnome, at least we have options for desktop environments at all.
- My problem with Gnome is the foundation itself.
  They act like they know best, and rarely listen to user feedback.
  They act like Apple, and that is very bad.
  Not only that, but they also act like they are the default and only desktop on Linux, and rarely if ever cooperate with other desktop groups to make things work smoothly.
  They are dragged kicking and screaming into following standards, and were the biggest source of NACKs (effectively a "veto") on the Wayland protocol and a huge reason why Wayland still isn't complete after over a decade of design.
  The gnome desktop is pretty, but it is not functional. You can make it functional by installing gobs of extensions, but those extensions don't follow a cohesive workflow concept, and often break with updates. It's like trying to mod Skyrim or Minecraft.
  To contrast that, KDE:
  Explicitly listens to its users and has scheduled times for specifically taking in user feedback (within the scope of broad goals)
  Actively works to be interoperable with other environments
  Follows standards and pushes them forward
  Has all the functionality out of the box, and can be made pretty with extensions/assets (the inverse of Gnome).
  Functionality mostly doesnt break on updates unless it's major (like switching to Wayland as the primary development target).
- I don't say much about it because it's stupid to argue, but I've used a LOT of different desktop interfaces over the past 45+ years (yeah, really!), and GNOME...well, GNOME sucks. When Gnome3 was first released we all had high hopes for it improving on Gnome2 (which for those of us on Unix systems was a huge improvement over CDE), and instead it was buggy, clunky, awkward, and an enormous resource hog. Oh yeah, and it was massively unconfigurable. AND it continued to not improve for many many years, until most people I know switched to KDE or one of the other environments (MATE, Cinnamon, and xfce were very popular).
  Gnome 4x added a touchscreen paradigm, whether you had a touchscreen or not, and made the experience worse in the process.
  If you like it, great! Use it and love it all you want! I'll play with it once every year or so just to see if someone has finally designed something that doesn't suck so badly, but for a functional desktop, no thanks.
  I think the fact that most of the 'fringe' desktops are well-known in the community because of people trying to escape GNOME is pretty telling.
  
  Gnome x.x added a
  <whatever they got excited about lately>
  paradigm, whether you need it or not, and made the experience worse in the process.
  There. The last couple decades of GNOME development in a nutshell.
- If you used Gnome back in the day you know there was a lot of that configurability built in. Then one day the developer decided to start taking it away. Slowly but surely all the ability to configure gnome was removed. If you experienced this arc like I did you were left scratching your head.
  Yes KDE was always more configurable, but removing what configurability Gnome did have made it less useful. For power users this is a big deal. It is like a company taking away all your features and thinking you are going to like it.
- I think the gnome haters are just the loudest. I've had all of the same issues with KDE and gnome has just always worked for me. Sure it's not as customizable, but it gets the job done without annoying issues.

You know how you start hallucinating in a sensory deprivation situation? I feel a lot of UX people just aren't talking to users directly and thus we get whatever they hallucinate is a good design, disconnected from any actual user needs. Any user feedback only comes after they've made their mind up and is seen as the users being wrong, as the alternative is harder to deal with.
It's free so I can't really complain, but I can use KDE instead.

Please don't force touch design in me!
- Please force touch design in me

Both Gnome and KDE are 100x better than win or macOS. I use KDE for me but I install Gnome on my familly 's stuff.
- Idk, man, macOS is basically a tiling WM and isn't even that far from GNOME. Windows's window management (pun not intended) does suck.
  
  MacOS use to be the best. Pretty sure Gnome is based on it, but macOS keeps adding security options that makes things more complicated. Every single plugin is now blocked by default, lots of drivers need you to modify security options in safe mode to be installed, it's a pain. It use to be great but these day, Gnome is better IMO.
- This is just wishful thinking. macOS is the GOAT of UI/UX.
  
  Okay. Explain the global menu, then. Why would I want the menu at the top of the screen, always, instead of attached to the top of the window?
  
  I work on macOS 90% of the time. It's super well design, but it gets worse with each release. The security options are way too intrusive. Gnome is much more intuitive these days.
  
  Why is it so terrible with multiple monitors then?
  
  It was pretty bad last time I used it

It's a fine DE... But boy making appindicator/KStatus an un-officially-supported extension is dumb

More like forcing no customization
- You can change it up with gnome tweaks and extensions. By default you can set accent colors and the background. (Plus move apps around the dashboard)
  
  But plugins break every update and gnome tweaks doesn't let you change gnomes gtk theme anymore and from what I heard they added it in Gnome 3 bcs there was alot of drama

GNOME peaked with 2 which is why I prefer MATE.

I actually like Gnome. I like the way it looks and I have no problems with UX. I also don't feel the need to use any extensions.
¯('')/¯

Gnome has more in common with hyprland than it does with tablet interfaces
Fight me fight me fight me fight me
- Gnome Mobile uses a near the same experience of workspaces for full view apps. That's exactly how I use hyprland.

Old gnome is nostalgic to me, because my first venture into Linux was Fedora Core 4. I was still using Win98 at the time, and gnome 2.10 felt so modern in comparison, with rounded corners and soft gradients.
Coming back to Linux after having not touched it for a very, very long time I tried gnome again and I just do not like it at all. It's weird looking. Maybe too modern for me, i don't know.
- If you miss GNOME 2 try MATE. It is a continuation of GNOME 2.
  
  I'll check that out, thanks! It does look nice. I have two PCs with Mint with Cinnamon, I'm pretty happy with. I have one more PC to switch over to Linux, I'll probably try MATE on that.

It's funny because GNOME was the first OSS X11 desktop environment to get actual usability testing from corporate developers (Sun Microsystems).
I'm not sure if they still have a user interface design guideline document, though. They probably burned it when GNOME 3 development started. Haven't checked. I've mostly used Xfce since then (and very recently KDE).
- https://developer.gnome.org/hig/

Gnome has the best kbm experience out of the box
But this meme doesn’t make sense because Gnome is also really high in the accessibility community

– Is supporting tray icons important? – What icons? Let the plugin community worry about that. – You're hired!

I'm happy with xfce4.
- same with Cinnamon (Not in Linux Mint)
- I can't wait for Wayland support

I prefer gnome. It feels like Linux to me. I don’t want a windows clone like every other DE
- My KDE setup is neither like Windows nor like MacOS.
  Stock options are often laid out similarly to Windows to make transition smoother. But many of them are powerful enough to make the UI look radically different according to your needs.
  
  Show me
- GNOME feels like Mac. I prefer i3wm because it actually feels like Linux (I use Arch btw).
  
  Honestly that looks worse when I search it from the fedora side. May I see your desktop?
  
  Gnome is so much better than Mac OS but the similarity are fairly limited.

What's better?
- Fluxbox, obviously. \s
- EXWM. With evil mode, obviously, I'm not a complete monster
  
  Did you fight in the Vim Emacs wars? 👩🏻‍🔧
- Clearly TWM

It's a pity that the dont improve touch experience. Especially floating touch keyboard situation - there is none (working well).
My only complain in (default PopOs/Gnome's?) Dolphin file explorer there is no "space" to right click in the "current" directory... Otherwise IMHO it's no worse than Windows!
- That's a pretty low bar!

Gnome is amazing for laptops, the touchpad gestures are incredible, on PC it's aight.

my sway setup is cozy, i've never used GNOME so i wouldn't know if it suits my needs. i dislike client-side decorations, so i avoid GNOME apps.

Compiz, XFCE, and GNOME <40 (now Cinnamon and MATE) proved quality UI design 15+ years ago.
It is actually insulting to Linux desktop that the default DE on the top distros don't even have minimize and expand buttons by default, and that any extra features require DE plugins.
GNOME 40+ is like Wayland. Years of development for practically no real user improvements. Every update shows off features DEs had over a decade ago.
GNOME 47's first listed big change is accent colors. wtf??????? What the f do you think we've been using GTK and Qt for???????
At least with KDE, the ram usage is justified. GNOME eats system resources just to give you a shitty ChomeOS UI that feels just as cheap.
The moment XFCE ports to Wayland, I'll happily swap Compiz for Wayfire and use my computer like a normal person.

nah gnome is great with ms+kb. as well as touch.
get outta here with this 2011 meme.

We'd like you to head up our project to tailor our new CLI for thumb-typing.

Thankfully Gnome is ridiculously customisable. The native experience is shit, but installing a few extensions fixes all the issues I had with it at least.
- Hmm... I found it very difficult to customise Gnome. So I switched to Plasma.
  
  That's fair. A couple of programs I use are more compatible with Gnome so I had an incentive to get it working. My desktop is pretty much identical to KDE/Windows with a start menu (ArcMenu extension), a taskbar (Dash to Panel extension) and I've removed all keyboard shortcuts to the Overview eyesore and have prevented it from showing up at launch (No overview at start-up extension).
- IMHO KDE is a better option than gnome. No need to tweak the UI to solve those issues.
  
  I've been a big fan of gnome since the gnome2 days. I was ok with Gnome3 when it came out. Typically preferred it over plasma.
  Having recently tried plasma, yeah it's certainly the better desktop environment. They have done a fantastic job, very impressive.
  I suspect QT is simply a better toolkit, however I have limited experience with gtk as qt fits my needs better for work. I'm excited to see where Iced and Cosmo goes, just wish iced had a stable webview (although a web socket is probably good enough for my needs anyway. )
  
  I agree, but a couple of programs I use were specifically made compatible with Gnome. It only took me three extensions to make my UI look like KDE though, so it wasn't too bad.
  
  Moksha Desktop is Even better
- 5 minutes with extension manager in Bazzite and i had Gnome exactly how i wanted it. I also haven't used Gnome in like 20 years.

It's always wild to me how these hateposts climb to the top, when all the complaints can be boiled down to "I don't like the design choices"
Have you tried... Just not using it? No one's forcing you to use it. Have you tried using a different DE instead?
- True to some extent, and I do this, but some aspects are unavoidable. For example the GTK save/open dialogue is used by Firefox, and it sucks (why can't I type the fucking path in?). There aren't good and popular alternative browsers that use Qt or any other toolkit with a decent dialogue.
  
  If you're on Plasma, rt-click the start menu and Edit Applications. Find Firefox and into the environment line add GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 and save it.
  This is something I do on every new install because the GTK dialogs with their buttons at the top and every other thing wrong with them hurts me deep inside to witness.
- Have you considered that maybe people actually like the thing and wanna use it but can't because of a stupid design choice made by the dev team headquartered all the way inside their own asses?

Every time I try kde I get pissed off that every time I make a settings change I have to hit apply as well. Gnome I just change the settings and close the window. Plus I can never figure out how to switch workspaces. I like super+scroll wheel or swiping on a laptop.
- I like super+scroll wheel or swiping on a laptop.
  Nevermind that you can configure it to do whatever you want. Swiping is literally the default in KDE.

How did the maker of that comic fuck up the very first sentence that badly? It makes no sense. The closest I can guess is it should be "forcing touch design on desktop users" and not "in", but even that is idiotic grammar. It's like they don't know what any of the words really mean.

269 comments