this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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I've quite enjoyed gnome so far. What are your complaints with it? Granted I don't think I have actually used another DE but I genuinely don't run into issues with gnome and the design is good enough imo.
What's your preferred DE and why?
My complaint with Gnome is just one, but it is overbearing: Gnome devs want to decide what is best for you, which stinks and goes against the very fundament of open software. But would not per se be a problem -- If they hadn't also decided that a bunch of things that are considered basic features that every other DE and even other OSes have implemented for the past 20 years are, in fact, unnecessary.
Consider the humble System Tray.
Gnome removed the System Tray in favour of a "Control Center". And the Control Center works really well -- For inbuilt Gnome stuff and applications that were written for Gnome. But stuff that is DE agnostic, or god forbid, ported over from another OS? Some of them expect a tray to be there. Have functionality that doesn't work without one. Or do work but are janky. Gnome doesn't offer a system tray. You have to install a third party extension, which would also be fine... Except every time Gnome updates every other third party extension breaks.
And like, sure, it's not Gnome Devs' job to ensure the operability of third party addons, but that you need them to begin with is a failure. Gnome's attitude towards everything seems to be "$#¨$ you, like just actually go &%$# yourself. You do things our way or you use something else. We have decided these things are useless, if you think they are necessary you are a $&@# and %$#$ you and the horse you rode in on"
As for my personal favourite DE? KDE Plasma. It's not something I'd ever recommend to a newcomer, but I like it precisely because of how many moving parts it has. I can make my system look, feel, and act just the way I like it. It's like the polar opposite of Gnome really.
Rebuttal: I’m extremely fickle, so someone else making choices for me is what I need. In KDE I ~~spent~~ wasted days customizing and just gave up in the end. It’s the same idea as using prettier instead of using your own lint rules: you stop wasting time and just do the thing you’re there to do.
In general, for configs (linting, neovim, etc), I prefer taking something really good and tweaking the parts I dislike—which is the model GNOME uses. Probabilistically, it’s exponentially likely that your preferences are only a little bit away from someone else—just use their thing and spend 15 minutes tweaking them.
See, while I understand that the "the system should be invisible and get out of the way so people can do things with their computers" philosophy isn't for me, I entirely understand it as not only valid, but preferred by most people. --
-- It's just that Gnome's approach to "getting out of the way" is at best counterproductive? I used Gnome for like 3 months in 2022, figured I'd give it a try, I'm always down to try new stuff. And I felt like I was just constantly fighting against it, having to do configuration stuff and install third-party addons not as a funtime activity because I like to make my computer look prettier, but because if I didn't, shit just refused to work. It was only much later that I learned that the reason I had to keep wrestling Gnome is because the peeps behind it had actively decided that the things I needed to do were stupid and didn't need doing.
You'll see me praising Cinnamon in a different comment. Cinnamon, a cousin of Gnome's born of Gnome 2, is what I'd call a DE that gets out of the way. It doesn't have all the moving parts that KDE does, and that is to its credit. Because it has everything it needs to have and no more but also no less.
Cinnamon absolutely is fantastic, and I 100% agree that it gets out of the way really well.
I'm curious what you needed to do that GNOME was fighting you. I'm not invalidating it, I'm genuinely just curious, since I haven't used a Linux system for personal/work use for about 5 years now, so my ideas of GNOME/KDE/etc. are almost certainly dated. To clarify: vanilla GNOME is kind of awful, and I've always wondered if anyone genuinely uses it stock while also being aware that extensions exist.
I already mentioned the System Tray, back then I used MegaSync for cloud backups and that app was completely broken due to the lack of a Tray. (I have since switched to using Syncthing and an old laptop with a USB HDD as a ghetto """""NAS""""" solution... Which would probably work quite well on Gnome actually, as Syncthing is a service and is controlled through a web interface)
Wine stuff was janky as hell. As were Qt apps. For one thing wine applications, too, expected a Tray, and would instead spawn a tiny window at the corner for tray stuff. Plus there was weird behaviour with some windows and the way they layered. As for Qt apps? Gnome offered no features for setting the look of Qt apps, so if I set Gnome to dark mode (by the way, very neat feature how Gnome's default theme deals with that, no joke here, very seamless and elegant, even if I'd never use light mode willingly), Qt apps would still be bright and I had to just install a third-party application for it (qt5ct) and set something in my /etc/environment.
All of these things had solutions, to be sure, an extension for the tray, a third-party application for the Qt apps, etc. But then I did an
apt upgradeand literally all the extensions broke. So I had to spend an extra hour that day figuring out what I'd do about that. Joy of joys.Then there is the Gnome File Manager.
Why in the name of all that is unholy did it not let one type in the addresses of folders? Or copy them or... ? Sure, icons and breadcrumbs are nice, but being able to type in an address when you know it saves a ton of time. And maybe I want to copy a location to use it on the terminal? That should have been one of the first things to be implemented. Apparently a recent patch to Gnome has added the address bar "feature" (which has been part of Windows Explorer since 1994 and of every Linux File Manager I've known since forever--), but like. Bruh.
So I installed Thunar, the File Manager from XFCE, but now I was using a separate file manager entirely and having to deal with everything that comes with switching file managers from the DE's default. Like. WOW.
Sorry, I laughed out loud when I read that. Only in Linux land would we run into issues like this because stuff is modular so when things aren't the way something expects, shit breaks in the stupidest ways.
Oh I learned early on to either update super regularly so I can see what's breaking as it happens, or be careful upgrading. The number of times I've broken shit by updating software is insane (and not limited to GNOME). Even on macOS, the number of times I've fixed something by symlinking a library file to the same location with an older version name is stupid. I can see why people are interested in something like NixOS.
You could've just stopped there, I had forgotten how weirdly awful it was. The amount of time I spent getting that stupid thing to just fucking have options like "Open in Terminal" is insane.
Oh?! Those app icons not appearing or working properly every once and a while are a gnome problem? Genuinely just thought I was doing something wrong.
I am not necessarily new to linux as I have distro hopped extensively so I might give KDE plasma a shot as I have heard good things but I am certainly not an expert when It comes to linux. I have only learned enough to keep my games running and my desktop environment clean. Sometimes I will run into an issue I cant fix and just reinstall the OS or try another one lmao.
I've recently grown quite interested in customizing my DE but was struggling to understand how people do it. Not used to messing with config files and I downloaded themes but didn't know how to install them. It often feels like I simply expected to know a lot of linux knowledge so steps often go unexplained and since I learned how to use linux primarly independantly and through necessary maintenance, there's a lot of of stuff I simply never learned because I did not need to.
Also what is the difference between a system tray and a control center?
Functionally, there isn't one. Both serve the same ultimate purpose: To be an area where background services and system functionality can be accessed quickly and easily, while staying out of the way of whatever you're doing in the foreground.
The tray is just an older, arguably more primitive metaphor for the same thing: "Just give every service and app its own icon, and make it so that icon can be clicked to access its options and features". It's simple, but it works.
The control center is more elegant, like, really, it is. It saves screen real estate and such. Giving you a little scrollable window where every controllable thing has its own little area. But that is contingent on the application itself implementing that functionality. When an application expects an old-fashioned tray, Gnome's control center just tells that app to go $&#* itself, when they could, if they wanted to, just add a corner on the control center for "legacy apps". But they don't wanna, because they think they know better than everyone else.
Why would‘t you recommend plasma to a beginner? For me it seemed like the out-of-the-box experience is really nice.
As I said -- Same reason I love it.
That system control panel app with all its billions of options and everything being customizable and change-able is very good if you are a user who a. WANTS to customize everything b. Either knows how or is willing to learn.
Most beginners aren't after that. They want something that is somewhat familiar and that works well. And while, sure, Plasma's defaults are pretty good... I can totally see a newbie user opening up KCM and immediately becoming overwhelmed. Another user here even mentioned how much time they wasted because all those choices actually got in the way of them getting stuff done
In my humble opinion, the system tray is a crutch anyway. But sadly a needed crutch for "legacy" support.
What does an application need with a tiny icon persistent on screen? Aren't notifications enough to notify the user that something has happened? Why can't it just run in background, and when the user needs it open it up from the taskbar/dock?
Easy access to a few key functions is nice, IMO. Though helping someone on their computer and seeing half the taskbar occupied with two dozen system tray icons makes me vomit just a little, so I get it.
Oh no, I entirely agree with the system tray being a leftover from an older era. The Control Center is actually super elegant. But it doesn't do to come up with a nicer, more elegant solution while telling all legacy support to go &*&$ itself in the same breath because it's no longer your problem.
That's some Apple bollocks, and if I wanted to deal with Apple's shit I'd get a Mac.
Up to 2.x, GNOME used what was basically the MacOS philosophy: make things easy and simple and intuitive, but if the user wants finer control and power features, make sure it's still possible somehow. GNOME 3 and later pretty much adopted the philosophy that there's the GNOME path of simplicity and streamlining, and power user functionality is going to be removed from the core and relegated to extensions. And, of course, GNOME started requiring boatloads of memory to run, which to me didn't go hand in hand with "simplicity".
I eventually settled on using XFCE, because it didn't have the bloat and still had enough customisability. Really good environment for old and underperforming systems. If I'm using a modern high performance system, I'm actually pretty impressed by what KDE Plasma is doing these days.
Try something new for a while. I like gnome but it is fun to try something new.