This is pretty subjective, but I've switched away from Gnome since Gnome 3. I find it slow and unintuitive even on modern hardware. I could use at least 4 out of the 6 points the author makes in this article to describe any modern linux desktop environment.
Disclosure: I use Openbox and Xfce. There are a few rough edges, but nothing that's a a deal breaker for me.
I used Gnome on a slower laptop the other day, and I have to say it's no longer the slow beast it was when it was first released. And in fact, I find the Gnome Shell to be pretty intuitive and easy to use.
Gnome is getting better and better all the time, I still hope for the year of the Linux Desktop, but I'm eternally optimistic.
Of course it has. As I said, this is subjective, but I provide support for a few non technical users (scientists/medical professionals) using the latest Ubuntu with Gnome 3 and I find it slow and unintuitive in comparison to my preferred setup. It has a superficial resemblance to MacOS/Windows which is a plus for some users.
More to the point, my comment was a criticism of the article rather than Gnome. Most of these "6 reasons" can be easily applied to any actively developed environment.
I'm on a netbook and had to dissapointedly move away from both Openbox and Xfce as there kept being issues. I'm now on LXDE and very happy. These things bloat over time it seems.
The main big problem with Gnome 3 is that if you not like the decisions that the developers take of how your desktop must be, you only can fuck yourself.
At least with KDE you have freedom to change things at your discretion.
Also, Gnome 3 more stable ?? WTF ? I saw more broken desktops and WTFs with Gnome that with KDE. Even I saw KDE working with a buggy X11 driver when Gnome simply fails on a miserable way.
I feel like if someone thinks they'll try Linux and they pick a Gnome 3 distro to test, they won't stick around or won't appreciate Linux for the reasons many of us do. Gnome 3 is basically everything I don't like about Windows or OSX but for Linux.
I feel this way a lot about Gnome, and even Ubuntu's attempt at "Unity".
It wants to be Mac. It wants to be Windows. In the end it's like all of the worst parts of both, made in to a mutant of dis-congeniality. They want the familiarity and user experience of both, and in the end capture neither.
I think it is more about the underlying "paternalism" than any specific UI/UX design.
Damn it, i have seen a comment from a prominent Gnome developer basically stating that users are idiots. This based on some usability testing that was done back in the day, apparently.
So expect more and more out of Gnome, and by extension Freedesktop, to be about putting users in padded cells...
This is so subjective even a rookie like me can tell he's biased. Each desktop environment has its key ideas behind it. You can compare individual components, which would be at least subjective enough, but you have to admit that both are huge code landscapes that offer ranges of exclusives functionalities and features. So saying one is "the best" is not an option I'm afraid.
3 (display switching) and 5 (dynamic workspaces) are the only actual arguments compared to any other DE, and the second is subjective. Pretty weak article.
I love Gnome, I'm now using Mac OS for my day to day desktop, but I would argue (subjectively, though) that Gnome is the best desktop environment, period, including Windows and Mac.
I totally agree with all the points in the post - the only problem Gnome has is the extension ecosystem. The idea of extensions is nice and few are awesome - but in practice most of them are low quality.
I really miss Gnome, and still use it for my secondary laptop, which I don't get to use that often.
A quote widely attributed to Steve Jobs: "good artists copy, great artists steal." Turns out he wasn't really the first to say that or express that sentiment [0], but it'd be hard to argue that Mac OS (at least back in the 80s) didn't heavily rely on copied or stolen features.
Yet another "holy war" in which we're expected to pick sides and defend our decisions to the death. The reason there are so many different DEs for Linux is because people have such different preferences. The choice is a good thing. Why try to turn it into yet another excuse to start an argument?
I like KDE neon because it comes without too much baggage. If you have 8GB+ RAM, you should give it a try on a live USB. You can install software using apt, use it, and discard it by just rebooting.
Absolutely. I'm using a Lenovo t61 thinkpad with 1GB RAM. However, the live USB shines if you have more. You can install anything like the latest node js from their own Ubuntu without committing to anything. You'll run out of space if you don't have much RAM.
200 currently. But I have 16gb. And I like how it looks and works. Jiggily windows when I move them. A centering crosshair when moving windows. The way they'll shuffle behind and in front of each other with a cute and quick animation when changing focus. All plugins you can choose to use or not, and even tweak.
And to "SmellyGeekBoy"s point: that's the thing that makes Linux so Linux-y. I can choose that. Or not. Or a raw command line only. Or have Plasma, Neon, Gnome, Cinnamon, LXDE, Lubuntu Next, and XFCE all installed AT THE SAME TIME. It's what you want. It's what you like. It's YOUR machine. Your desktop environment. You choose and tweak the one that suits you. No one should be able to hate or discriminate against that, it's not their desktop. So fuck'em.
Not that I'm aware of. I'll typically start with Ubuntu Server and add a DE to it, but this time I did a clean Kubuntu install. I'm looking at my resource monitor right now and it's been sitting around 200 all day for Plasma. Perhaps if you add up all the rest of the KDE background services like KDE Connect, klauncher, etc, you'll have a grand total above 300. But I have the hardware, so I don't mind.
I was really liking Cinnamon, but I don't know. Something just felt incomplete, and I was having odd issues that seemed to be exclusive to running Cinnamon. I switched to Plasma, and have really liked it, very much, a lot so far.
Yup, pretty pointless article IMO. Doesn't even provide any actually good reasons why "Gnome is teh best". I'm sure there are probably a few reasons why Gnome is better than <something> for some set of users, this article just fails to list any of them.
I think this is remnants of the Windows/MacOS holy wars that keep people focused on the wrong things, while making the interesting approaches seem scary.
Talking about the differences between “traditional” desktop environments seems mindless to me, while introducing newcomers to tiling WMs is refreshing and fun.
Funny thing is that the original Xerox UI would tile by default (but the windows were floating). Similarly Windows 1.0 were all tiles.
And to some degree Windows 10 has gone back to tiling.
You can drag windows top corners and the left and right edges to have the take up a fixed part of the screen. Sadly only when using the left/right split will Windows try to auto-resize the opposite window in response to you actions.
Thanks to the Gnome 3 / Unity / Ubuntu fiasco years back, I started using tiling window managers and never looked back. I might have kept on using Gnome 2 happily but the intrusive changes made me look for alternatives.
The desktop metaphor and floating windows might make sense for casual computer users (mostly because they're used to it) but for programmers and power users it's just not a very good setup.
Yawn. Let me know when I can plug a camera into my wife's Fedora / Gnome 3 computer and be able to download the photos. This hasn't worked properly for years and years.
Shotwell is unmaintained. There are two other photo applications, but it's not clear which to use. In any case when you plug a camera or phone into a GNOME desktop what happens is the file manager application and any camera programs you have installed all compete to open the camera. In my wife's case the file manager always appears to "win" and Shotwell gives an error about not being able to find a camera. IOW basic functionality, broken for years.
Rats... unmaintained. This is sad, really.
About your wife problem, it might be due to a daemon being instructed by the DM to automatically mount and open any newly inserted memory card or USB devices appearing as such.
I don't know about Gnome as I use XFCE, anyway on the removable media options there is one to auto mount removable media and I keep it unchecked. Their icons appear anyway on the desktop, but until I access them they don't get mounted so they remain accessible for other software.
I'm sure there is such an option on Gnome too.
The problem with shotwell is that is too much greedy. After running out of space three times in a day and finding again an autogenerated shotwell cache with several Gigas of garbage, I find it more annoying than really useful.
This is strange, I never had such a problem, but in my case I don't point Shotwell to my main image directory (which is on the NAS) but to a local one where I store photos before I decide what to keep and what to ditch. Every X days/week/months, depending on laziness :), I open its directory and move most important images onto the NAS.
So nothing very big, but over here it still points to a tree containing several hundred photos without hitches.
I tried Gnome 3 a few years ago, when it had already matured somewhat and was curious how it turned out to be. First impression was good, looked pretty and seemed well-polished. However, I found the default font size too large for my taste. No problem, I thought, just head to the preferences and make them smaller. So I opened the prefs and searched and searched... and couldn't find it.
At some point I thought I must be stupid for overlooking it and turned to google. Among the very first hits, google showed me a posting on google+, written by Linus Torvalds himself. In there he was ranting about exactly my problem: not being able to change the font size in Gnome 3. That was kind of a relief: at least I wasn't being too stupid to find it.
In the end I found out that Gnome 3 indeed doesn't have that setting! To change it, you had to install a thing called Gnome Tweak Tool (IIRC). By default, this was seemingly deemed a too advanced feature for normal users.
I then quickly decided that Gnome 3 wasn't for me. (Admittedly, I don't know if this has changed since then in newer version.)
I'm all for usability and not providing a million settings (hello KDE), but changing the system font seems so very basic to me... I still can't fathom why they'd remove it.
I personally find that KDE has too many settings and it's a pain. BUT, I use KDE Neon for 6 months now and I like (maybe too much) the new look of it. Also they refined a lot the bottom status bar with NetworkManager etc, very simple, clean.
I still use Gnome on my personal laptop, but at work I find KDE more usable.
I don't think KDE has too many settings, but I do agree that the need to adapt to different form factors has made a lot of UI a lot cleaner and more concise. Mobile and tablet interfaces seem to have had a positive impact on cleaning up the desktop, while still providing means to change commonly needed settings.
I wonder if this is due to copying (to some extent) MacOS? I didn't realise how similar everything was until I used MacOS for a few years and then went back to GNOME - the behaviour of Nautilus and missing configuration options for part of the system was very MacOS-like. That is, you can't change the default font size for anything on MacOS without installing TinkerTool or something like that.
Gnome 3 is the default DE I'll install. But I very much dislike the default setup: the combination of the top bar and the title bar and the menu bar inside the applications themselves. 3 horizontal bars which are quite ugly.
Inside bspwm I use xfce bar with the menu extension and I feel like I don't waste as much vertical space. (it looks like macOS or Unity, except I don't have title bars)
Gnome 3 is a step backward from its predecessor and sacrificed functionality for mostly aesthetical reasons. I don't have a problem with a 'simplifed' UI, but the fact that Gnome 3 is now the default DE for most Linux distros is worrying, and to me is a sign that Linux on the desktop will not get anywhere anytime soon.
From the article:
1) G3 is stable: "stable" like these weird crash notifications I regularly got on 3 different laptop models (that did not in fact provide any info on what app/service actually crashed...) whenever I resumed from sleep, or "stable" like the Gnome dev indicating they will break GTK3 backward compatibilty whenever they feel like it? So much stable, we're going to be tired of stabling.
2) "Stays out of the way": like not even having a minimize button by default? So when you have your windows lined up, and switch to another one just to check something, now you just... ho wait you don't get to "just" because there is no minimize action to get rid of it. I like this example because on one hand they claim it is not needed[1] even when a most basic example can prove them wrong, but on the other hand they have published a first-party plugin/extension to add this and a number of other "fixes". So double the failure. TFA author also claims G3's chrome takes less space: like having a damn clock take 80% of the top bar? Seriously. And also, "MATE uses two panels so it takes more space" ...you mean exactly like G3 once you enable the taskbar? Plus in other DE you can easily fuse / insert the taskbar into another panel, not sure you can in G3. In short G3 is ignoring basic UI rules we have known to be true since the 1980s.
3) "Display switching actually works" ...hu, just like in XFCE? Never had a problem in XFCE. In G3 though I occasionally had it not detect when I unplugged an external screen, which means I was left with a blank desktop background where all of my inputs would only take effect on a now 'ghost' screen.
4) Many extensions: probably. I only know that some of them exist solely to fix basic shortcomings of the default UI. I also know you have to use a browser+plugin to download these, and this feels...wrong?
5) Dynamic workspace: this is the only thing that G3 does right, i.e. not just properly, but also better than the competition. I really wish other DE would implement something vaguely as intuitive. If they did, for many users G3 would have no competitive advantage left.
6) Plenty of themes: Huh. OK. I guess.
I also need to add that the G3 Bluetooth devices app/panel is really aggravating. BT sucks in Linux to begin with, but the G3 UI is really making it worse. At first I thought it was only a OS-level thing, but then I discovered XFCE doesn't have this problem.
[1] It always get me when a OS or DE dev claims you "don't need" a basic feature: you're not building an app, you're building a platform, you do not know how it's going to be used, that's the point of a platform.
66 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadDisclosure: I use Openbox and Xfce. There are a few rough edges, but nothing that's a a deal breaker for me.
Gnome is getting better and better all the time, I still hope for the year of the Linux Desktop, but I'm eternally optimistic.
More to the point, my comment was a criticism of the article rather than Gnome. Most of these "6 reasons" can be easily applied to any actively developed environment.
At least with KDE you have freedom to change things at your discretion.
Also, Gnome 3 more stable ?? WTF ? I saw more broken desktops and WTFs with Gnome that with KDE. Even I saw KDE working with a buggy X11 driver when Gnome simply fails on a miserable way.
It wants to be Mac. It wants to be Windows. In the end it's like all of the worst parts of both, made in to a mutant of dis-congeniality. They want the familiarity and user experience of both, and in the end capture neither.
I actually quite like some of the ideas in Deepin though
Damn it, i have seen a comment from a prominent Gnome developer basically stating that users are idiots. This based on some usability testing that was done back in the day, apparently.
So expect more and more out of Gnome, and by extension Freedesktop, to be about putting users in padded cells...
I totally agree with all the points in the post - the only problem Gnome has is the extension ecosystem. The idea of extensions is nice and few are awesome - but in practice most of them are low quality.
I really miss Gnome, and still use it for my secondary laptop, which I don't get to use that often.
I can't believe the list of top GTK3 Themes [1] are so much influenced by macOS ( second "greatest" one basically replicates even the icons ).
macOS is beautiful, indeed, but as Ralph Waldo Emerson's quoted :
"... Imitation is Suicide."
I bet if the effort is put towards themes that can distinguish GTK from anything else, there will be another reason of Gnome being the best LDE.
1 : https://www.opendesktop.org/s/Gnome/browse/cat/135/ord/top/
[0] http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/
it's a clone of NeXT's UI in the 1990's.
But in all honesty, I use KDE Plasma with a healthy mix of Gnome apps, because I can't stand Kmail and others.
Edit: try the dev stable.
or even if you have 4 or 2. Plasma itself uses roughly 300 megabytes of RAM.
And to "SmellyGeekBoy"s point: that's the thing that makes Linux so Linux-y. I can choose that. Or not. Or a raw command line only. Or have Plasma, Neon, Gnome, Cinnamon, LXDE, Lubuntu Next, and XFCE all installed AT THE SAME TIME. It's what you want. It's what you like. It's YOUR machine. Your desktop environment. You choose and tweak the one that suits you. No one should be able to hate or discriminate against that, it's not their desktop. So fuck'em.
Every time I've tried KDE recently, the starting RAM usage is closer to 800-900mb and it anecdotally felt laggier than Unity. (I tried KDE Neon)
I was really liking Cinnamon, but I don't know. Something just felt incomplete, and I was having odd issues that seemed to be exclusive to running Cinnamon. I switched to Plasma, and have really liked it, very much, a lot so far.
Talking about the differences between “traditional” desktop environments seems mindless to me, while introducing newcomers to tiling WMs is refreshing and fun.
And to some degree Windows 10 has gone back to tiling.
You can drag windows top corners and the left and right edges to have the take up a fixed part of the screen. Sadly only when using the left/right split will Windows try to auto-resize the opposite window in response to you actions.
The desktop metaphor and floating windows might make sense for casual computer users (mostly because they're used to it) but for programmers and power users it's just not a very good setup.
fwiw. I have used awesome, dwm and now bspwm.
At some point I thought I must be stupid for overlooking it and turned to google. Among the very first hits, google showed me a posting on google+, written by Linus Torvalds himself. In there he was ranting about exactly my problem: not being able to change the font size in Gnome 3. That was kind of a relief: at least I wasn't being too stupid to find it.
In the end I found out that Gnome 3 indeed doesn't have that setting! To change it, you had to install a thing called Gnome Tweak Tool (IIRC). By default, this was seemingly deemed a too advanced feature for normal users.
I then quickly decided that Gnome 3 wasn't for me. (Admittedly, I don't know if this has changed since then in newer version.)
I'm all for usability and not providing a million settings (hello KDE), but changing the system font seems so very basic to me... I still can't fathom why they'd remove it.
I still use Gnome on my personal laptop, but at work I find KDE more usable.
I stopped using GNOME after they decided that a toolbar was too distracting during the gedit rewrite, necessitating clicking a button first in order to see any useful buttons: https://blogs.gnome.org/nacho/2014/01/15/gedit-has-a-new-fac...
It seemed to be simplifying for the sake of simplification, but that could have been just me.
Inside bspwm I use xfce bar with the menu extension and I feel like I don't waste as much vertical space. (it looks like macOS or Unity, except I don't have title bars)
From the article:
1) G3 is stable: "stable" like these weird crash notifications I regularly got on 3 different laptop models (that did not in fact provide any info on what app/service actually crashed...) whenever I resumed from sleep, or "stable" like the Gnome dev indicating they will break GTK3 backward compatibilty whenever they feel like it? So much stable, we're going to be tired of stabling.
2) "Stays out of the way": like not even having a minimize button by default? So when you have your windows lined up, and switch to another one just to check something, now you just... ho wait you don't get to "just" because there is no minimize action to get rid of it. I like this example because on one hand they claim it is not needed[1] even when a most basic example can prove them wrong, but on the other hand they have published a first-party plugin/extension to add this and a number of other "fixes". So double the failure. TFA author also claims G3's chrome takes less space: like having a damn clock take 80% of the top bar? Seriously. And also, "MATE uses two panels so it takes more space" ...you mean exactly like G3 once you enable the taskbar? Plus in other DE you can easily fuse / insert the taskbar into another panel, not sure you can in G3. In short G3 is ignoring basic UI rules we have known to be true since the 1980s.
3) "Display switching actually works" ...hu, just like in XFCE? Never had a problem in XFCE. In G3 though I occasionally had it not detect when I unplugged an external screen, which means I was left with a blank desktop background where all of my inputs would only take effect on a now 'ghost' screen.
4) Many extensions: probably. I only know that some of them exist solely to fix basic shortcomings of the default UI. I also know you have to use a browser+plugin to download these, and this feels...wrong?
5) Dynamic workspace: this is the only thing that G3 does right, i.e. not just properly, but also better than the competition. I really wish other DE would implement something vaguely as intuitive. If they did, for many users G3 would have no competitive advantage left.
6) Plenty of themes: Huh. OK. I guess.
I also need to add that the G3 Bluetooth devices app/panel is really aggravating. BT sucks in Linux to begin with, but the G3 UI is really making it worse. At first I thought it was only a OS-level thing, but then I discovered XFCE doesn't have this problem.
[1] It always get me when a OS or DE dev claims you "don't need" a basic feature: you're not building an app, you're building a platform, you do not know how it's going to be used, that's the point of a platform.