Yet so many distros choose it as the default. I feel like I am being gaslit by the entire linux community, am I crazy for not liking it? Unless you live in a browser and only a browser, KDE makes so much more sense.
KDE is kinda junky/bloated, even if you tweak it and rip stuff out of the default in distros... not that it stops me from using KDE, especially since it seems to run smoother than a more "minimal" GNOME.
Are you sure? The cold boot RAM usage is not of significant importance. You should check the RAM usage after using your system extensively and then closing all apps. My personal experience have been that after using KDE for few hours the RAM usage of plasmashell, krunner and kwin is way too much and it keep increasing. This is on stock KDE without any plugins etc.
I really dislike GNOME >= 3 UI especially this fascination with putting everything in the fat title bar and using hamburger menus like I'm using a mobile website. KDE does make more sense to me but I personally use xfce everywhere.
I am glad GNOME exists but its a DE I try to avoid.
In my opinion everybody has a right to an opinion. It saddens me that you feel like the entire linux community is gaslighting you, I sure ain't and do not intend to.
I suspect this is the silent majority at work. The vocal folks who have opinions don't like how GNOME largely just sits there and manages windows. People who do care show up on hacker news to complain about it being default.
I, as a technically inclined person who has many people in their life who are not, love GNOME as an opinionated desktop that works reasonably well for average users with no tweaking. I can install it, explain how the windows key works and then walk away from the computer for a decent amount of time.
Is it my daily driver? No. But I'm not going to inflict i3 on my loved ones. There's nothing gaslighting about not being the target demographic for something. Unlike macOS or Windows, if you don't like Gnome, use something else. Damn I'm getting tired of people acting like whatever Fedora or Ubuntu choose as the default is them trying to poison the FOSS well. They just need something that works by default and isn't a Windows clone (cough, KDE, cough). That's largely GNOME in 2023.
BUT, there are plenty of distros that do not use GNOME by default and there's always a way to remove it or install something else, because this is linux, after all. I wish we could objectively argue about desktop environments, but I think it may be like objectively discussing our favorite brand of underwear.
It is my daily driver as a quite technical person, for what it’s worth. It is really great on laptop especially, with its multi-finger gestures, but I also like it on desktop with Super+scroll wheel.
Use what you like. It's Linux. It's what you make it. This is why there's options.
Why would your ideal config look anything like the next person's? Everybody has different needs, and everybody has different taste, different hardware, different workflows. What I'd recommend to one person isn't what I'd recommend to the next. I wouldn't even necessarily use the same DE between a laptop and desktop.
I see the value in both GNOME and KDE. I use KDE, but I miss certain things from GNOME like GNOME Sushi, which gives you a preview of a file with the spacebar similar to macOS' Finder's Quick Look. If you're a Mac user, GNOME will seem relatively familiar in the default OOBE.
You know how you hear a lot of very positive Mac users but very few people ever really talk about Windows machines in a positive light? Macs attract a certain user with a certain mindset, and GNOME is just like that too. You hear about their enjoyment of it. KDE users tend to be a bit more utilitarian in my experiences and just pick the thing that works and gets the task done, seldom ever discussing it, because it's just a DE.
That doesn't mean that either GNOME or KDE are the best or only way to do things though.
In terms of gaslighting, you're probably just chasing your tail. You want to understand what others see in it, that's cool of you, but maybe it just makes more sense to enjoy KDE, which it sounds like you already are. You can observe a similar thing in choice of DAW for audio, some people prefer x, others prefers y, z users are very vocal about enjoying their DAW (hello Reaper fanboys), but what ultimately counts is your ability to do the things you want to do with the tool at hand.
GNOME seems to be built for the lowest-common denominator of user. They go out of their way to make sure there is only one possible way to do something and almost nothing can be customized without writing an extension. I imagine their devs go to sleep every night, only to be shaken awake at 3 AM by a horrific nightmare wherein some 85 year-old grandma was mildly confused by a setting in the control panel that she didn't understand.
I consider myself a "power user." I know what the computer can do, I know what works for me, and I want software that can be bent to my will, especially if I will be spending the majority of my day working with it. I tried to like GNOME for a long time, but KDE with all of its functionality and flexibility fits me a whole lot better.
I love gnome. It’s more keyboard driven than macOS or windows. It’s streamlined. You just need to mod it a bit, and you can mod it to suit your preferences. Yet it isn’t over-configurable like kde. The only issue for me is the performance slows down if you don’t reboot periodically
I use GNOME every day. What I like is that it isn't to much. The main use to me of any window manager is to use my mouse as little as possible, be able to tweak all of the underlying hardware and peripherals and get access to my tools with as little interaction as possible. And I want it to "just work" whether it is my home desktop with 4 monitors, or my 14" desktop. GNOME delivers just that for me. Nothing more and nothing less. Of course this is just my humble opinion.
The ~10 years I was exclusively on Linux, I was using Xubuntu. It was glorious to go so long without a UI change. Every feature added beyond what xfce offers out of the box is a step backwards. Windows 95 was the pinnacle of desktop UI.
Compared to what we had before, Windows 95 was so good it felt like alien technology, so maybe we're remembering it with rose-tinted eyeglasses. OTOH, all experimental desktop interfaces I've seen have fizzled because the desktop metaphor is super easy to explain and understand.
I switched from macOS to Fedora/GNOME three years ago, and I'm perfectly happy with it. I've seen useful features added and improved in that time. One day I'm going to give KDE a serious try, but GNOME does almost everything I like the way I like it out of the box.
There's tons of desktop environments to choose from. I don't get why so many people seem personally offended by GNOME when all you have to do is choose something else.
My current biggest complaint is apps putting widgets in the title bar area. This would be less common if they hadn't made the title bar ridiculously huge in the first place. But now I find it hard to drag a window because first, I'm not sure where the title bar is. And worst, because some of those widgets will not drag the app if you click/drag them.
Second up is that tabs are little disconnected buttons rather than looking like a little tab attached to something. Other than these 2 things I would say gnome 4 is better than 3. Some of my old complaints are still there, but overall I'd say its getting better with few exceptions like these WTF items.
> My current biggest complaint is apps putting widgets in the title bar area.
Agreed and I don't know what the reasoning for this could possibly be. My guess is that they _actually_ wanted to get rid of title bars altogether, and the current result is some kind of compromise between two factions that don't get along.
From where I sit, the current trend in UI design is to remove basically all "widgets", texture, style, and visual cues from the UI until you are left with the perfect "flat" UI... consisting of only text, some pictures, and a few tiny monochrome icons that force you to guess at what they do.
Since the GNOME devs seem to be over-represented by aspiring UI trend-followers, I suspect that this is where GNOME is ultimately headed as well.
> This would be less common if they hadn't made the title bar ridiculously huge in the first place.
IIRC, they started making the title bars huge in order to fit more things into it.
I use it every day on my work RHEL workstation, it is OK. There are better options but on the latest RHEL some applications will break if not using GNOME3, so that is why I use it.
But my issue is with desktop.org pushing Wayland. The BSDs are struggling with this and I do not like desktops. Given a choice between twm and GNOME, KDE, XFCE ... whatever DE, I will use twm any day. I use fvwm and cwm, depending on monitor size, cwm for small screens.
Right now all you have with Wayland are Desktop Environments and Sway. I would chose KDE or GNOME over tiling WM any day. This my main issues with desktop.org
I really floundered when Ubuntu 10.04 got to end of life. My personal issue with Gnome 3 was that the way I worked involved one workspace with lots of open PDFs.
Because they all looked similar on a thumbnail, I tended to use their filenames to identify them. The 2D workspace unfortunately shuffled them around as they moved between rows, and it preferred thumbnail over filename.
Basically I needed the 1D taskbar with filenames and that's what worked for me.
I floundered via Unity, Fedora, eventually settling on crunchbang for a while. I tried gnome fallback and flashback but they were deficient.
One day MATE appeared, and I have never appreciated a well-honed DE so much.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 54.4 ms ] threadI am glad GNOME exists but its a DE I try to avoid.
You aren't alone.
I, as a technically inclined person who has many people in their life who are not, love GNOME as an opinionated desktop that works reasonably well for average users with no tweaking. I can install it, explain how the windows key works and then walk away from the computer for a decent amount of time.
Is it my daily driver? No. But I'm not going to inflict i3 on my loved ones. There's nothing gaslighting about not being the target demographic for something. Unlike macOS or Windows, if you don't like Gnome, use something else. Damn I'm getting tired of people acting like whatever Fedora or Ubuntu choose as the default is them trying to poison the FOSS well. They just need something that works by default and isn't a Windows clone (cough, KDE, cough). That's largely GNOME in 2023.
BUT, there are plenty of distros that do not use GNOME by default and there's always a way to remove it or install something else, because this is linux, after all. I wish we could objectively argue about desktop environments, but I think it may be like objectively discussing our favorite brand of underwear.
Why would your ideal config look anything like the next person's? Everybody has different needs, and everybody has different taste, different hardware, different workflows. What I'd recommend to one person isn't what I'd recommend to the next. I wouldn't even necessarily use the same DE between a laptop and desktop.
I see the value in both GNOME and KDE. I use KDE, but I miss certain things from GNOME like GNOME Sushi, which gives you a preview of a file with the spacebar similar to macOS' Finder's Quick Look. If you're a Mac user, GNOME will seem relatively familiar in the default OOBE.
You know how you hear a lot of very positive Mac users but very few people ever really talk about Windows machines in a positive light? Macs attract a certain user with a certain mindset, and GNOME is just like that too. You hear about their enjoyment of it. KDE users tend to be a bit more utilitarian in my experiences and just pick the thing that works and gets the task done, seldom ever discussing it, because it's just a DE.
That doesn't mean that either GNOME or KDE are the best or only way to do things though.
In terms of gaslighting, you're probably just chasing your tail. You want to understand what others see in it, that's cool of you, but maybe it just makes more sense to enjoy KDE, which it sounds like you already are. You can observe a similar thing in choice of DAW for audio, some people prefer x, others prefers y, z users are very vocal about enjoying their DAW (hello Reaper fanboys), but what ultimately counts is your ability to do the things you want to do with the tool at hand.
I consider myself a "power user." I know what the computer can do, I know what works for me, and I want software that can be bent to my will, especially if I will be spending the majority of my day working with it. I tried to like GNOME for a long time, but KDE with all of its functionality and flexibility fits me a whole lot better.
LMAO, even the GTK file picker is not fully accessible without a mouse.
Cinnamon is actually a GNOME 3 fork created to turn it back into a more traditional desktop environment.
XFCE is not a fork of any version of GNOME, although it does have a UI similar to GNOME 2 and is based on GTK.
Personally, I switched to XFCE back when GNOME 3 came out, and have been happy with it.
There's tons of desktop environments to choose from. I don't get why so many people seem personally offended by GNOME when all you have to do is choose something else.
Second up is that tabs are little disconnected buttons rather than looking like a little tab attached to something. Other than these 2 things I would say gnome 4 is better than 3. Some of my old complaints are still there, but overall I'd say its getting better with few exceptions like these WTF items.
Agreed and I don't know what the reasoning for this could possibly be. My guess is that they _actually_ wanted to get rid of title bars altogether, and the current result is some kind of compromise between two factions that don't get along.
From where I sit, the current trend in UI design is to remove basically all "widgets", texture, style, and visual cues from the UI until you are left with the perfect "flat" UI... consisting of only text, some pictures, and a few tiny monochrome icons that force you to guess at what they do.
Since the GNOME devs seem to be over-represented by aspiring UI trend-followers, I suspect that this is where GNOME is ultimately headed as well.
> This would be less common if they hadn't made the title bar ridiculously huge in the first place.
IIRC, they started making the title bars huge in order to fit more things into it.
But my issue is with desktop.org pushing Wayland. The BSDs are struggling with this and I do not like desktops. Given a choice between twm and GNOME, KDE, XFCE ... whatever DE, I will use twm any day. I use fvwm and cwm, depending on monitor size, cwm for small screens.
Right now all you have with Wayland are Desktop Environments and Sway. I would chose KDE or GNOME over tiling WM any day. This my main issues with desktop.org
Because they all looked similar on a thumbnail, I tended to use their filenames to identify them. The 2D workspace unfortunately shuffled them around as they moved between rows, and it preferred thumbnail over filename.
Basically I needed the 1D taskbar with filenames and that's what worked for me.
I floundered via Unity, Fedora, eventually settling on crunchbang for a while. I tried gnome fallback and flashback but they were deficient.
One day MATE appeared, and I have never appreciated a well-honed DE so much.
i also find it annoying, and don’t use it. this is fine.
i’m glad gnome continues to thrive. it is for great good.