7 ms·

I sometimes wonder what it would be like today if we had just kept iterating on GNOME 2 rather than trying to do 50 different new things simultaneously... Pers

I sometimes wonder what it would be like today if we had just kept iterating on GNOME 2 rather than trying to do 50 different new things simultaneously... Personally I still use MATE :)

MisterTea 1y ago
The Gnome desktop churn was a bit of a headache. Gnome 3 took this weird tablet approach like Windows 8 did and it felt like they were playing "keeping up with the Jones's" instead of making a solid user experience. I remember around that time trying to record video from my Thinkpad's webcam using Cheese which was a buggy mess. That made me really mad as the Gnome team clearly focused on rearranging the furniture instead of focusing on improving the components that make up the entire desktop experience. I used to like Mate and moved to Cinnamon but lately I just use XFCE and call it a day.
- DrewADesign 1y ago
  I appreciate all open source work, but the gnome 3 UI definitely hit like an attempt to chase trends rather than improve usability. A lot of times, designers get pushed by team leadership to chase trendy paradigms and techniques because the leaders don’t want to feel like they’re out of date, but just like architectural changes in code, impetuous revamps cause problems that take time and testing to ferret out and address. Some of the design choices in Linux desktops over the years, however, just felt like ham-fisted amateur design. Who ever thought it was a good idea to have no visual feedback on a gui login screen while entering your password? Not even a password box, or anything saying “enter your password?” Something like that reeks of a cocky wannabe designer hearing a talk about reducing cognitive load by reducing unnecessary visual elements on a screen, probably figured “well the password doesn’t show up on the command line login, and if the password isn’t showing up, then why is a password box necessary” or something like that. Doing it right is harder than it looks.
  - edg5000 1y ago
    I don't get that argument. GNOME 3 with the Canonical app launcher (default on Ubuntu, it provides an alternative to the stock fullscreen app launcher with its awkwardly huge icons) really has great UI design. At least the statusbar controls, settings, file management, and basic apps like calculator. Not sure which parts you think are bad? (apart from the garbage stock app launcher, haha)
    - creesch 1y ago
      > GNOME 3 with the Canonical app launcher You are the second person I see adding this qualifier. In other words, it isn't all that great until modified. I get that you are also referencing other overall design paradigm. But the fact that such a, to so many people, essential piece is missing after so many years is just a bit odd to me. Granted, Gnome has improved over the years but there was a lot more missing that took a long time to get fixed and there is still a bunch of stuff that I think is user hostile. It is one thing to be opinionated about UI and UX, it is a whole other thing to look like you are actively fighting large parts of your user base. If we are talking about historical examples (since then mostly "fixed"): - No Minimize or Maximize Buttons out of the box. Early Gnome 3 versions only had a close button. To get the minimize and maximize buttons back, you had to use the third party Gnome tweak tool. Apparantly we all needed to get on the tiling or workspaces train. - No option for a visible taskbar of any kind. Not even a clear dock with running applications, you had to actively enter the activies overview to switch windows. - No ability to place icons on the desktop, at all. No files, no shortcuts. It was just there to have a pretty background. - Dropping support for any sort of system tray (notifications area) leaving no place for background apps like messaging clients, sync tools, etc. - The "where heck is my power off button?!" enigma, the system menu didn't have a power off button unless you knew to old the alt key. Then if we are talking about stuff that I think is still broken: - The hate for visible menus where every gnome app has a hamburger menu that is impossible to turn off in the native Gnome apps and as far as I know also doesn't really have a work around. - While great for customizing things, the fact that extensions are seen as essential is also problematic to me. Extensions can, and will, break with newer Gnome versions. This in turn leads to a less stable experience. - Nautilus is just a poor mans file manager as far as I am concerned. If I could help it I wouldn't use Gnome. But I can't escape it entirely due to work related shenigans.
- coldpie 1y ago
  > The Gnome desktop churn was a bit of a headache ... lately I just use XFCE and call it a day Yeah, the desktop roller coaster is fun for a year or two, but eventually you get tired of constantly being jerked around for no reason so you switch to XFCE and everything just works and stays the same for decades. The PC desktop is a solved problem, and XFCE is the solution.
  - porridgeraisin 1y ago
    Yep. I did the same thing. Went through the usual dance of trying out gnome, hit the extension breakage(there's been many of them over the years I can't even tell you which one it was) and I moved to KDE. They changed a whole bunch of crap in one of the releases and everything moved around... Oh and latte dock broke. A bunch of other crap broke every now and then as well. Mind you this was all before they both moved to wayland. I moved to XFCE soon after and it's great. I found a random plugin with last commit 7 years ago and it works Just Fine today. I set up my desktop 3y ago and it works the exact same way today. I know all the screens I use by heart. It's great. Although I must say, I'm a sucker for animations and background blur and wobbly windows especially. Loved KDE for that. I wish I could have XFCE's stability + animations. Ah well.
  - SequoiaHope 1y ago
    I stayed on the gnome train and it’s always interesting how it changes and sometimes makes no sense and sometimes it gets worse in ways that matter or are just annoying but mostly I like it. It works for me and I don’t have any interest in other window managers. It’s cute!
- zozbot234 1y ago
  GNOME's "tablet" approach actually works great on well-supported x86 hardware (either actual tablets or touchscreen laptops that can flip the screen for tablet use). It was truly state-of-the-art until quite recently, only surpassed by the new iPadOS 26 release.
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
    Have a starlite tablet and can say no, not a single gnome video player works well with tablets. We lost so much functionality in the gnome 3 transition, and they didn’t even succeed at touch. Browser based video players work well with touch so the hardware is fine.
    - mixmastamyk 1y ago
      A funny part of this is several of these video players look like they are built for touch… lots of round corners and buttons. But when you try to use them most functionality is only available by keyboard.
  - MisterTea 1y ago
    Thing is, I'm not a tablet user so those features dont mean anything to me. I also dont have a tablet save for a Surface Go I rarely use. My newest laptop is an old Lenovo x270 from 2012 or so.
- freedomben 1y ago
  > Gnome 3 took this weird tablet approach like Windows 8 did and it felt like they were playing "keeping up with the Jones's" instead of making a solid user experience. It definitely did feel like they were getting ready for mobile/tablets when they designed and released Gnome 3, but I felt they did (and do) a great job at making a fantastic desktop and mobile interface. I was a vocal advocate at the time basically saying, "Yes let's consider how it will work on mobile, but we can't compromise the desktop experience in pursuit of it." I do think they went a little too far on minimalism (for example, the lack of system tray to this day still irks me, and although I don't like to install extensions, that one is a must), but they did make a beautiful desktop that functioned very well for desktop/laptop use. The keyboard-driven nature makes it a joy for me, and the toolbar and hot corner make it very usable for a mouse-driven user. Even plain Gnome 3 is plenty usable, and among non-technical family members who I've installed Linux for, they generally love it and it's simplicity. For more power users, extensions are a thing (though I would agree the dev landscape for them is awful and it's in part because of the Gnome team's decisions). I would love to see them build in a system tray, and try to make the APIs more stable from release to release so extensions aren't on a constant treadmill of breakage.
  - zerocrates 1y ago
    Really everything to do with the "Mac-envy" top bar is a miss: the removal of any other status icons without an extension, the now-aborted attempt to make applications define a single menu and render it up there, the vast oceans of space you're not allowed to use for anything.
senfiaj 1y ago
Probably it will still have problems. Gnome 3 is part of a bigger problem. Here is the most complete explanation on why Linux is not popular on desktop. https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t... Recently the list shrank, but many problems still exist. https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.final.html https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...
- gunalx 1y ago
  Those lista reads like nonsense. Linux is Not Necessarily an Operating System -> no but we have distros that are. QA/QC, Bugs and Regressions Lack of General Software and Games -> just has different software, and de have wine/proton but fair ms office and adobe comes to mind. Poor File and Folder Sharing Situation on the Local Network -> really not an issue, we have smb ftp ntfs... But maybe a skillissue. Lack of Funding - > not really, ms for example funds a lot og linux dev. Hardware Support and Compatibility -> At least better than MacOS .... Wont dispute everything but it really paints a unnecesarily dark image
  - kown7 1y ago
    Office works like a charm if you install Chrome. That's a whole other can of worms though.
  - redeeman 1y ago
    linux has far better hardware support than windows
    - thewebguyd 1y ago
      Especially for weird and obscure peripherals. Good chance you can plug something into a linux machine and it'll detect it and just work because someone way smarter than me also owns that device and got a driver for it mainlined into the kernel. On the Windows side of things, you can run into situations where you have really old specialized devices where the manufacturer is long gone, so the driver downloads don't exist anymore.
edg5000 1y ago
GNOME 3 is the best desktop UI I've ever used, and I've used MacOS 9 all the way to Sonoma, and Windows 3.1 all the way to 10. Critical point is that stock GNOME 3 is really terrible. Canonical has a plugin which provides an app launcher. This is the missing piece which makes GNOME 3 amazing. Using JavaScript will make developing bug-free software more difficult as the codebase scales though, it will make development slower and also slow down the code. That is absolutely a mistake. Not sure how much is JS currently; at least some it is. But I never have to look at the code because it just works. I'm on Ubuntu 22 LTS though, not sure about newer GNOME versions.
- wwfn 1y ago
  I'm curious if having JS makes the code more approachable for potential contributors or extension authors. And then if a project does "better" (measure utility to users? sustainability/longevity?) with more bugs but more engagement. Maybe that's just another way of asking "Cathedral or Bazaar?"
  - runjake 1y ago
    > I'm curious if having JS makes the code more approachable for potential contributors or extension authors. Yes, this was a primary reason[1]. 1. https://gjs.guide/about/ https://gjs.guide/about/
- hodgehog11 1y ago
  I'm on Fedora Workstation, latest version. Can confirm, current GNOME is still amazing and getting even better. But yes, this is all with the Dash-to-Dock extension.
- eptcyka 1y ago
  I will take JS over writing plugins in C any day of the week. Gnome devs felt the same way. This way, they can iterate faster on plugins and extending the compositor.
  - edg5000 1y ago
fsflover 1y ago
It would be a monopoly dictating its rules on everybody?
kccqzy 1y ago
There is a large and thriving ecosystem of GNOME extensions that add or remove various UI elements, change their appearance or behavior in all kinds of ways, including a tiling window manager. Many Linux distributions simply shipped extensions for GNOME 3 to make things look like GNOME 2. I personally never liked the traditional desktop metaphor anyways and enjoyed customizing my desktop with different extensions. You won't get this landscape of diversity and customization if you just iterated on GNOME 2.
- streptomycin 1y ago
  With a broad enough definition of "iterate" you could have. Regardless, 99% of users don't want to customize their desktop environment so the defaults are really important.
  - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
    With a broad definition of iterate, Gnome 3 is itself an iteration of Gnome 2.
- codewiz 1y ago
  In my past experience, too many extensions tend to break every time GNOME Shell is upgraded and it can take a long time to get them fixed. The GNOME developers have signaled over and over again that they're unwilling to provide stable APIs for UI customization. Being a developer myself, I can see why it's a burden, but the current situation is that it's being done anyway through unofficial extensions and users are left to deal with the random breakage.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Not only we had them, they were written in native languages, not performance hogs running on top of gjs. Signed, former contributor to Gktmm during the GNOME 1.0 days.
School-Cotton 1y ago
Who is “we” ?
prmph 1y ago
GNOME is ugly, to me. Personally I think KDE is the pinnacle of Linux desktops. Might be a bit heavy, but there is no other Linux desktop I think comes close to it in the level of polish and aesthetics, and I've used a lot of them. I consider KDE even more polished than the MacOS and Windows desktops.
- graynk 1y ago
  I try to use KDE every 3-4 years and always come back to GNOME (which is bad in its own way) It's still, to this day, full of growing-pains-bugs, so every time a die from a thousand papercuts. I use NVIDIA+Wayland though and a lot of issues stem from that. Still, GNOME behaves better for me
  - jimmaswell 1y ago
    What exactly bothers you in KDE? I've used it on a bunch of Gentoo installations this year with only the more minor consternations expected of a Linux desktop like changing default shortcuts. As a side note, getting to wobbly windows has become a milestone of a Gentoo installation for me now - GPU driver has to be functioning for compositing, so by that point the system is largely functional. Feels like a rewarding treat at the end - it's a trivial graphical task on any modern hardware but it still feels like a fun flex after growing up with Pentium 4-esque workstations that couldn't handle KDE at all.
    - graynk 1y ago
      Somehow I keep hitting what I call "z-index issues". Examples: just for one frame I will see a background window drawn on top of everything else. Or a single line of pixels in Konsole will show me my desktop wallpaper (instead of being correctly half-transparent and showing the window underneath). Or only a random portion of the background window will get drawn on top of another for no reason whatsoever. My other gripes this time around also include: 1. Inability to make my secondary monitor static, while the main one gets to switch between virtual desktops, which is my preferred way of working 2. I couldn't find a good screenshot tool that would be able to capture rectangular sections of the screen on Wayland (AND worked with scaling), besides the built-in one, and I hated the built-in one because it insisted on opening its own window every time and I couldn't find a way to make it just silently take a screenshot and put it in the buffer. 3. Probably something else
hulitu 1y ago
> I sometimes wonder what it would be like today if we had just kept iterating on GNOME 2 You mean fixing bugs ? No way. It is boring as hell. /s
spauldo 1y ago
I jumped off the GNOME train early because of their philosophy of appealing to the average user by removing options power users want. The UI guidelines Sun donated to them were all about removing customization and "unnecessary" options to simplify the user experience, and early GNOME went all in on it. KDE took a different approach, balancing power user needs vs. average user needs. That's where I wound up after I reached the point where maintaining a 2,000 line .fvwmrc was no longer appealing. My conclusion was that there is no "one-size-fits-all" desktop. Fortunately a good chunk of formerly duplicated functionality has been moved outside of GNOME and KDE so I barely notice when I'm running a GNOME program on KDE these days.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like today if we had just kept iterating on GNOME 2 rather than trying to do 50 different new things simultaneously... Personally I still use MATE :)

MisterTea 1y ago

The Gnome desktop churn was a bit of a headache. Gnome 3 took this weird tablet approach like Windows 8 did and it felt like they were playing "keeping up with the Jones's" instead of making a solid user experience. I remember around that time trying to record video from my Thinkpad's webcam using Cheese which was a buggy mess. That made me really mad as the Gnome team clearly focused on rearranging the furniture instead of focusing on improving the components that make up the entire desktop experience. I used to like Mate and moved to Cinnamon but lately I just use XFCE and call it a day.

DrewADesign 1y ago
I appreciate all open source work, but the gnome 3 UI definitely hit like an attempt to chase trends rather than improve usability. A lot of times, designers get pushed by team leadership to chase trendy paradigms and techniques because the leaders don’t want to feel like they’re out of date, but just like architectural changes in code, impetuous revamps cause problems that take time and testing to ferret out and address. Some of the design choices in Linux desktops over the years, however, just felt like ham-fisted amateur design. Who ever thought it was a good idea to have no visual feedback on a gui login screen while entering your password? Not even a password box, or anything saying “enter your password?” Something like that reeks of a cocky wannabe designer hearing a talk about reducing cognitive load by reducing unnecessary visual elements on a screen, probably figured “well the password doesn’t show up on the command line login, and if the password isn’t showing up, then why is a password box necessary” or something like that. Doing it right is harder than it looks.
- edg5000 1y ago
  I don't get that argument. GNOME 3 with the Canonical app launcher (default on Ubuntu, it provides an alternative to the stock fullscreen app launcher with its awkwardly huge icons) really has great UI design. At least the statusbar controls, settings, file management, and basic apps like calculator. Not sure which parts you think are bad? (apart from the garbage stock app launcher, haha)
  - creesch 1y ago
    > GNOME 3 with the Canonical app launcher You are the second person I see adding this qualifier. In other words, it isn't all that great until modified. I get that you are also referencing other overall design paradigm. But the fact that such a, to so many people, essential piece is missing after so many years is just a bit odd to me. Granted, Gnome has improved over the years but there was a lot more missing that took a long time to get fixed and there is still a bunch of stuff that I think is user hostile. It is one thing to be opinionated about UI and UX, it is a whole other thing to look like you are actively fighting large parts of your user base. If we are talking about historical examples (since then mostly "fixed"): - No Minimize or Maximize Buttons out of the box. Early Gnome 3 versions only had a close button. To get the minimize and maximize buttons back, you had to use the third party Gnome tweak tool. Apparantly we all needed to get on the tiling or workspaces train. - No option for a visible taskbar of any kind. Not even a clear dock with running applications, you had to actively enter the activies overview to switch windows. - No ability to place icons on the desktop, at all. No files, no shortcuts. It was just there to have a pretty background. - Dropping support for any sort of system tray (notifications area) leaving no place for background apps like messaging clients, sync tools, etc. - The "where heck is my power off button?!" enigma, the system menu didn't have a power off button unless you knew to old the alt key. Then if we are talking about stuff that I think is still broken: - The hate for visible menus where every gnome app has a hamburger menu that is impossible to turn off in the native Gnome apps and as far as I know also doesn't really have a work around. - While great for customizing things, the fact that extensions are seen as essential is also problematic to me. Extensions can, and will, break with newer Gnome versions. This in turn leads to a less stable experience. - Nautilus is just a poor mans file manager as far as I am concerned. If I could help it I wouldn't use Gnome. But I can't escape it entirely due to work related shenigans.
coldpie 1y ago
> The Gnome desktop churn was a bit of a headache ... lately I just use XFCE and call it a day Yeah, the desktop roller coaster is fun for a year or two, but eventually you get tired of constantly being jerked around for no reason so you switch to XFCE and everything just works and stays the same for decades. The PC desktop is a solved problem, and XFCE is the solution.
- porridgeraisin 1y ago
  Yep. I did the same thing. Went through the usual dance of trying out gnome, hit the extension breakage(there's been many of them over the years I can't even tell you which one it was) and I moved to KDE. They changed a whole bunch of crap in one of the releases and everything moved around... Oh and latte dock broke. A bunch of other crap broke every now and then as well. Mind you this was all before they both moved to wayland. I moved to XFCE soon after and it's great. I found a random plugin with last commit 7 years ago and it works Just Fine today. I set up my desktop 3y ago and it works the exact same way today. I know all the screens I use by heart. It's great. Although I must say, I'm a sucker for animations and background blur and wobbly windows especially. Loved KDE for that. I wish I could have XFCE's stability + animations. Ah well.
- SequoiaHope 1y ago
  I stayed on the gnome train and it’s always interesting how it changes and sometimes makes no sense and sometimes it gets worse in ways that matter or are just annoying but mostly I like it. It works for me and I don’t have any interest in other window managers. It’s cute!
zozbot234 1y ago
GNOME's "tablet" approach actually works great on well-supported x86 hardware (either actual tablets or touchscreen laptops that can flip the screen for tablet use). It was truly state-of-the-art until quite recently, only surpassed by the new iPadOS 26 release.
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  Have a starlite tablet and can say no, not a single gnome video player works well with tablets. We lost so much functionality in the gnome 3 transition, and they didn’t even succeed at touch. Browser based video players work well with touch so the hardware is fine.
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
    A funny part of this is several of these video players look like they are built for touch… lots of round corners and buttons. But when you try to use them most functionality is only available by keyboard.
- MisterTea 1y ago
  Thing is, I'm not a tablet user so those features dont mean anything to me. I also dont have a tablet save for a Surface Go I rarely use. My newest laptop is an old Lenovo x270 from 2012 or so.
freedomben 1y ago
> Gnome 3 took this weird tablet approach like Windows 8 did and it felt like they were playing "keeping up with the Jones's" instead of making a solid user experience. It definitely did feel like they were getting ready for mobile/tablets when they designed and released Gnome 3, but I felt they did (and do) a great job at making a fantastic desktop and mobile interface. I was a vocal advocate at the time basically saying, "Yes let's consider how it will work on mobile, but we can't compromise the desktop experience in pursuit of it." I do think they went a little too far on minimalism (for example, the lack of system tray to this day still irks me, and although I don't like to install extensions, that one is a must), but they did make a beautiful desktop that functioned very well for desktop/laptop use. The keyboard-driven nature makes it a joy for me, and the toolbar and hot corner make it very usable for a mouse-driven user. Even plain Gnome 3 is plenty usable, and among non-technical family members who I've installed Linux for, they generally love it and it's simplicity. For more power users, extensions are a thing (though I would agree the dev landscape for them is awful and it's in part because of the Gnome team's decisions). I would love to see them build in a system tray, and try to make the APIs more stable from release to release so extensions aren't on a constant treadmill of breakage.
- zerocrates 1y ago
  Really everything to do with the "Mac-envy" top bar is a miss: the removal of any other status icons without an extension, the now-aborted attempt to make applications define a single menu and render it up there, the vast oceans of space you're not allowed to use for anything.

senfiaj 1y ago

Probably it will still have problems. Gnome 3 is part of a bigger problem. Here is the most complete explanation on why Linux is not popular on desktop. https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t... Recently the list shrank, but many problems still exist. https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.final.html https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...

gunalx 1y ago
Those lista reads like nonsense. Linux is Not Necessarily an Operating System -> no but we have distros that are. QA/QC, Bugs and Regressions Lack of General Software and Games -> just has different software, and de have wine/proton but fair ms office and adobe comes to mind. Poor File and Folder Sharing Situation on the Local Network -> really not an issue, we have smb ftp ntfs... But maybe a skillissue. Lack of Funding - > not really, ms for example funds a lot og linux dev. Hardware Support and Compatibility -> At least better than MacOS .... Wont dispute everything but it really paints a unnecesarily dark image
- kown7 1y ago
  Office works like a charm if you install Chrome. That's a whole other can of worms though.
- redeeman 1y ago
  linux has far better hardware support than windows
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    Especially for weird and obscure peripherals. Good chance you can plug something into a linux machine and it'll detect it and just work because someone way smarter than me also owns that device and got a driver for it mainlined into the kernel. On the Windows side of things, you can run into situations where you have really old specialized devices where the manufacturer is long gone, so the driver downloads don't exist anymore.

edg5000 1y ago

GNOME 3 is the best desktop UI I've ever used, and I've used MacOS 9 all the way to Sonoma, and Windows 3.1 all the way to 10. Critical point is that stock GNOME 3 is really terrible. Canonical has a plugin which provides an app launcher. This is the missing piece which makes GNOME 3 amazing. Using JavaScript will make developing bug-free software more difficult as the codebase scales though, it will make development slower and also slow down the code. That is absolutely a mistake. Not sure how much is JS currently; at least some it is. But I never have to look at the code because it just works. I'm on Ubuntu 22 LTS though, not sure about newer GNOME versions.

wwfn 1y ago
I'm curious if having JS makes the code more approachable for potential contributors or extension authors. And then if a project does "better" (measure utility to users? sustainability/longevity?) with more bugs but more engagement. Maybe that's just another way of asking "Cathedral or Bazaar?"
- runjake 1y ago
  > I'm curious if having JS makes the code more approachable for potential contributors or extension authors. Yes, this was a primary reason[1]. 1. https://gjs.guide/about/ https://gjs.guide/about/
hodgehog11 1y ago
I'm on Fedora Workstation, latest version. Can confirm, current GNOME is still amazing and getting even better. But yes, this is all with the Dash-to-Dock extension.
eptcyka 1y ago
I will take JS over writing plugins in C any day of the week. Gnome devs felt the same way. This way, they can iterate faster on plugins and extending the compositor.
- edg5000 1y ago

fsflover 1y ago

It would be a monopoly dictating its rules on everybody?

kccqzy 1y ago

There is a large and thriving ecosystem of GNOME extensions that add or remove various UI elements, change their appearance or behavior in all kinds of ways, including a tiling window manager. Many Linux distributions simply shipped extensions for GNOME 3 to make things look like GNOME 2. I personally never liked the traditional desktop metaphor anyways and enjoyed customizing my desktop with different extensions. You won't get this landscape of diversity and customization if you just iterated on GNOME 2.

streptomycin 1y ago
With a broad enough definition of "iterate" you could have. Regardless, 99% of users don't want to customize their desktop environment so the defaults are really important.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  With a broad definition of iterate, Gnome 3 is itself an iteration of Gnome 2.
codewiz 1y ago
In my past experience, too many extensions tend to break every time GNOME Shell is upgraded and it can take a long time to get them fixed. The GNOME developers have signaled over and over again that they're unwilling to provide stable APIs for UI customization. Being a developer myself, I can see why it's a burden, but the current situation is that it's being done anyway through unofficial extensions and users are left to deal with the random breakage.
pjmlp 1y ago
Not only we had them, they were written in native languages, not performance hogs running on top of gjs. Signed, former contributor to Gktmm during the GNOME 1.0 days.

School-Cotton 1y ago

Who is “we” ?

prmph 1y ago

GNOME is ugly, to me. Personally I think KDE is the pinnacle of Linux desktops. Might be a bit heavy, but there is no other Linux desktop I think comes close to it in the level of polish and aesthetics, and I've used a lot of them. I consider KDE even more polished than the MacOS and Windows desktops.

graynk 1y ago
I try to use KDE every 3-4 years and always come back to GNOME (which is bad in its own way) It's still, to this day, full of growing-pains-bugs, so every time a die from a thousand papercuts. I use NVIDIA+Wayland though and a lot of issues stem from that. Still, GNOME behaves better for me
- jimmaswell 1y ago
  What exactly bothers you in KDE? I've used it on a bunch of Gentoo installations this year with only the more minor consternations expected of a Linux desktop like changing default shortcuts. As a side note, getting to wobbly windows has become a milestone of a Gentoo installation for me now - GPU driver has to be functioning for compositing, so by that point the system is largely functional. Feels like a rewarding treat at the end - it's a trivial graphical task on any modern hardware but it still feels like a fun flex after growing up with Pentium 4-esque workstations that couldn't handle KDE at all.
  - graynk 1y ago
    Somehow I keep hitting what I call "z-index issues". Examples: just for one frame I will see a background window drawn on top of everything else. Or a single line of pixels in Konsole will show me my desktop wallpaper (instead of being correctly half-transparent and showing the window underneath). Or only a random portion of the background window will get drawn on top of another for no reason whatsoever. My other gripes this time around also include: 1. Inability to make my secondary monitor static, while the main one gets to switch between virtual desktops, which is my preferred way of working 2. I couldn't find a good screenshot tool that would be able to capture rectangular sections of the screen on Wayland (AND worked with scaling), besides the built-in one, and I hated the built-in one because it insisted on opening its own window every time and I couldn't find a way to make it just silently take a screenshot and put it in the buffer. 3. Probably something else

hulitu 1y ago

> I sometimes wonder what it would be like today if we had just kept iterating on GNOME 2 You mean fixing bugs ? No way. It is boring as hell. /s

spauldo 1y ago

I jumped off the GNOME train early because of their philosophy of appealing to the average user by removing options power users want. The UI guidelines Sun donated to them were all about removing customization and "unnecessary" options to simplify the user experience, and early GNOME went all in on it. KDE took a different approach, balancing power user needs vs. average user needs. That's where I wound up after I reached the point where maintaining a 2,000 line .fvwmrc was no longer appealing. My conclusion was that there is no "one-size-fits-all" desktop. Fortunately a good chunk of formerly duplicated functionality has been moved outside of GNOME and KDE so I barely notice when I'm running a GNOME program on KDE these days.