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Just go on the GNOME subreddit and you will see there actual GNOME users complaining, you will see mostly this: - how I get tray icons working (tray icons we

Just go on the GNOME subreddit and you will see there actual GNOME users complaining, you will see mostly this: - how I get tray icons working (tray icons were removed) - GNOME won't start (an extension incompatibility can make the DE crash) - lag when some animation happens - how can I make the theme to use less padding (some devs are considering removing theming support completely ) This are complaints for actual GNOME users that update to latest version and have unpleasantness surprises.

dman 8y ago
I just upgraded to Fedora 29. Text scaling slider is gone, now you can only pick between 100% and 200% scaling. Cant understand what would drive this "simplification"
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  It works on iOS where Apple picks which screen resolutions exist, so it should work fine on Linux too! More seriously, I dealt with this trying to run a Linux VM on a Surface Pro a couple of years ago. I don't remember which distro, but 100% and 200% were the only UI scale options. Surface Pro's native scale in Windows is 150%, and the solution to match that in Linux ended up being to scale it to 200% and then set up xrandr to scale it back down to 75% of that. Not exactly a clean way to handle it. I'm pretty sad to hear that's still the state of things.
  - blub 8y ago
    Having multiple resolutions on a mobile device doesn't really make sense, but in iOS one can adjust the size of UI elements and text. There is a text size slider under display & brightness
    - wlesieutre 8y ago
      I mean in terms of native hardware resolution, everything started with 1x assets, and eventually changed to 2x. Though they did eventually do a fractional scaling thing with 3x scaled down, which still feels clunky to me but at least you don't have to configure it yourself in two different places one of which is a command line.
- tomrod 8y ago
  In my perspective? Arrogance by the devs that they know their users without knowing their users. Like, okay, make an easy mode the default. But allow for that complexity to exist without completely writing full extensions for basic functionality.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    In addition to themes they also want to get rid of extensions.
- Mikeb85 8y ago
  In Gnome Tweak you can adjust the text scaling to any factor you want, to the decimal. You can also choose whether or not you want sub-pixel hinting and if you want anti-aliasing. I'm using Fedora 29 right now for the record.
  - dman 8y ago
    I know of Gnome Tweak. I am talking about the "Displays" tool which I believe is the default.
    - Mikeb85 8y ago
      Yeah that's HiDPI scaling (for the whole screen) and I agree it's silly that the options are only 100% or 200%. In their defence, most screens are either 1080 or 4K, not a ton of resolutions in between for desktops or laptops.
      - TylerE 8y ago
        1440p is getting pretty popular on desktop.
- sjellis 8y ago
  Here's a post on the GNOME blog aggregator about the issues of themes and adjustable sizing of elements: https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-at-scale/ https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-a...
  - dman 8y ago
    This is a self inflicted issue. Theming existed prior to CSS, and developers decided that CSS was the way to implement theming rather than support an explicit theming api. Now the argument is being made the CSS has too wide a surface area.
shittyadmin 8y ago
Yeah, I upgraded to the latest Ubuntu on my Linux box and immediately experienced a large amount of lag every time I opened the app launcher, that combined with the sheer bulkiness of everything made the desktop feel almost entirely unusable. Unity was miles better than the new Gnome (and the old Gnome miles better than Unity ever was). I migrated to KDE after discovering they fixed the majority of issues I had early on in the KDE4 release. Quite disappointing to see it becoming unsupported by a major distro.
- jimnotgym 8y ago
  I couldn't handle the extra screen area all of the Gnome menu bars took on my laptop. I tried a load of extensions to fix it and then gave up and installed Kubuntu. KDE is much better for me. No problems at all
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > Unity was miles better than the new Gnome (and the old Gnome miles better than Unity ever was). Yeah, I had to stop using Gnome when everyone was manhandled into Unity / Gnome 3. I have no idea what anyone was thinking. I now use xubuntu, which doesn't seem to have suffered. XFCE beat out KDE on the strength of... similarity to Gnome 2. I like having the two bars.
  - ethelward 8y ago
    > I like having the two bars. You can add bars in KDE.
riquito 8y ago
> Just go on the X subreddit and you will see there actual X users complaining [...] This are complaints for actual X users that update to latest version and have unpleasantness surprises. this is true for every software > how I get tray icons working (tray icons were removed) They explained the change, they have their reasons, they proposed alternatives to people who wanted to keep them around. What do you need more? https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2017/08/31/status-icons-and-gnome/ https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2017/08/31/status-icons-and-gno...
- simion314 8y ago
  You are impling the posts on the gnome subreddit are made only by the people that are unhappy, you should also check the answers to the posts, those are regular users and not one time posters, some of them are developers, developers of extensions or themes and they alo have complains, plus the plans for Gnome4 admint most of the technical issues mentioned.
  - derefr 8y ago
    No, the GP isn't assuming any astro-turfing campaign; they're just talking about the known effect where every time e.g. Facebook's UX changes, a million people come out against the change, and how they liked it better the way it was. Yet, those same people were often against "the way it was" when it was new, too! People just hate change (esp. change that requires them to change how their own stuff works to accomodate it—such as devs when their platform changes), regardless of whether the given makes for a more or less coherent experience; and regardless of whether the person complaining would have liked the system more or less if it was already like that in the first place.
    - cvbxcvb 8y ago
      This.
    - simion314 8y ago
      This is a bad excuse to ignore the bugs and issues reported on reddit and forums. Also is a bad excuse to ignore feedback, like you seen in latest release the developers are still moving thing around like the app menu, if a user would have complained about it an year ago you all would have defended Gnome design , now the devs said it was useless and not used and is a great design to remove it. The solution is to do more usability tests and not rely on what some "expert" thinks an UI should be.
znpy 8y ago
I'm sad to say this, but today's GNOME is a complete shitshow. Fedora's default gnome is completely unusable. It's like if GNOME developers wake up in the morning and wonder: "how can we prevent our users from doing their jobs today? What useful feature can we drop this month? What fully functional application can we replace with a half-assed 200 LOCs one?" I am not surprised though: has anyone tried learning gtk programming recently? Unless you learn to use the C library first (and before that, the GObjext library), it's nearly impossible. There's, for example, a nice python 3 tutorial and it covers the basics nicely. However it fails completely to answer the question "how do I continue on my own from here?". The most important issue however is that it's been like this for years and GNOME developers don't even acknowledge this. GNOME 3 is so bad that people took the effort to revive, update and keep using GNOME 2 in the form of Mate Desktop. And Mate Desktop is a major player in the DE space.
- russdpale 8y ago
  dont let you scare that off fedora though, LXDE is a great fedora spin :). People say good things about xfce also.
  - Aldo_MX 8y ago
    I've been using XFCE for about 3 or 4 years, and I really can't complain, it simply doesn't get in my way, it doesn't force me to relearn the UI, it even works with my old 800mhz EeePC, and the theme used with Xubuntu doesn't look as ancient as people say. I remember trying Mate in the past, but I also remember I had issues running GTK3 software and I didn't feel motivated enough to dig for a solution. What I wanted was a hassle-free DE, and XFCE was the one for me.
    - edoceo 8y ago
      I've been on XFCE for over 10 years. Old style menu, never gets in my way, runs GTK and QT apps, easy to exetend, four monitors, etc. So simple and stable. I've avoided so much yak-shaving that other desktop Linux users I know have been stuck in, more than once. Cheers to XFCE team!!
boogiewoogie 8y ago
Microsoft used to cut products that didn't get support questions. People asking about edge cases/complaining about problems is a sign of noobie uptake.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Microsoft used to cut products that didn't get support questions. That's a great way to encourage product teams to produce inadequate documentation.
  - cpeterso 8y ago
    I've read that Microsoft used to bill a product's support costs to the product's engineering team to encourage them to ship products with fewer bugs.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      So, you've got to design your product to have just enough support calls to not get canceled, but beyond that minimize them for budget reasons.
      - chongli 8y ago
        Or you just forget about trying to game your employer and just make a good product, satisfied that you're being paid an industry-leading salary and that you and your coworkers' stock options are going to make all of you into multi-millionaires.
userbinator 8y ago
some devs are considering removing theming support completely In other words, they're trying to copy Windows and Microsoft's aggressive feature removals from it? That's horrible, when for the longest time one of the biggest advantages of running desktop Linux was its easier and wider customisation.
- pmontra 8y ago
  And Apple's un-customizability. I gave a try to KDE at the beginning of 2014. I used it for a few months but everything was painful: twice as many clicks to get things done than I used to in Gnome. It reminded me of Windows. I installed Gnome Flashback and stayed there. I'm customizing Gnome Shell to look like the old Gnome 2 now. I have to sort out a couple of problems with the Nvidia driver (flickering unless I use a strange 40 Hz refresh rate) and I'll be there for the next few years on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. If there won't be themes anymore by then, I'll switch to something else because the Gnome developers and I have two really different ideas of the desktop. Ironically I'm closer to KDE but it was really unusable.
  - KozmoNau7 8y ago
    You really should give KDE another go. KDE5/Plasma is the most coherent UI available on Linux, by a long way. KDE Neon is a KDE-focused distribution, using Ubuntu LTS as its base, with a pleasingly minimal default install. Every Ubuntu PPA I've tried works just like on base Ubuntu. Similar to Linux Mint and others, it works as a live distro so you can check it out before you commit. KDE4 made me switch away too (I chose Linux Mint), it simply felt too much like a transitional release cycle. KDE5 brought me back, big time.
- pizza234 8y ago
  The GNOME devs are actively closing the software as much as possible; their software philosophy is probably as closed as you can get while being formally open source. There are many interesting informations around to get a picture of how they think; this article has interesting concepts: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/ https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti... and this is the most relevant part: I think one of the most important cases against applets (as they are currently defined in GNOME) is that they are extremely detrimental to the Identity of the product or platform. [...] Let’s say that we are trying to define either a product or a product platform. I don’t think it is possible to do this without some “brand” coherence. And it is arguably impossible to do this effectively with such an ad-hoc/individually-customized design identity.
czei002 8y ago
Would agree with that. Just used Ubuntu gnome for a product demo and its a usability nightmare. - How to create a shortcut for a command -> use the command line. - Modify group permission in nautilus? -> No use the command line. - Switching users -> bug, doesn't work half of the time - Functionality is hidden in the window title bar (debatable) - Window close button is too close to the logout button Is Gnome so simple to use because you don't have any option to do something? :-p The Ubuntu theme is especially bad: - No window borders -> overlapping terminals become indistinguishable. - Window title bars and top menu bar are almost indistinguishable... In contrast, we used an KDE app in the demo and a couple of times we thought, can you configure xy? would simplify things. Yes! you can do xy. Is there a keyboard shortcut for xy? no but you can configure one, Great!
- meko 8y ago
  KDE tailors to windows users, it has familiar conventions. GNOME is a linux DE for linux users. The problems you had are not really 'problems' for anyone moderately versed with linux.
  - m_mueller 8y ago
    By that you mean people who stay in one terminal? Why have a window manager at all then?
  - KozmoNau7 8y ago
    KDE is somewhat similar to Windows, because that general UI layout works well, and has worked well since Windows 95, ie. for literally 23 years. Other systems have used similar GUIs, including OS/2 Warp. We are now at a point where KDE is vastly superior at this type of UI than Windows 10 is. They've been doing it for almost as long as MS (KDE 1.0 was released in 1998). The settings UIs alone are so vastly superior, it's kind of embarrassing for Microsoft. So why has KDE stuck doggedly to this UI style? Because it works. MS spend countless millions and hours on UI research for Win95. It's a very pragmatic decision, and they've made progressions based on the original design, rather than throwing everything out the window and trying to re-invent the wheel, like the Gnome devs did. As a result, KDE is focused, straight-forward and doesn't get in your way. It simply lets you get on with what you actually want to do. Yet it is also extremely flexible, perhaps even more so than famously customizable UIs like FVWM. The problems czei002 mentioned are absolutely problems with Gnome. Some of them are specifically Ubuntu problems, but generally they are inherent to bad UI choices from the Gnome devs. Not being able to change permissions in Nautilus? User switching not working? Not being able to create shortcuts from the UI? These are all signs of a bad UI. You can't even set focus to "follows mouse" without raising windows when clicking inside them. I want focus to follow the mouse, and I only want windows to raise if I click the frame or title bar. KDE lets me do this right in the settings UI, with just a couple of clicks. In Gnome (or Cinnamon), you have to alter gconf settings, akin to registry fiddling in Windows. That's not cool.
pjmlp 8y ago
- how is everything so slow (aka JS engine GC not working as it should) - how to place files on the desktop - how to configure virtual desktops in all directions Does the JS engine even have a JIT?
meko 8y ago
I've been using GNOME 3 for almost two years now and I haven't experienced any of those issues. GNOMEs actually been really easy to use. Never had difficulty with theming or ricing my setup. Just wanted to provide some counter anecdata. I see a lot distaste for it but as an everyday user I've had no issues.

dman 8y ago

I just upgraded to Fedora 29. Text scaling slider is gone, now you can only pick between 100% and 200% scaling. Cant understand what would drive this "simplification"

wlesieutre 8y ago
It works on iOS where Apple picks which screen resolutions exist, so it should work fine on Linux too! More seriously, I dealt with this trying to run a Linux VM on a Surface Pro a couple of years ago. I don't remember which distro, but 100% and 200% were the only UI scale options. Surface Pro's native scale in Windows is 150%, and the solution to match that in Linux ended up being to scale it to 200% and then set up xrandr to scale it back down to 75% of that. Not exactly a clean way to handle it. I'm pretty sad to hear that's still the state of things.
- blub 8y ago
  Having multiple resolutions on a mobile device doesn't really make sense, but in iOS one can adjust the size of UI elements and text. There is a text size slider under display & brightness
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    I mean in terms of native hardware resolution, everything started with 1x assets, and eventually changed to 2x. Though they did eventually do a fractional scaling thing with 3x scaled down, which still feels clunky to me but at least you don't have to configure it yourself in two different places one of which is a command line.
tomrod 8y ago
In my perspective? Arrogance by the devs that they know their users without knowing their users. Like, okay, make an easy mode the default. But allow for that complexity to exist without completely writing full extensions for basic functionality.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  In addition to themes they also want to get rid of extensions.
Mikeb85 8y ago
In Gnome Tweak you can adjust the text scaling to any factor you want, to the decimal. You can also choose whether or not you want sub-pixel hinting and if you want anti-aliasing. I'm using Fedora 29 right now for the record.
- dman 8y ago
  I know of Gnome Tweak. I am talking about the "Displays" tool which I believe is the default.
  - Mikeb85 8y ago
    Yeah that's HiDPI scaling (for the whole screen) and I agree it's silly that the options are only 100% or 200%. In their defence, most screens are either 1080 or 4K, not a ton of resolutions in between for desktops or laptops.
    - TylerE 8y ago
      1440p is getting pretty popular on desktop.
sjellis 8y ago
Here's a post on the GNOME blog aggregator about the issues of themes and adjustable sizing of elements: https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-at-scale/ https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-a...
- dman 8y ago
  This is a self inflicted issue. Theming existed prior to CSS, and developers decided that CSS was the way to implement theming rather than support an explicit theming api. Now the argument is being made the CSS has too wide a surface area.

shittyadmin 8y ago

Yeah, I upgraded to the latest Ubuntu on my Linux box and immediately experienced a large amount of lag every time I opened the app launcher, that combined with the sheer bulkiness of everything made the desktop feel almost entirely unusable. Unity was miles better than the new Gnome (and the old Gnome miles better than Unity ever was). I migrated to KDE after discovering they fixed the majority of issues I had early on in the KDE4 release. Quite disappointing to see it becoming unsupported by a major distro.

jimnotgym 8y ago
I couldn't handle the extra screen area all of the Gnome menu bars took on my laptop. I tried a load of extensions to fix it and then gave up and installed Kubuntu. KDE is much better for me. No problems at all
thaumasiotes 8y ago
> Unity was miles better than the new Gnome (and the old Gnome miles better than Unity ever was). Yeah, I had to stop using Gnome when everyone was manhandled into Unity / Gnome 3. I have no idea what anyone was thinking. I now use xubuntu, which doesn't seem to have suffered. XFCE beat out KDE on the strength of... similarity to Gnome 2. I like having the two bars.
- ethelward 8y ago
  > I like having the two bars. You can add bars in KDE.

riquito 8y ago

> Just go on the X subreddit and you will see there actual X users complaining [...] This are complaints for actual X users that update to latest version and have unpleasantness surprises. this is true for every software > how I get tray icons working (tray icons were removed) They explained the change, they have their reasons, they proposed alternatives to people who wanted to keep them around. What do you need more? https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2017/08/31/status-icons-and-gnome/ https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2017/08/31/status-icons-and-gno...

simion314 8y ago
You are impling the posts on the gnome subreddit are made only by the people that are unhappy, you should also check the answers to the posts, those are regular users and not one time posters, some of them are developers, developers of extensions or themes and they alo have complains, plus the plans for Gnome4 admint most of the technical issues mentioned.
- derefr 8y ago
  No, the GP isn't assuming any astro-turfing campaign; they're just talking about the known effect where every time e.g. Facebook's UX changes, a million people come out against the change, and how they liked it better the way it was. Yet, those same people were often against "the way it was" when it was new, too! People just hate change (esp. change that requires them to change how their own stuff works to accomodate it—such as devs when their platform changes), regardless of whether the given makes for a more or less coherent experience; and regardless of whether the person complaining would have liked the system more or less if it was already like that in the first place.
  - cvbxcvb 8y ago
    This.
  - simion314 8y ago
    This is a bad excuse to ignore the bugs and issues reported on reddit and forums. Also is a bad excuse to ignore feedback, like you seen in latest release the developers are still moving thing around like the app menu, if a user would have complained about it an year ago you all would have defended Gnome design , now the devs said it was useless and not used and is a great design to remove it. The solution is to do more usability tests and not rely on what some "expert" thinks an UI should be.

znpy 8y ago

I'm sad to say this, but today's GNOME is a complete shitshow. Fedora's default gnome is completely unusable. It's like if GNOME developers wake up in the morning and wonder: "how can we prevent our users from doing their jobs today? What useful feature can we drop this month? What fully functional application can we replace with a half-assed 200 LOCs one?" I am not surprised though: has anyone tried learning gtk programming recently? Unless you learn to use the C library first (and before that, the GObjext library), it's nearly impossible. There's, for example, a nice python 3 tutorial and it covers the basics nicely. However it fails completely to answer the question "how do I continue on my own from here?". The most important issue however is that it's been like this for years and GNOME developers don't even acknowledge this. GNOME 3 is so bad that people took the effort to revive, update and keep using GNOME 2 in the form of Mate Desktop. And Mate Desktop is a major player in the DE space.

russdpale 8y ago
dont let you scare that off fedora though, LXDE is a great fedora spin :). People say good things about xfce also.
- Aldo_MX 8y ago
  I've been using XFCE for about 3 or 4 years, and I really can't complain, it simply doesn't get in my way, it doesn't force me to relearn the UI, it even works with my old 800mhz EeePC, and the theme used with Xubuntu doesn't look as ancient as people say. I remember trying Mate in the past, but I also remember I had issues running GTK3 software and I didn't feel motivated enough to dig for a solution. What I wanted was a hassle-free DE, and XFCE was the one for me.
  - edoceo 8y ago
    I've been on XFCE for over 10 years. Old style menu, never gets in my way, runs GTK and QT apps, easy to exetend, four monitors, etc. So simple and stable. I've avoided so much yak-shaving that other desktop Linux users I know have been stuck in, more than once. Cheers to XFCE team!!

boogiewoogie 8y ago

Microsoft used to cut products that didn't get support questions. People asking about edge cases/complaining about problems is a sign of noobie uptake.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> Microsoft used to cut products that didn't get support questions. That's a great way to encourage product teams to produce inadequate documentation.
- cpeterso 8y ago
  I've read that Microsoft used to bill a product's support costs to the product's engineering team to encourage them to ship products with fewer bugs.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    So, you've got to design your product to have just enough support calls to not get canceled, but beyond that minimize them for budget reasons.
    - chongli 8y ago
      Or you just forget about trying to game your employer and just make a good product, satisfied that you're being paid an industry-leading salary and that you and your coworkers' stock options are going to make all of you into multi-millionaires.

userbinator 8y ago

some devs are considering removing theming support completely In other words, they're trying to copy Windows and Microsoft's aggressive feature removals from it? That's horrible, when for the longest time one of the biggest advantages of running desktop Linux was its easier and wider customisation.

pmontra 8y ago
And Apple's un-customizability. I gave a try to KDE at the beginning of 2014. I used it for a few months but everything was painful: twice as many clicks to get things done than I used to in Gnome. It reminded me of Windows. I installed Gnome Flashback and stayed there. I'm customizing Gnome Shell to look like the old Gnome 2 now. I have to sort out a couple of problems with the Nvidia driver (flickering unless I use a strange 40 Hz refresh rate) and I'll be there for the next few years on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. If there won't be themes anymore by then, I'll switch to something else because the Gnome developers and I have two really different ideas of the desktop. Ironically I'm closer to KDE but it was really unusable.
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  You really should give KDE another go. KDE5/Plasma is the most coherent UI available on Linux, by a long way. KDE Neon is a KDE-focused distribution, using Ubuntu LTS as its base, with a pleasingly minimal default install. Every Ubuntu PPA I've tried works just like on base Ubuntu. Similar to Linux Mint and others, it works as a live distro so you can check it out before you commit. KDE4 made me switch away too (I chose Linux Mint), it simply felt too much like a transitional release cycle. KDE5 brought me back, big time.
pizza234 8y ago
The GNOME devs are actively closing the software as much as possible; their software philosophy is probably as closed as you can get while being formally open source. There are many interesting informations around to get a picture of how they think; this article has interesting concepts: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/ https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti... and this is the most relevant part: I think one of the most important cases against applets (as they are currently defined in GNOME) is that they are extremely detrimental to the Identity of the product or platform. [...] Let’s say that we are trying to define either a product or a product platform. I don’t think it is possible to do this without some “brand” coherence. And it is arguably impossible to do this effectively with such an ad-hoc/individually-customized design identity.

czei002 8y ago

Would agree with that. Just used Ubuntu gnome for a product demo and its a usability nightmare. - How to create a shortcut for a command -> use the command line. - Modify group permission in nautilus? -> No use the command line. - Switching users -> bug, doesn't work half of the time - Functionality is hidden in the window title bar (debatable) - Window close button is too close to the logout button Is Gnome so simple to use because you don't have any option to do something? :-p The Ubuntu theme is especially bad: - No window borders -> overlapping terminals become indistinguishable. - Window title bars and top menu bar are almost indistinguishable... In contrast, we used an KDE app in the demo and a couple of times we thought, can you configure xy? would simplify things. Yes! you can do xy. Is there a keyboard shortcut for xy? no but you can configure one, Great!

meko 8y ago
KDE tailors to windows users, it has familiar conventions. GNOME is a linux DE for linux users. The problems you had are not really 'problems' for anyone moderately versed with linux.
- m_mueller 8y ago
  By that you mean people who stay in one terminal? Why have a window manager at all then?
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  KDE is somewhat similar to Windows, because that general UI layout works well, and has worked well since Windows 95, ie. for literally 23 years. Other systems have used similar GUIs, including OS/2 Warp. We are now at a point where KDE is vastly superior at this type of UI than Windows 10 is. They've been doing it for almost as long as MS (KDE 1.0 was released in 1998). The settings UIs alone are so vastly superior, it's kind of embarrassing for Microsoft. So why has KDE stuck doggedly to this UI style? Because it works. MS spend countless millions and hours on UI research for Win95. It's a very pragmatic decision, and they've made progressions based on the original design, rather than throwing everything out the window and trying to re-invent the wheel, like the Gnome devs did. As a result, KDE is focused, straight-forward and doesn't get in your way. It simply lets you get on with what you actually want to do. Yet it is also extremely flexible, perhaps even more so than famously customizable UIs like FVWM. The problems czei002 mentioned are absolutely problems with Gnome. Some of them are specifically Ubuntu problems, but generally they are inherent to bad UI choices from the Gnome devs. Not being able to change permissions in Nautilus? User switching not working? Not being able to create shortcuts from the UI? These are all signs of a bad UI. You can't even set focus to "follows mouse" without raising windows when clicking inside them. I want focus to follow the mouse, and I only want windows to raise if I click the frame or title bar. KDE lets me do this right in the settings UI, with just a couple of clicks. In Gnome (or Cinnamon), you have to alter gconf settings, akin to registry fiddling in Windows. That's not cool.

pjmlp 8y ago

- how is everything so slow (aka JS engine GC not working as it should) - how to place files on the desktop - how to configure virtual desktops in all directions Does the JS engine even have a JIT?

meko 8y ago

I've been using GNOME 3 for almost two years now and I haven't experienced any of those issues. GNOMEs actually been really easy to use. Never had difficulty with theming or ricing my setup. Just wanted to provide some counter anecdata. I see a lot distaste for it but as an everyday user I've had no issues.