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It sure looks like Gnome 3 took the wind out of Gnome's sails. This correlates with my experience as a Gnome user, as it was Gnome 3 where the project really t

It sure looks like Gnome 3 took the wind out of Gnome's sails. This correlates with my experience as a Gnome user, as it was Gnome 3 where the project really took on a condescending user-demeaning attitude. Gnome 3 is where the project shifted from 'user friendly' to 'assume the user is an imbecile.' I now tell novices to use XFCE instead.

shrimp_emoji 6y ago
Why not KDE? It easily seems like the best Linux DE, and it's so weird that Gnome is so often the default in comparison. As a bonus, all the best Linux apps are Qt-based (e.g., Dolphin [compared to which any other file manager, including Windows's Explorer, will seem unusable], Okular, Gwenview, Clementine, and Kate).
- bigbubba 6y ago
  I used KDE for a while and liked it, but KDE 4.0 burned me and I never looked back. I've heard it's much better now, but haven't tried it. Okular, and gwenview were always nice, even during 4.0 days. Amarok used to be great, though I've not tried Clementine and I'm no longer a user of that sort of music library software. The reason I don't recommend KDE today is because I'm just not very familiar with it.
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    > I've heard it's much better now, but haven't tried it. I'm using KDE since 3.5.x including 4.0 release train. Its infinitely better. Stable, fast, extensible and infinitely useful (esp. Dolphin's services). I'm not using too many widgets and/or activities, but it's better than anything I use (incl. macOS, albeit they're close).
  - topspin 6y ago
    It's safe to come back. The bad old days are long past; KDE is a great DE and you should revisit now. Kubuntu 20.04 LTS is an excellent choice and will serve you for many years.
- bayindirh 6y ago
  I personally use KDE and XFCE every day. While KDE is very nice, it reflects the spirit of the Linux very well. Extremely customizable, extremely extensible. When everything settles down, it's a productivity monster, and I love it. On the other hand, XFCE is much more approachable and usable for a newcomer. It's not intimidating. It's not infinite. It's more resource friendly and straightforward. For a newcomer I recommend GNOME or XFCE. When they're seasoned enough, they automatically gravitate towards KDE most of the time.
  - rrdharan 6y ago
    Why do you use both every day?
    - bayindirh 6y ago
      My office laptop and personal desktop runs KDE while my office desktop runs XFCE. I like to use different things. Keeps my mind open.
  - still_grokking 6y ago
    > XFCE ... It's more resource friendly Not any more since the switch to GTK3. Plasma is more lightweight since than.
- spekcular 6y ago
  Can you please explain why it seems obviously superior to GNOME? I'm in the market for a new DE after using i3 for a while and would be interested in your reasoning.
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    KDE is an extremely integrated and batteries included DE. File manager can manage SVN/Git/Mercurial repositories and connect to anything. Akonadi can handle your mail and calendars at the background. Included apps (Gwenview and Okular) are very powerful. Desktop effects are not gimmicky but useful (e.g: dim inactive windows). Power management makes sense and is reliable. KDE can behave like anything you like and doesn't bury power-user related features somewhere. It's all visible. Multi-speaker & multi sound card management is also better, more obvious.
- jhoechtl 6y ago
  I agree with you that all the apps you named have no counterpart in Gnome land which is as polished and usablle as the once you mentioned. For those still burning plastics I would add K3b to the list. I am using Gnome since 2018 btw.
- grawprog 6y ago
  I've gotta second kde. I went through a bunch of different DE's and window managers and stuff. KDE was the one I eventually settled on and haven't looked back. It's easy to customize and setup everything just the way you want it and after that it stays out of your way. The default qt apps like you say are all great pieces od software. Going back to windows explorer after using dolphin is like jumping back in time 20 years. Kate's been my favourite text editor for years. It's got just the right balance of being light, but full of useful things. I wanna throw in KDE connect too, honestly, the best and easiest way to work with an android device from a PC hands down.
- dleslie 6y ago
  KDE is an unstable, bloated and buggy mess. I give it a shot about once a year and uninstall it when the DE crashes; it doesn't matter what hardware I use, it never lasts longer than a few hours.
  - still_grokking 6y ago
    Are you trying nightly builds? Or some suspicious distri (Like KDE Neon)? KDE is rock stable in my experience. Runs for weeks or sometimes even month (between kernel update reboots) without any crash or this like. I'm running Debian Testing. So it's usually not the newest release of the desktop. I guess this makes it so rock solid for me. Anecdotical story regarding stability of a DE: I had to use Windows 10 lately. I think the compositor crashes quite often if one has to may open windows. :-D
    - dleslie 6y ago
      Debian testing or Kubuntu, usually; lately Manjaro.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  It always had the best technology but looked like a cluttered ass. :D
- petepete 6y ago
  KDE does have some nice applications but it's a bit of a usability nightmare. Fine for power users or people who want 238 separate screens in their control panel.
  - ognarb 6y ago
    Nate is blogging each week about all the usability improvements KDE is getting: https://pointieststick.com/ https://pointieststick.com/.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Historical reasons due to Qt's original license and the whole C vs C++ on the Linux world (both are anyway Bell Labs languages designed for UNIX). So C camp went with GNOME, and C++ camp with KDE. Naturally then GNOME got bindings for C++ (actually quite good), however it is a big difference being the main language or one that always needs someone to write bindings.
canofbars 6y ago
To add another opinion. I love gnome 3, Its by far the nicest DE I have used on linux and what I would recommend to anyone to start with. I have used XFCE/Mate/Plasma/Unity and none of them worked as well. Its usually not even so much the design (although xfce does look very dated) but that they seem to have such little development resources that many parts of the DE are lagging software wise 5 to 10 years behind what they should. XFCE is still in the process of upgrading to GTK3 when GTK4 is already out and they still have made no progress on migrating to wayland so its not a usable DE for a modern desktop experience. Gnome just works and it just works very well. After using xcfe for a year I would go to report multiple bugs only to find they have already been reported years ago while on gnome I have only opened feature requests.
- stingraycharles 6y ago
  You’re being downvoted but I don’t see a clear reason for it. The parent gave their opinion, you give your opinion, it’s all a fair discussion. I suspect you’re getting downvoted just because people don’t agree with you.
  - emmelaich 6y ago
    HN says disagreement is sufficient for voting down. I don't like it and never do it myself however. While I'm here, another vote for Gnome3. Love it.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    Probably because of things like this: XFCE is still in the process of upgrading to GTK3 when GTK4 is already out and they still have made no progress on migrating to wayland so its not a usable DE for a modern desktop experience. What's wrong with GTK3? And "modern desktop experience" just reads like meaningless marketing fluff.
    - canofbars 6y ago
      There is nothing wrong with GTK3. Clearly we have been using it for a long time just fine. I mention it because gtk3 came out in 2011. Which means it took the xfce team 9 years to perform a migration which still isn't complete yet. Now I don't want to shit on the work of the xfce team because they work on this on their free time and provide us alternative options and ask nothing in return, but its a data point showing why one would preference Gnome over XFCE. The Gnome team has a lot of resources behind it to just get things done and push new technology out faster than the rest.
probably_wrong 6y ago
I agree with you on Gnome 3's attitude - I know in design there's a point to be made for being bold, but I wish Gnome 3 had reconsidered. I know that this is probably me being old and resisting change, but: I switched to Mate (which is essentially Gnome 2) and I haven't looked back. For me, a Desktop Manager's job is getting out of my way, which is exactly what Gnome 2 achieved. Gnome 3, OTOH, often got in my way.
bayindirh 6y ago
> It sure looks like Gnome 3 took the wind out of Gnome's sails. For me, GNOME made three mistakes and made them back to back: - No 3D graphics, no desktop for you (wrong timing). - All advanced settings is embedded in a registry-like structure (too much OS X influence, sent the wrong message, made a lot of things hard). - Extreme paradigm shift without communication (GNOME 3 became something different, almost OS X like, also Canonical's influence did this IMHO). As a result GNOME3 didn't evolve. It went through metamorphosis. It's core qualities (low resource usage, balance between customization power & approachability, and more importantly familiarity) disappeared. Compounded with backlash (MATE mainly) took the excitement out of GNOME.
- dleslie 6y ago
  For the first: and it was a pig until even recently; you still need a fairly beefy machine to run it at 60 fps! For the second: not just moved, many options were flat out removed; I dropped Gnome because of this. For the last one: and broke many apps in the process.
  - hda2 6y ago
    I still remember how their developers requested that transmission (a popular third-party torrent app) remove support for system tray icons because Gnome removed them. They eventually decided to side-step developers and remove system tray support from GTK entirely. Edit: changed "demanded" to "requested" to be more neutral. See comment bellow.
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      For reference, here is the bug: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 Reading further down, it's hard for me to see a demand there, I see a heads-up about an upcoming deprecation and a suggestion of what to do about it. The reason the system tray support was deprecated and removed eventually was because nobody was keeping it up-to-date.
    - anoncake 6y ago
fbelzile 6y ago
True, but I also feel this might also be part in staying relevant with touch displays. The dumbification of UI coincided with the rise of tablet computers and touchscreen devices. Windows 8 came out around that time too. I personally preferred Gnome 2 when Gnome 3 came out, but I've gotten pretty used to the top-left corner flick after a couple weeks. I sometimes do it on Windows and get disappointed when nothing happens :) This sounds somewhat perverse, but I kind of like the fact that it takes a little extra effort to switch applications. I'd say it keeps me maybe 5-10% more productive! Ideally, UI's should be tailored for the device they get installed on, but I'm happy Gnome was able to accept a few design compromises in order to keep moving the project forward.
- michaelt 6y ago
  > True, but I also feel this might also be part in staying relevant with touch displays. Undoubtedly - at about the same time, they introduced a swipe-to-unlock screen which is crucial on a tablet or smartphone, but useless on a desktop or laptop. The thing is, Gnome don't seem to have achieved any success in the smartphone/tablet market. So with the benefit of hindsight, trading off mouse and keyboard power user UX to improve touchscreen UX doesn't seem to have paid dividends.
  - kaba0 6y ago
    You can just start typing your password - something you can’t do on windows and it drives me mad there.
- dleslie 6y ago
  Curiously, with the PinePhone it is possible to use Desktop UIs on a phone form factor. It's worth a try! IMHO, Firefox with desktop UI (and addons!) on a phone is _vastly_ superior to Firefox Android. It's shocking how much better I find it to be.
  - still_grokking 6y ago
    Especially as one can customize Firefox quite well. For example you can have the addressbar at the bottom (even it's not officially supported) with a few lines of CSS.
jhoechtl 6y ago
I think gnome deserves a countervoice. I have been using KDE since pre 1.0. Back in the days my internet was so slow I went to the university and copied KDE down on 5? floppy disks. I used KDE through all iterations and looked at Gnome in dismayal. Two years ago I tried Gnome. I was fed up with KDE screwing up with Wayland. And should I tell you? I love Gnome! I was productive from day two. Ok, its opinionated and there is much less to configure than in KDE. But otoh it keeps me focused on work instead of fiddling with the DE. Imho a DE should just do two things: Make frequent steps easy to do but otherwise go out of the way. Gnome does that for me.
- viraptor 6y ago
  Kde took a turn at 5 / plasma. It's not the long pages of configuration anymore. It's close to as opinionated as gnome or at least not putting the options in your face until you ask for it. It's a massive difference from kde 3 times. I couldn't stand gnome shell and moved to plasma as it was starting. Didn't really experience option overload.
pwdisswordfish4 6y ago
XFCE is barely maintained, unfortunately. The recent port to Gtk3 lost some functionality as a result of regressions in the toolkit: keybindings in menus are no longer hover-rebindable, and the themes have not been properly ported, leaving me only with bloated Adwaita. For some reason, the package with window manager themes has not been released for 4.12 (the package from 4.10 works fine, though). There’s no path for migration to Wayland. Integration with display managers (i.e. screen locking) and systemd’s power management is flaky. And I am saying all this with regret, as a long time user; I consider it the best desktop environment I have used. I almost wish they had forked Gtk2 instead of porting to Gtk3 (or even more crazily, ported Gtk2 to Gdk3 to take advantage of ‘plumbing’ improvements in the latter, like Wayland support), but I do realise they just don’t have the manpower.
- aninteger 6y ago
  I guess by being on Debian I haven't noticed yet how bad its gotten. I do agree with you. Maybe it's time to migrate to IceWM 2.0.
  - still_grokking 6y ago
    Why migrate form a project that decays because of lack of manpower to another tiny one which could end the same? Did you give Plasma a try recently? It's featureful, configurable, maintained, and lightweight (even more than the newest XFCE to the surprise of many).
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      I tiny codebase means there's less to maintain.
    - curlypaul924 6y ago
      I disagree that Plasma is lightweight. I've been running KDE since I set up my computer to work from home back in February. I don't have the latest hardware, since I mostly built it from parts I had lying around, but it's not bottom of the barrel. 8-core AMD FX-8350, 20GB of DDR3, GeForce GT 720. One problem I've had with KDE is that after running it for a few hours, it would get really really slow. It was so slow that I could actually watch the title bar redraw when I would switch windows. Turns out that a 1GB graphics card isn't enough to do compositing at 4K when you have more than a few windows on the screen. Fair enough. So I turn off hardware compositing in firefox, chrome, and plasma. I boot the computer, and check memory usage in nvidia-settings. With just plasma running and a few docked widgets, I've already used 342/978MB. Perhaps the widgets are at fault, but I'm pretty I was able to run fvwm and gkrellm on my S3 Virge back in the day, and it had far less than 1GB of video memory. I also notice that sometimes I lock my computer for the night, then I come back in the morning to login, and the hard disk churns for minutes before I can type my password. I never had this problem with xscreensaver. There's plenty of RAM available. I know my 5400rpm RAID 1 setup isn't the fastest, but this is absurd. Then there's the K gear menu. Why is it so slow? I click the icon, go to Applications, then go to Utilities. Then I wait a few seconds. Eventually they all show up. Then I go back to All Applications. The menu stalls for a few seconds. What is it doing? I don't know. The fluxbox menu never stalled like this. The default picture viewer seems to be gwenview. I've imported a bunch of pictures from my phone and they are stored on my HDD. I double-click on an image, and then I want. And I wait. And I wait. No indication that it's doing anything; maybe my double-click didn't register. So I double-click again. I wait some more, and suddenly I see two gwenview windows. After a few seconds neither one has fully initialized the UI or loaded the image. I close one of them, wait some more, and eventually the image shows up. Why is it so slow? I don't remember images loading this slow in xv or eog. Should I be using digikam? I just used the default. The apps in the system tray are terribly slow. Let's say I want to change my volume while a video is playing. That should be simple enough. So I click on the volume control. I wait for it to show up. Then I drag the volume slider. It is slow enough to respond that I overshoot. Oops, too low. Bring it back up again. Overshoot again. I really need to set up some volume up/down key bindings so I don't have to mess with that thing. Oh, and my headphone volume always starts out muted after I boot the computer. No idea why. The slider doesn't show up in KDE, but I can adjust it just fine in alsamixer. I blame pulseaudio. If I were young and without kids I might have time to figure out how to go back to OSS. I remember when sound was as simple as running sndconfig and then listening to that wonderful voice say, "Hello, my name is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux, 'Linux'". The good old days. Life was simple.
hactually 6y ago
Where are those quotes from? They seem incredibly hostile for a project to adopt.
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
I think it's fine that they assume it; imbecile's need interfaces too. My problem with GNOME developers is that they consistently deny that they cater to the least technically savvy base and use euphemisms such as “normal people”. They are not “normal” they are technically far less literate than the normal man, and they too of course should be able to own and operate a computer. GNOME in fact seems to think it's own users to be even less savvy than I do, but they continue to deny this. The other problem is that everything that Red Hat has it's tendrils in overflows with meaningless marketing language such as that, in general.
- kodah 6y ago
  I idle in a Linux IRC channel where support is provided voluntarily 24/7x365. The fact that your assessment doesn't stand up to is that "normal man" seems misplaced. The average person I know cannot figure out how to install Linux much less troubleshoot issues along the way. I don't think this makes them imbeciles or anything of the like. Even GNOMEs definition of a normal person is probably off kilter because the bar for their basic user is so high.
  - dleslie 6y ago
    Being able to install Linux is itself something of a quality filter. Without aid from someone competent, those who cannot ascertain how to write an image to a usb stick and get their computer to boot from it won't be using Linux. There used to be Linux distributions that installed to one's C: drive and booted as a windows launch option; I haven't heard of that being a thing in years.
    - auscompgeek 6y ago
      Apparently Wubi is still maintained by the community these days: https://github.com/hakuna-m/wubiuefi https://github.com/hakuna-m/wubiuefi
      - dleslie 6y ago
        That's rad!
awill 6y ago
To paraphase Churchill, Gnome is the worst DE, except for all the others. I don't particularly love Gnome, but it's still what I use, as I don't really like any of the others more. Gnome Shell has a lot of javascript, which must go down in history as one of the worst 'modern computing' ideas ever.
maheart 6y ago
In my opinion the shift from desktop to mobile across the wider industry took the wind out of Gnome's sails (and desktops in general, no matter the platform). It feels like there's been very little (visible) progress made on any desktop in the last 10 years.
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  The problem is Gnome seemed to look at mobile and "pre-sabotage" itself. Both Gnome 3 and Unbuntu Unity wound-up creating "tablet/mobile ready" shells when no one was going to be using them that way. Tablets only seemed to be the wave of the future because they were new and everyone was buying them. It only became evident later that laptops were going stick around for a while and be what most people still used if they were doing "real work". But with the narrative being "this is the future", they were more or less pressured into it. The designers as well as programmers are volunteers and I would imagine designers want to work on the "cutting edge" even if that cutting edge is a complete disaster for users (just Microsoft's redesigned UI was).
  - me_againnnnnn 6y ago
    /r/Linux just eviserated me for saying this. The problem is people forget why the gnome shell was created and they are not being held accountable for that giant mistake.
  - curlypaul924 6y ago
    Their target wasn't just tablets, but any device with a touchscreen and/or a small screen. As a Netbook user, I loved Unity and was excited about the Gnome 3 shell. It seemed like the logical progression of Ubuntu Netbook Remix. What changed is that display and battery technology got better. I went from carrying around a tiny PC with an undersized keyboard (remember the Eee PC?) to one that weighs less, has a full size keyboard, and sports a display larger than the one the came with my first desktop computer. On this hardware, a traditional desktop environment feels cozy, while Gnome Shell feels foreign.
    - 6y ago
jdub 6y ago
The change from GNOME 1 to 2 was much greater than the change from 2 to 3, and there were people who complained (and attributed malice to GNOME contributors) on both occasions. The project has a point of view: that software freedom should be accessible and usable for everyone. If that doesn't excite you, cool. But it has improved the entire FLOSS / Linux stack over the last couple of decades, whether you use GNOME or not.
na85 6y ago
In retrospect, the years following Gnome 3's release are really what hurt my enthusiasm for linux on the desktop. Prior to that I'd had a few different linux systems (I started with Gentoo... that was an odyssey and a half) and at the time the mainstream-ness of Debian and Ubuntu pushed me into what I perceived to be more hipster RPM distros like Fedora. Well of course Fedora being what it is, they had Gnome 3 and I used it as a daily driver on my Thinkpad X220 doing web dev/devops (we called it "sysadmin" back then) for an indie marketing firm. Well, Gnome 3 was neat at first, but they made what I felt were several boneheaded decisons such as removing options from menus, removing menus entirely in some cases, gconf, and of course the early 2010s were peak "copy whatever the fuck the Freedesktop people are doing without critical thinking" so of course systemd featured prominently. Those couple of years of tweaking and fixing systemd problems and finding menu options being removed seemingly every fucking week really killed any enjoyment I had and it's part of the reason I own a mac today. I have better things to do with my time than find workarounds for whatever way Poettering's latest fetish is broken. I'm sick of awful battery life, awful track pads, awful suspend-resume, awful external display support, and awful wifi. I'm convinced the only people who have good things to say about using linux (or BSD for that matter, been there done that, no thanks) on a laptop are the kind of people who keep their "laptops" on the same desk, plugged in to ethernet, and are effectively using a desktop with poor thermals, and I think a large part of the reason why the desktop linux ecosystem is in such a poor state today is because of the choices made by some Freedesktop.org people and aped by the rest of the community back in the late 2000's and early 2010s.
- andromeduck 6y ago
  Ha this is my experience exactly! The first few years of gnome 3 was nothing but frustrating XFCE was such a breath of fresh air. Running crouton with XFCE @ 1:1 on a second hand Chromebook pixel from Google IO made me switch to MacBooks because there was really nothing else with the same build quality between chassis, display, trackoad and audio quality. Chromebook pixels were really quite something.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > the kind of people who keep their "laptops" on the same desk, plugged in to ethernet, and are effectively using a desktop with poor thermals Don't think of it as a desktop with poor thermals. Think of it as a desktop that can easily travel with you.
29athrowaway 6y ago
I think for novices the most friendly experience is Pantheon, the desktop environment shipped with the elementary OS distro. https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/ (you can either donate, or choose to donate $0 and get it for free). Now with regards to: > Gnome 3 is where the project shifted from 'user friendly' to 'assume the user is an imbecile.' I don't think that is what they had in mind. If I recall correctly one of the design motivations for Gnome 3 was removing the excessive distractions found in the numerous graphical elements of most desktop environments and make things a bit more minismalistic.
pjmlp 6y ago
I was an happy Unity user and as Ubuntu moved into GNOME 3, I really tried to love it, as I was into GNOME back in the Gtk vs KDE early days. However its use of JavaScript for any customization, broken use of UNIX workspaces and overall slowness pushed me into XFCE as well. In spite of not bing a C fan, I am even less fan from polluting the GNOME experience with JavaScript everywhere, instead of pushing Vala forward.
pantalaimon 6y ago
Why XFCE and not Mate, which is a continuation of Gnome 2?
jamienicol 6y ago
It looks to me like the build up to gnome 3 caused a large increase in contributors, which then naturally petered off back to pre-3.0 levels. Could it be possible your personal experience as a gnome user is clouding your interpretation of the data?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

shrimp_emoji 6y ago

Why not KDE? It easily seems like the best Linux DE, and it's so weird that Gnome is so often the default in comparison. As a bonus, all the best Linux apps are Qt-based (e.g., Dolphin [compared to which any other file manager, including Windows's Explorer, will seem unusable], Okular, Gwenview, Clementine, and Kate).

bigbubba 6y ago
I used KDE for a while and liked it, but KDE 4.0 burned me and I never looked back. I've heard it's much better now, but haven't tried it. Okular, and gwenview were always nice, even during 4.0 days. Amarok used to be great, though I've not tried Clementine and I'm no longer a user of that sort of music library software. The reason I don't recommend KDE today is because I'm just not very familiar with it.
- bayindirh 6y ago
  > I've heard it's much better now, but haven't tried it. I'm using KDE since 3.5.x including 4.0 release train. Its infinitely better. Stable, fast, extensible and infinitely useful (esp. Dolphin's services). I'm not using too many widgets and/or activities, but it's better than anything I use (incl. macOS, albeit they're close).
- topspin 6y ago
  It's safe to come back. The bad old days are long past; KDE is a great DE and you should revisit now. Kubuntu 20.04 LTS is an excellent choice and will serve you for many years.
bayindirh 6y ago
I personally use KDE and XFCE every day. While KDE is very nice, it reflects the spirit of the Linux very well. Extremely customizable, extremely extensible. When everything settles down, it's a productivity monster, and I love it. On the other hand, XFCE is much more approachable and usable for a newcomer. It's not intimidating. It's not infinite. It's more resource friendly and straightforward. For a newcomer I recommend GNOME or XFCE. When they're seasoned enough, they automatically gravitate towards KDE most of the time.
- rrdharan 6y ago
  Why do you use both every day?
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    My office laptop and personal desktop runs KDE while my office desktop runs XFCE. I like to use different things. Keeps my mind open.
- still_grokking 6y ago
  > XFCE ... It's more resource friendly Not any more since the switch to GTK3. Plasma is more lightweight since than.
spekcular 6y ago
Can you please explain why it seems obviously superior to GNOME? I'm in the market for a new DE after using i3 for a while and would be interested in your reasoning.
- bayindirh 6y ago
  KDE is an extremely integrated and batteries included DE. File manager can manage SVN/Git/Mercurial repositories and connect to anything. Akonadi can handle your mail and calendars at the background. Included apps (Gwenview and Okular) are very powerful. Desktop effects are not gimmicky but useful (e.g: dim inactive windows). Power management makes sense and is reliable. KDE can behave like anything you like and doesn't bury power-user related features somewhere. It's all visible. Multi-speaker & multi sound card management is also better, more obvious.
jhoechtl 6y ago
I agree with you that all the apps you named have no counterpart in Gnome land which is as polished and usablle as the once you mentioned. For those still burning plastics I would add K3b to the list. I am using Gnome since 2018 btw.
grawprog 6y ago
I've gotta second kde. I went through a bunch of different DE's and window managers and stuff. KDE was the one I eventually settled on and haven't looked back. It's easy to customize and setup everything just the way you want it and after that it stays out of your way. The default qt apps like you say are all great pieces od software. Going back to windows explorer after using dolphin is like jumping back in time 20 years. Kate's been my favourite text editor for years. It's got just the right balance of being light, but full of useful things. I wanna throw in KDE connect too, honestly, the best and easiest way to work with an android device from a PC hands down.
dleslie 6y ago
KDE is an unstable, bloated and buggy mess. I give it a shot about once a year and uninstall it when the DE crashes; it doesn't matter what hardware I use, it never lasts longer than a few hours.
- still_grokking 6y ago
  Are you trying nightly builds? Or some suspicious distri (Like KDE Neon)? KDE is rock stable in my experience. Runs for weeks or sometimes even month (between kernel update reboots) without any crash or this like. I'm running Debian Testing. So it's usually not the newest release of the desktop. I guess this makes it so rock solid for me. Anecdotical story regarding stability of a DE: I had to use Windows 10 lately. I think the compositor crashes quite often if one has to may open windows. :-D
  - dleslie 6y ago
    Debian testing or Kubuntu, usually; lately Manjaro.
mixmastamyk 6y ago
It always had the best technology but looked like a cluttered ass. :D
petepete 6y ago
KDE does have some nice applications but it's a bit of a usability nightmare. Fine for power users or people who want 238 separate screens in their control panel.
- ognarb 6y ago
  Nate is blogging each week about all the usability improvements KDE is getting: https://pointieststick.com/ https://pointieststick.com/.
pjmlp 6y ago
Historical reasons due to Qt's original license and the whole C vs C++ on the Linux world (both are anyway Bell Labs languages designed for UNIX). So C camp went with GNOME, and C++ camp with KDE. Naturally then GNOME got bindings for C++ (actually quite good), however it is a big difference being the main language or one that always needs someone to write bindings.

canofbars 6y ago

To add another opinion. I love gnome 3, Its by far the nicest DE I have used on linux and what I would recommend to anyone to start with. I have used XFCE/Mate/Plasma/Unity and none of them worked as well. Its usually not even so much the design (although xfce does look very dated) but that they seem to have such little development resources that many parts of the DE are lagging software wise 5 to 10 years behind what they should. XFCE is still in the process of upgrading to GTK3 when GTK4 is already out and they still have made no progress on migrating to wayland so its not a usable DE for a modern desktop experience. Gnome just works and it just works very well. After using xcfe for a year I would go to report multiple bugs only to find they have already been reported years ago while on gnome I have only opened feature requests.

stingraycharles 6y ago
You’re being downvoted but I don’t see a clear reason for it. The parent gave their opinion, you give your opinion, it’s all a fair discussion. I suspect you’re getting downvoted just because people don’t agree with you.
- emmelaich 6y ago
  HN says disagreement is sufficient for voting down. I don't like it and never do it myself however. While I'm here, another vote for Gnome3. Love it.
- userbinator 6y ago
  Probably because of things like this: XFCE is still in the process of upgrading to GTK3 when GTK4 is already out and they still have made no progress on migrating to wayland so its not a usable DE for a modern desktop experience. What's wrong with GTK3? And "modern desktop experience" just reads like meaningless marketing fluff.
  - canofbars 6y ago
    There is nothing wrong with GTK3. Clearly we have been using it for a long time just fine. I mention it because gtk3 came out in 2011. Which means it took the xfce team 9 years to perform a migration which still isn't complete yet. Now I don't want to shit on the work of the xfce team because they work on this on their free time and provide us alternative options and ask nothing in return, but its a data point showing why one would preference Gnome over XFCE. The Gnome team has a lot of resources behind it to just get things done and push new technology out faster than the rest.

probably_wrong 6y ago

I agree with you on Gnome 3's attitude - I know in design there's a point to be made for being bold, but I wish Gnome 3 had reconsidered. I know that this is probably me being old and resisting change, but: I switched to Mate (which is essentially Gnome 2) and I haven't looked back. For me, a Desktop Manager's job is getting out of my way, which is exactly what Gnome 2 achieved. Gnome 3, OTOH, often got in my way.

bayindirh 6y ago

> It sure looks like Gnome 3 took the wind out of Gnome's sails. For me, GNOME made three mistakes and made them back to back: - No 3D graphics, no desktop for you (wrong timing). - All advanced settings is embedded in a registry-like structure (too much OS X influence, sent the wrong message, made a lot of things hard). - Extreme paradigm shift without communication (GNOME 3 became something different, almost OS X like, also Canonical's influence did this IMHO). As a result GNOME3 didn't evolve. It went through metamorphosis. It's core qualities (low resource usage, balance between customization power & approachability, and more importantly familiarity) disappeared. Compounded with backlash (MATE mainly) took the excitement out of GNOME.

dleslie 6y ago
For the first: and it was a pig until even recently; you still need a fairly beefy machine to run it at 60 fps! For the second: not just moved, many options were flat out removed; I dropped Gnome because of this. For the last one: and broke many apps in the process.
- hda2 6y ago
  I still remember how their developers requested that transmission (a popular third-party torrent app) remove support for system tray icons because Gnome removed them. They eventually decided to side-step developers and remove system tray support from GTK entirely. Edit: changed "demanded" to "requested" to be more neutral. See comment bellow.
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    For reference, here is the bug: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 Reading further down, it's hard for me to see a demand there, I see a heads-up about an upcoming deprecation and a suggestion of what to do about it. The reason the system tray support was deprecated and removed eventually was because nobody was keeping it up-to-date.
  - anoncake 6y ago

fbelzile 6y ago

True, but I also feel this might also be part in staying relevant with touch displays. The dumbification of UI coincided with the rise of tablet computers and touchscreen devices. Windows 8 came out around that time too. I personally preferred Gnome 2 when Gnome 3 came out, but I've gotten pretty used to the top-left corner flick after a couple weeks. I sometimes do it on Windows and get disappointed when nothing happens :) This sounds somewhat perverse, but I kind of like the fact that it takes a little extra effort to switch applications. I'd say it keeps me maybe 5-10% more productive! Ideally, UI's should be tailored for the device they get installed on, but I'm happy Gnome was able to accept a few design compromises in order to keep moving the project forward.

michaelt 6y ago
> True, but I also feel this might also be part in staying relevant with touch displays. Undoubtedly - at about the same time, they introduced a swipe-to-unlock screen which is crucial on a tablet or smartphone, but useless on a desktop or laptop. The thing is, Gnome don't seem to have achieved any success in the smartphone/tablet market. So with the benefit of hindsight, trading off mouse and keyboard power user UX to improve touchscreen UX doesn't seem to have paid dividends.
- kaba0 6y ago
  You can just start typing your password - something you can’t do on windows and it drives me mad there.
dleslie 6y ago
Curiously, with the PinePhone it is possible to use Desktop UIs on a phone form factor. It's worth a try! IMHO, Firefox with desktop UI (and addons!) on a phone is _vastly_ superior to Firefox Android. It's shocking how much better I find it to be.
- still_grokking 6y ago
  Especially as one can customize Firefox quite well. For example you can have the addressbar at the bottom (even it's not officially supported) with a few lines of CSS.

jhoechtl 6y ago

I think gnome deserves a countervoice. I have been using KDE since pre 1.0. Back in the days my internet was so slow I went to the university and copied KDE down on 5? floppy disks. I used KDE through all iterations and looked at Gnome in dismayal. Two years ago I tried Gnome. I was fed up with KDE screwing up with Wayland. And should I tell you? I love Gnome! I was productive from day two. Ok, its opinionated and there is much less to configure than in KDE. But otoh it keeps me focused on work instead of fiddling with the DE. Imho a DE should just do two things: Make frequent steps easy to do but otherwise go out of the way. Gnome does that for me.

viraptor 6y ago
Kde took a turn at 5 / plasma. It's not the long pages of configuration anymore. It's close to as opinionated as gnome or at least not putting the options in your face until you ask for it. It's a massive difference from kde 3 times. I couldn't stand gnome shell and moved to plasma as it was starting. Didn't really experience option overload.

pwdisswordfish4 6y ago

XFCE is barely maintained, unfortunately. The recent port to Gtk3 lost some functionality as a result of regressions in the toolkit: keybindings in menus are no longer hover-rebindable, and the themes have not been properly ported, leaving me only with bloated Adwaita. For some reason, the package with window manager themes has not been released for 4.12 (the package from 4.10 works fine, though). There’s no path for migration to Wayland. Integration with display managers (i.e. screen locking) and systemd’s power management is flaky. And I am saying all this with regret, as a long time user; I consider it the best desktop environment I have used. I almost wish they had forked Gtk2 instead of porting to Gtk3 (or even more crazily, ported Gtk2 to Gdk3 to take advantage of ‘plumbing’ improvements in the latter, like Wayland support), but I do realise they just don’t have the manpower.

aninteger 6y ago
I guess by being on Debian I haven't noticed yet how bad its gotten. I do agree with you. Maybe it's time to migrate to IceWM 2.0.
- still_grokking 6y ago
  Why migrate form a project that decays because of lack of manpower to another tiny one which could end the same? Did you give Plasma a try recently? It's featureful, configurable, maintained, and lightweight (even more than the newest XFCE to the surprise of many).
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    I tiny codebase means there's less to maintain.
  - curlypaul924 6y ago
    I disagree that Plasma is lightweight. I've been running KDE since I set up my computer to work from home back in February. I don't have the latest hardware, since I mostly built it from parts I had lying around, but it's not bottom of the barrel. 8-core AMD FX-8350, 20GB of DDR3, GeForce GT 720. One problem I've had with KDE is that after running it for a few hours, it would get really really slow. It was so slow that I could actually watch the title bar redraw when I would switch windows. Turns out that a 1GB graphics card isn't enough to do compositing at 4K when you have more than a few windows on the screen. Fair enough. So I turn off hardware compositing in firefox, chrome, and plasma. I boot the computer, and check memory usage in nvidia-settings. With just plasma running and a few docked widgets, I've already used 342/978MB. Perhaps the widgets are at fault, but I'm pretty I was able to run fvwm and gkrellm on my S3 Virge back in the day, and it had far less than 1GB of video memory. I also notice that sometimes I lock my computer for the night, then I come back in the morning to login, and the hard disk churns for minutes before I can type my password. I never had this problem with xscreensaver. There's plenty of RAM available. I know my 5400rpm RAID 1 setup isn't the fastest, but this is absurd. Then there's the K gear menu. Why is it so slow? I click the icon, go to Applications, then go to Utilities. Then I wait a few seconds. Eventually they all show up. Then I go back to All Applications. The menu stalls for a few seconds. What is it doing? I don't know. The fluxbox menu never stalled like this. The default picture viewer seems to be gwenview. I've imported a bunch of pictures from my phone and they are stored on my HDD. I double-click on an image, and then I want. And I wait. And I wait. No indication that it's doing anything; maybe my double-click didn't register. So I double-click again. I wait some more, and suddenly I see two gwenview windows. After a few seconds neither one has fully initialized the UI or loaded the image. I close one of them, wait some more, and eventually the image shows up. Why is it so slow? I don't remember images loading this slow in xv or eog. Should I be using digikam? I just used the default. The apps in the system tray are terribly slow. Let's say I want to change my volume while a video is playing. That should be simple enough. So I click on the volume control. I wait for it to show up. Then I drag the volume slider. It is slow enough to respond that I overshoot. Oops, too low. Bring it back up again. Overshoot again. I really need to set up some volume up/down key bindings so I don't have to mess with that thing. Oh, and my headphone volume always starts out muted after I boot the computer. No idea why. The slider doesn't show up in KDE, but I can adjust it just fine in alsamixer. I blame pulseaudio. If I were young and without kids I might have time to figure out how to go back to OSS. I remember when sound was as simple as running sndconfig and then listening to that wonderful voice say, "Hello, my name is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux, 'Linux'". The good old days. Life was simple.

hactually 6y ago

Where are those quotes from? They seem incredibly hostile for a project to adopt.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

I think it's fine that they assume it; imbecile's need interfaces too. My problem with GNOME developers is that they consistently deny that they cater to the least technically savvy base and use euphemisms such as “normal people”. They are not “normal” they are technically far less literate than the normal man, and they too of course should be able to own and operate a computer. GNOME in fact seems to think it's own users to be even less savvy than I do, but they continue to deny this. The other problem is that everything that Red Hat has it's tendrils in overflows with meaningless marketing language such as that, in general.

kodah 6y ago
I idle in a Linux IRC channel where support is provided voluntarily 24/7x365. The fact that your assessment doesn't stand up to is that "normal man" seems misplaced. The average person I know cannot figure out how to install Linux much less troubleshoot issues along the way. I don't think this makes them imbeciles or anything of the like. Even GNOMEs definition of a normal person is probably off kilter because the bar for their basic user is so high.
- dleslie 6y ago
  Being able to install Linux is itself something of a quality filter. Without aid from someone competent, those who cannot ascertain how to write an image to a usb stick and get their computer to boot from it won't be using Linux. There used to be Linux distributions that installed to one's C: drive and booted as a windows launch option; I haven't heard of that being a thing in years.
  - auscompgeek 6y ago
    Apparently Wubi is still maintained by the community these days: https://github.com/hakuna-m/wubiuefi https://github.com/hakuna-m/wubiuefi
    - dleslie 6y ago
      That's rad!

awill 6y ago

To paraphase Churchill, Gnome is the worst DE, except for all the others. I don't particularly love Gnome, but it's still what I use, as I don't really like any of the others more. Gnome Shell has a lot of javascript, which must go down in history as one of the worst 'modern computing' ideas ever.

maheart 6y ago

In my opinion the shift from desktop to mobile across the wider industry took the wind out of Gnome's sails (and desktops in general, no matter the platform). It feels like there's been very little (visible) progress made on any desktop in the last 10 years.

joe_the_user 6y ago
The problem is Gnome seemed to look at mobile and "pre-sabotage" itself. Both Gnome 3 and Unbuntu Unity wound-up creating "tablet/mobile ready" shells when no one was going to be using them that way. Tablets only seemed to be the wave of the future because they were new and everyone was buying them. It only became evident later that laptops were going stick around for a while and be what most people still used if they were doing "real work". But with the narrative being "this is the future", they were more or less pressured into it. The designers as well as programmers are volunteers and I would imagine designers want to work on the "cutting edge" even if that cutting edge is a complete disaster for users (just Microsoft's redesigned UI was).
- me_againnnnnn 6y ago
  /r/Linux just eviserated me for saying this. The problem is people forget why the gnome shell was created and they are not being held accountable for that giant mistake.
- curlypaul924 6y ago
  Their target wasn't just tablets, but any device with a touchscreen and/or a small screen. As a Netbook user, I loved Unity and was excited about the Gnome 3 shell. It seemed like the logical progression of Ubuntu Netbook Remix. What changed is that display and battery technology got better. I went from carrying around a tiny PC with an undersized keyboard (remember the Eee PC?) to one that weighs less, has a full size keyboard, and sports a display larger than the one the came with my first desktop computer. On this hardware, a traditional desktop environment feels cozy, while Gnome Shell feels foreign.
  - 6y ago

jdub 6y ago

The change from GNOME 1 to 2 was much greater than the change from 2 to 3, and there were people who complained (and attributed malice to GNOME contributors) on both occasions. The project has a point of view: that software freedom should be accessible and usable for everyone. If that doesn't excite you, cool. But it has improved the entire FLOSS / Linux stack over the last couple of decades, whether you use GNOME or not.

na85 6y ago

In retrospect, the years following Gnome 3's release are really what hurt my enthusiasm for linux on the desktop. Prior to that I'd had a few different linux systems (I started with Gentoo... that was an odyssey and a half) and at the time the mainstream-ness of Debian and Ubuntu pushed me into what I perceived to be more hipster RPM distros like Fedora. Well of course Fedora being what it is, they had Gnome 3 and I used it as a daily driver on my Thinkpad X220 doing web dev/devops (we called it "sysadmin" back then) for an indie marketing firm. Well, Gnome 3 was neat at first, but they made what I felt were several boneheaded decisons such as removing options from menus, removing menus entirely in some cases, gconf, and of course the early 2010s were peak "copy whatever the fuck the Freedesktop people are doing without critical thinking" so of course systemd featured prominently. Those couple of years of tweaking and fixing systemd problems and finding menu options being removed seemingly every fucking week really killed any enjoyment I had and it's part of the reason I own a mac today. I have better things to do with my time than find workarounds for whatever way Poettering's latest fetish is broken. I'm sick of awful battery life, awful track pads, awful suspend-resume, awful external display support, and awful wifi. I'm convinced the only people who have good things to say about using linux (or BSD for that matter, been there done that, no thanks) on a laptop are the kind of people who keep their "laptops" on the same desk, plugged in to ethernet, and are effectively using a desktop with poor thermals, and I think a large part of the reason why the desktop linux ecosystem is in such a poor state today is because of the choices made by some Freedesktop.org people and aped by the rest of the community back in the late 2000's and early 2010s.

andromeduck 6y ago
Ha this is my experience exactly! The first few years of gnome 3 was nothing but frustrating XFCE was such a breath of fresh air. Running crouton with XFCE @ 1:1 on a second hand Chromebook pixel from Google IO made me switch to MacBooks because there was really nothing else with the same build quality between chassis, display, trackoad and audio quality. Chromebook pixels were really quite something.
thaumasiotes 6y ago
> the kind of people who keep their "laptops" on the same desk, plugged in to ethernet, and are effectively using a desktop with poor thermals Don't think of it as a desktop with poor thermals. Think of it as a desktop that can easily travel with you.

29athrowaway 6y ago

I think for novices the most friendly experience is Pantheon, the desktop environment shipped with the elementary OS distro. https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/ (you can either donate, or choose to donate $0 and get it for free). Now with regards to: > Gnome 3 is where the project shifted from 'user friendly' to 'assume the user is an imbecile.' I don't think that is what they had in mind. If I recall correctly one of the design motivations for Gnome 3 was removing the excessive distractions found in the numerous graphical elements of most desktop environments and make things a bit more minismalistic.

pjmlp 6y ago

I was an happy Unity user and as Ubuntu moved into GNOME 3, I really tried to love it, as I was into GNOME back in the Gtk vs KDE early days. However its use of JavaScript for any customization, broken use of UNIX workspaces and overall slowness pushed me into XFCE as well. In spite of not bing a C fan, I am even less fan from polluting the GNOME experience with JavaScript everywhere, instead of pushing Vala forward.

pantalaimon 6y ago

Why XFCE and not Mate, which is a continuation of Gnome 2?

jamienicol 6y ago

It looks to me like the build up to gnome 3 caused a large increase in contributors, which then naturally petered off back to pre-3.0 levels. Could it be possible your personal experience as a gnome user is clouding your interpretation of the data?

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