10 ms·

Gnome has a fairly negative rep now, thanks in part to its repeated spurning of feature requests from developers and users. I remember when the Gnome desktop w

Gnome has a fairly negative rep now, thanks in part to its repeated spurning of feature requests from developers and users. I remember when the Gnome desktop was exciting; there were frequently new apps to try, things pushing niche workflows that the Gnome team didn't consider. That all stopped with Gnome3.

Cloudef 6y ago
Gnome developers actively hate their users and non-gnome developers. This issue takes the cake: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217
- Karunamon 6y ago
  Gnome is one of those projects that should be considered "free in license only". While the project is free to hack on as you wish for your own purposes, your chances of being able to influence the development of the main project are minuscule. To borrow a term or two, it's developed in the bazaar, but run like the cathedral. Maybe an open-air cathedral. Firefox is another project that I'd put under this label. All the important discussions happen in the back rooms, and by the time something universally unpopular hits the bug tracker, it's too late for users or the wider dev community to have any say.
  - zxzax 6y ago
    >Gnome is one of those projects that should be considered "free in license only". While the project is free to hack on as you wish for your own purposes, your chances of being able to influence the development of the main project are minuscule. That's not been my experience at all. The outrage machine on social media tends to spread around the small handful of patches that do get rejected so they can get angry about it, but they never talk about the other thousands of patches that do get accepted. Go look through all the other MRs on the gitlab if you don't believe me. Yes sometimes patches get rejected, it happens in any open source project.
    - traverseda 6y ago
      As a programmer Gnome has really damaged their relationship with a lot of developers. For example take a look here: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1 https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1 >I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I'm sorry that this is the case but it wasn't GNOME's fault that Ubuntu has started this fork. And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry. Gnome kind of goes off and does it's own thing without thinking about or cooperating with other open source developers. [Here's](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217) an example where they make a technical decisions that massively inconveniences a bunch of well known open source projects like GLFW and SDL (low-level cross-platform GUI toolkits). Gnome are not good citizens of the open source commons, they do things that make it much harder to create cross-platform/cross-DE apps. GTK used to be fairly vendor neutral, it was the "GIMP ToolKit", not the Gnome toolkit. It worked with any desktop environment you chose to use. Since then they've been making the toolkit much more dependent on Gnome specific features and actively been making the lives of everyone else more difficult. Also there are a lot of controversial decisions that make developers lives annoying, like [refusing to implement classic typeahead](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/244 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/244) instead relying on their search daemon which is really annoying for a lot of developers, and of course makes running a GTK app in a non-gnome desktop much worse. There are a few outstanding issues that make it annoying for developers to work with file paths under Gnome. So yeah, they've burnt a lot of developer good will and seem intent on continuing that trend. LXDE even switched to QT instead. Really made it so that the linux desktop is less of a stable/reliable thing to develop for. --- https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2019/12/04/there-is-no-linux-platform-1/ https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2019/12/04/there-is-no-linu... By refusing to cooperate with other open source projects they're really making it harder for open source developers to get things done and make new apps. Instead of having a common platform we now have gnome and everyone else, and there really are a lot of very obvious examples of that happening over the years.
      - zxzax 6y ago
        Your first link is an issue that was posted over 10 years ago and was long resolved in other areas. It's not an illustrative example. I really wish people would stop trying to revive these ancient flamewars without acknowledging the current state of things (not saying this is your fault, but a little diligence always helps). The second two links you're posting are again, the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of patches are accepted, you just happened to stumble across two of the contentious ones that got a big outrage response on reddit. Please go look at the other thousands of issues and MRs against GTK if you don't believe me, it's not just GNOME people filing those. I would say I thoroughly agree with the last article you posted. There has never been a "Linux platform." It was always Motif versus KDE versus GNOME versus Enlightenment versus all the rest. Historically they only cooperated with each other on certain things. If none of them refused to cooperate, we would still probably be using Motif. We can come up with various reasons for why this fragmentation happened but placing all the blame for that on GNOME for going its on way doesn't make many sense when this fragmentation always existed.
  - specialist 6y ago
    > "free in license only" Very interesting. Thanks. Are you familiar with Bryan Cantrill's "right to fork, but not the power" observation? It deeply influenced me. Alas, I didn't find his post-mortem until after I already joined an FOSS effort (kauli.org). Which failed. For so many reasons. Neutering us contributors probably being foremost. Copypasta: OpenSolaris challenges • That certain critical bits had to remain proprietary made forking the operating system technically difﬁcult... • And that virtually all Solaris implementation knowledge lived within Sunʼs walls made it a practical impossibility • The community had the right to fork, but not the power • This led down the primrose path to open source governance: governing boards, elections, constitutions • And because all development on the system realistically required copyright assignment to Sun, OpenSolaris (sadly) remained a Sun puppet • Worse, some among Sunʼs middle management fancied themselves puppeteers... https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/slides/cantrill.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/slides/cant...
- zxzax 6y ago
  I don't see why you are saying that has something to do with some attitude from GNOME. There are several Wayland compositors that don't implement that feature.
  - Cloudef 6y ago
    >There are several Wayland compositors that don't implement that feature. Can you list some that aren't weston or dead projects?
    - zxzax 6y ago
      I don't follow all the Wayland compositors but Enlightenment doesn't, and Weston matters here. If somebody really wants this to become standard, implementing it in Weston should be priority. Every compositor library I've looked at also considers this optional, e.g. mir, qtwayland, wlroots.
      - Cloudef 6y ago
        Considering it got xdg prefix and was included in wayland-protocols that should be as standard as it gets. Weston is barebones "reference" compositor. It's not for normal use. Mir is dead. The xdg-decoration is based on KDE's own protocol, it was later refined and pushed to wayland-protocols by wlroots devs. Now kde uses the xdg-decoration too. >Every compositor library I've looked at also considers this optional Because that's the point of it. If compositor doesn't implement it, application would have to fallback to CSD (however very inconvenient for many apps, or users who suddenly will not see a decoration due to purely _technical reasons_), and even when it's implemented, application have to explicitly ask for compositor to decorate the window.
        zxzax 6y ago
        Inclusion in wayland-protocols means that it had enough support without opposition. It doesn't mean that all the members are interested in implementing the feature. According to the members list, Weston and Mir are still important enough to have a vote: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/blob/main/MEMBERS.md https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/b... >application have to explicitly ask for compositor to decorate the window. My reading of the protocol is that even when the application asks for that, the compositor can still reject it, and the application must always provide a fallback to CSD.
- akvadrako 6y ago
  If that's your best argument against Gnome it seems like they are doing pretty well. Decorations can be done client-side with a library if needed - there is no reason to push that work to the compositor.
  - Cloudef 6y ago
    Sure you can do everything with a library, and that's how you end up with library hell, or dependencies that will be hard to get rid of or replaced later, because how big they become or how broken the API was (e.g. fontconfig). But being the only ecosystem where that's needed is pushing some heavy boilerplate on developers. Why would games, or non-gnome apps care about decoration? There's plenty of good examples of applications where the decoration being forced on them doesn't make sense. The protocol is also standardized and gnome is the only wayland compositor that refuses to implement it, this is not the only case where gnome devs just decide to be jerks. Things like these are why I think I'll never will be using wayland as it just breaks everyone's existing applications and workflows. wlroots and sway developers are doing good work to try to bring wayland and its tools to same level as X11, but then we have these other groups that just actively reject anything that doesn't go along with their "vision". And I speak as someone who wrote one of the first wayland compositors, and one of the first wayland compositor libraries, which code partially still exists in wlroots.
    - zxzax 6y ago
      >Why would games, or non-gnome apps care about decoration? I don't think they would which is why the low level toolkits like SDL are the ones that have to handle it. Unfortunately that's the way it is, libwayland is very barebones and doesn't have a way to draw decorations. >this is not the only case where gnome devs just decide to be jerks. Please do not assume bad faith and suggest that someone is being a jerk to you personally because they didn't implement a feature that you were interested in. This is a sure fire way to cause burnout and stress to open source developers. >wlroots and sway developers are doing good work to try to bring wayland and its tools to same level as X11, but then we have these other groups that just actively reject anything that doesn't go along with their "vision". I have seen wlroots and sway developers reject patches and features that don't go along with their vision too, so I am not sure what distinction you're trying to draw.
- dleslie 6y ago
  I love how that thread is full of well-intentioned, respectful responses with deep technical knowledge and details; and the Gnome developers just won't budge. When, finally, it becomes clear that the user demands cannot be met and Gnome is woefully inadequate as a modern desktop due to their design decisions, the final post is: > Enough spam for today. Locking the issue. Gnome is dead. It has been taken over by toxic developers.
zxzax 6y ago
I know it's fun for people to hate on GNOME but if you actually read the bug reports, the feature was not rejected. The patch was rejected in favor of a different way to implement the feature.
- traverseda 6y ago
  Having observed this for a while that often seems to be just the way Gnome works. Patches that help non-Gnome projects are held to a much higher (sometimes unobtainable) standard than patches that help members of the Gnome foundation. It seems very insular, and if you want to "scratch your own itch" as an outsider expect to take 5-20x as much effort for the same feature. There will always be a reason why this patch isn't acceptable, despite the overall code-quality in gnome projects being... what it is. I'd bet if a Gnome app needed this feature that patch would have been quickly and quietly accepted.
  - zxzax 6y ago
    Again if you actually read the bug report, it contradicts what you're saying. This patch was rejected because it created unnecessary work for terminals outside the GNOME project. The favored solution would help all terminals using that widget.
    - traverseda 6y ago
      Did they ever implement that solution?
      - zxzax 6y ago
        It doesn't look like it, I'm sure they would be open to patches to help out there.
        traverseda 6y ago
        I'm a lot less sure, and the lack of clear requirements makes me even less certain. Also things like >adding only hooks for you means that all the other terminals get no benefit. Makes me quite concerned since these hooks weren't just for termite, as evidenced by tilix showing interest in this patch set. >Implementing this in VTE would mean ruling out having any flexibility in the terminal using the library. [...] an implementation inside VTE won't satisfy the use case. I think that the termite developer explained very clearly why the approach suggested by the VTE maintainer wouldn't actually solve the problem they were having, and the maintainer responded with a simple "wontfix" and no more discussion. This is kind of the thing we're talking about. One project said they needed this, another project said they'd also appreciate this feature, and instead of discussing how to make this work, setting clear requirements and the like, it took 2 years to respond to the first patch submission and then the issue was just randomly closed in the middle of a discussion.
CrazyPyroLinux 6y ago
I've never understood all the love and excitement and attention that GNOME has gotten ever since Canonical got behind it and dropped Unity. All the cheerleading over what seem like really basic fixes that haven't been a problem on other DEs, like "now the single-threaded shell crashes to login less often! Horray!" That's only intensified with 3.40 (Now hailed as "40" like a pop star using only their first name.) Apparently the top hot new feature is "horizontal workspaces"...mind-blowing.
rkangel 6y ago
> things pushing niche workflows that the Gnome team didn't consider On the other hand Gnome3 is the first Linux desktop that I think is really non power user friendly. The laptop my partner uses at home is a slightly old Thinkpad I put Fedora on last year and it took her about 20 minutes to work out to use everything (less time than she took on a Mac). I think the Gnome developers have been pretty hostile to outside input and could have done a better job. But the fact that they've had a clear direction and haven't implemented everybody's personal preference has resulted in a coherent result without unnecessary cruft.
- dleslie 6y ago
  My non-power-user wife, father and mother all prefer MATE. It works like Windows, which they are accustomed to. Edit: I don't get why this was down-voted, but OK.
- rthomas6 6y ago
  > On the other hand Gnome3 is the first Linux desktop that I think is really non power user friendly. I think Plasma and Cinnamon also belong in this group.
  - codemac 6y ago
    Considering Cinnamon is a fork of Gnome 3, it seems to be significant evidence of Gnome 3's influence. And Plasma was first released in 2014, 3 years after Gnome 3. Gnome 3 had a HUGE affect on desktop environments, due to Gnome 2's popularity.
    - sangnoir 6y ago
      Plasma's predecessor (KDE 3) is closer to Gnome that Plasma itself. Plasma is as close to an antithesis of Gnome as you could get (outside of tiling window managers) - everything is customizable/extensible
    - barrkel 6y ago
      Cinnamon basically makes Gnome feel more like Windows.

Cloudef 6y ago

Gnome developers actively hate their users and non-gnome developers. This issue takes the cake: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217

Karunamon 6y ago
Gnome is one of those projects that should be considered "free in license only". While the project is free to hack on as you wish for your own purposes, your chances of being able to influence the development of the main project are minuscule. To borrow a term or two, it's developed in the bazaar, but run like the cathedral. Maybe an open-air cathedral. Firefox is another project that I'd put under this label. All the important discussions happen in the back rooms, and by the time something universally unpopular hits the bug tracker, it's too late for users or the wider dev community to have any say.
- zxzax 6y ago
  >Gnome is one of those projects that should be considered "free in license only". While the project is free to hack on as you wish for your own purposes, your chances of being able to influence the development of the main project are minuscule. That's not been my experience at all. The outrage machine on social media tends to spread around the small handful of patches that do get rejected so they can get angry about it, but they never talk about the other thousands of patches that do get accepted. Go look through all the other MRs on the gitlab if you don't believe me. Yes sometimes patches get rejected, it happens in any open source project.
  - traverseda 6y ago
    As a programmer Gnome has really damaged their relationship with a lot of developers. For example take a look here: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1 https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1 >I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I'm sorry that this is the case but it wasn't GNOME's fault that Ubuntu has started this fork. And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry. Gnome kind of goes off and does it's own thing without thinking about or cooperating with other open source developers. [Here's](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217) an example where they make a technical decisions that massively inconveniences a bunch of well known open source projects like GLFW and SDL (low-level cross-platform GUI toolkits). Gnome are not good citizens of the open source commons, they do things that make it much harder to create cross-platform/cross-DE apps. GTK used to be fairly vendor neutral, it was the "GIMP ToolKit", not the Gnome toolkit. It worked with any desktop environment you chose to use. Since then they've been making the toolkit much more dependent on Gnome specific features and actively been making the lives of everyone else more difficult. Also there are a lot of controversial decisions that make developers lives annoying, like [refusing to implement classic typeahead](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/244 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/244) instead relying on their search daemon which is really annoying for a lot of developers, and of course makes running a GTK app in a non-gnome desktop much worse. There are a few outstanding issues that make it annoying for developers to work with file paths under Gnome. So yeah, they've burnt a lot of developer good will and seem intent on continuing that trend. LXDE even switched to QT instead. Really made it so that the linux desktop is less of a stable/reliable thing to develop for. --- https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2019/12/04/there-is-no-linux-platform-1/ https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2019/12/04/there-is-no-linu... By refusing to cooperate with other open source projects they're really making it harder for open source developers to get things done and make new apps. Instead of having a common platform we now have gnome and everyone else, and there really are a lot of very obvious examples of that happening over the years.
    - zxzax 6y ago
      Your first link is an issue that was posted over 10 years ago and was long resolved in other areas. It's not an illustrative example. I really wish people would stop trying to revive these ancient flamewars without acknowledging the current state of things (not saying this is your fault, but a little diligence always helps). The second two links you're posting are again, the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of patches are accepted, you just happened to stumble across two of the contentious ones that got a big outrage response on reddit. Please go look at the other thousands of issues and MRs against GTK if you don't believe me, it's not just GNOME people filing those. I would say I thoroughly agree with the last article you posted. There has never been a "Linux platform." It was always Motif versus KDE versus GNOME versus Enlightenment versus all the rest. Historically they only cooperated with each other on certain things. If none of them refused to cooperate, we would still probably be using Motif. We can come up with various reasons for why this fragmentation happened but placing all the blame for that on GNOME for going its on way doesn't make many sense when this fragmentation always existed.
- specialist 6y ago
  > "free in license only" Very interesting. Thanks. Are you familiar with Bryan Cantrill's "right to fork, but not the power" observation? It deeply influenced me. Alas, I didn't find his post-mortem until after I already joined an FOSS effort (kauli.org). Which failed. For so many reasons. Neutering us contributors probably being foremost. Copypasta: OpenSolaris challenges • That certain critical bits had to remain proprietary made forking the operating system technically difﬁcult... • And that virtually all Solaris implementation knowledge lived within Sunʼs walls made it a practical impossibility • The community had the right to fork, but not the power • This led down the primrose path to open source governance: governing boards, elections, constitutions • And because all development on the system realistically required copyright assignment to Sun, OpenSolaris (sadly) remained a Sun puppet • Worse, some among Sunʼs middle management fancied themselves puppeteers... https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/slides/cantrill.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/slides/cant...
zxzax 6y ago
I don't see why you are saying that has something to do with some attitude from GNOME. There are several Wayland compositors that don't implement that feature.
- Cloudef 6y ago
  >There are several Wayland compositors that don't implement that feature. Can you list some that aren't weston or dead projects?
  - zxzax 6y ago
    I don't follow all the Wayland compositors but Enlightenment doesn't, and Weston matters here. If somebody really wants this to become standard, implementing it in Weston should be priority. Every compositor library I've looked at also considers this optional, e.g. mir, qtwayland, wlroots.
    - Cloudef 6y ago
      Considering it got xdg prefix and was included in wayland-protocols that should be as standard as it gets. Weston is barebones "reference" compositor. It's not for normal use. Mir is dead. The xdg-decoration is based on KDE's own protocol, it was later refined and pushed to wayland-protocols by wlroots devs. Now kde uses the xdg-decoration too. >Every compositor library I've looked at also considers this optional Because that's the point of it. If compositor doesn't implement it, application would have to fallback to CSD (however very inconvenient for many apps, or users who suddenly will not see a decoration due to purely _technical reasons_), and even when it's implemented, application have to explicitly ask for compositor to decorate the window.
      - zxzax 6y ago
        Inclusion in wayland-protocols means that it had enough support without opposition. It doesn't mean that all the members are interested in implementing the feature. According to the members list, Weston and Mir are still important enough to have a vote: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/blob/main/MEMBERS.md https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/b... >application have to explicitly ask for compositor to decorate the window. My reading of the protocol is that even when the application asks for that, the compositor can still reject it, and the application must always provide a fallback to CSD.
akvadrako 6y ago
If that's your best argument against Gnome it seems like they are doing pretty well. Decorations can be done client-side with a library if needed - there is no reason to push that work to the compositor.
- Cloudef 6y ago
  Sure you can do everything with a library, and that's how you end up with library hell, or dependencies that will be hard to get rid of or replaced later, because how big they become or how broken the API was (e.g. fontconfig). But being the only ecosystem where that's needed is pushing some heavy boilerplate on developers. Why would games, or non-gnome apps care about decoration? There's plenty of good examples of applications where the decoration being forced on them doesn't make sense. The protocol is also standardized and gnome is the only wayland compositor that refuses to implement it, this is not the only case where gnome devs just decide to be jerks. Things like these are why I think I'll never will be using wayland as it just breaks everyone's existing applications and workflows. wlroots and sway developers are doing good work to try to bring wayland and its tools to same level as X11, but then we have these other groups that just actively reject anything that doesn't go along with their "vision". And I speak as someone who wrote one of the first wayland compositors, and one of the first wayland compositor libraries, which code partially still exists in wlroots.
  - zxzax 6y ago
    >Why would games, or non-gnome apps care about decoration? I don't think they would which is why the low level toolkits like SDL are the ones that have to handle it. Unfortunately that's the way it is, libwayland is very barebones and doesn't have a way to draw decorations. >this is not the only case where gnome devs just decide to be jerks. Please do not assume bad faith and suggest that someone is being a jerk to you personally because they didn't implement a feature that you were interested in. This is a sure fire way to cause burnout and stress to open source developers. >wlroots and sway developers are doing good work to try to bring wayland and its tools to same level as X11, but then we have these other groups that just actively reject anything that doesn't go along with their "vision". I have seen wlroots and sway developers reject patches and features that don't go along with their vision too, so I am not sure what distinction you're trying to draw.
dleslie 6y ago
I love how that thread is full of well-intentioned, respectful responses with deep technical knowledge and details; and the Gnome developers just won't budge. When, finally, it becomes clear that the user demands cannot be met and Gnome is woefully inadequate as a modern desktop due to their design decisions, the final post is: > Enough spam for today. Locking the issue. Gnome is dead. It has been taken over by toxic developers.

zxzax 6y ago

I know it's fun for people to hate on GNOME but if you actually read the bug reports, the feature was not rejected. The patch was rejected in favor of a different way to implement the feature.

traverseda 6y ago
Having observed this for a while that often seems to be just the way Gnome works. Patches that help non-Gnome projects are held to a much higher (sometimes unobtainable) standard than patches that help members of the Gnome foundation. It seems very insular, and if you want to "scratch your own itch" as an outsider expect to take 5-20x as much effort for the same feature. There will always be a reason why this patch isn't acceptable, despite the overall code-quality in gnome projects being... what it is. I'd bet if a Gnome app needed this feature that patch would have been quickly and quietly accepted.
- zxzax 6y ago
  Again if you actually read the bug report, it contradicts what you're saying. This patch was rejected because it created unnecessary work for terminals outside the GNOME project. The favored solution would help all terminals using that widget.
  - traverseda 6y ago
    Did they ever implement that solution?
    - zxzax 6y ago
      It doesn't look like it, I'm sure they would be open to patches to help out there.
      - traverseda 6y ago
        I'm a lot less sure, and the lack of clear requirements makes me even less certain. Also things like >adding only hooks for you means that all the other terminals get no benefit. Makes me quite concerned since these hooks weren't just for termite, as evidenced by tilix showing interest in this patch set. >Implementing this in VTE would mean ruling out having any flexibility in the terminal using the library. [...] an implementation inside VTE won't satisfy the use case. I think that the termite developer explained very clearly why the approach suggested by the VTE maintainer wouldn't actually solve the problem they were having, and the maintainer responded with a simple "wontfix" and no more discussion. This is kind of the thing we're talking about. One project said they needed this, another project said they'd also appreciate this feature, and instead of discussing how to make this work, setting clear requirements and the like, it took 2 years to respond to the first patch submission and then the issue was just randomly closed in the middle of a discussion.

CrazyPyroLinux 6y ago

I've never understood all the love and excitement and attention that GNOME has gotten ever since Canonical got behind it and dropped Unity. All the cheerleading over what seem like really basic fixes that haven't been a problem on other DEs, like "now the single-threaded shell crashes to login less often! Horray!" That's only intensified with 3.40 (Now hailed as "40" like a pop star using only their first name.) Apparently the top hot new feature is "horizontal workspaces"...mind-blowing.

rkangel 6y ago

> things pushing niche workflows that the Gnome team didn't consider On the other hand Gnome3 is the first Linux desktop that I think is really non power user friendly. The laptop my partner uses at home is a slightly old Thinkpad I put Fedora on last year and it took her about 20 minutes to work out to use everything (less time than she took on a Mac). I think the Gnome developers have been pretty hostile to outside input and could have done a better job. But the fact that they've had a clear direction and haven't implemented everybody's personal preference has resulted in a coherent result without unnecessary cruft.

dleslie 6y ago
My non-power-user wife, father and mother all prefer MATE. It works like Windows, which they are accustomed to. Edit: I don't get why this was down-voted, but OK.
rthomas6 6y ago
> On the other hand Gnome3 is the first Linux desktop that I think is really non power user friendly. I think Plasma and Cinnamon also belong in this group.
- codemac 6y ago
  Considering Cinnamon is a fork of Gnome 3, it seems to be significant evidence of Gnome 3's influence. And Plasma was first released in 2014, 3 years after Gnome 3. Gnome 3 had a HUGE affect on desktop environments, due to Gnome 2's popularity.
  - sangnoir 6y ago
    Plasma's predecessor (KDE 3) is closer to Gnome that Plasma itself. Plasma is as close to an antithesis of Gnome as you could get (outside of tiling window managers) - everything is customizable/extensible
  - barrkel 6y ago
    Cinnamon basically makes Gnome feel more like Windows.