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My experience is very similar. I tried the first iterations of Gnome 3 and was very disappointed. At some point I tried Windows+WSL but that was a complete dis

My experience is very similar. I tried the first iterations of Gnome 3 and was very disappointed. At some point I tried Windows+WSL but that was a complete disaster. A couple of years ago I decided to try Fedora+Gnome+Wayland. It is an outstanding experience. Everything is smooth, the UI is beautiful. Now with PipeWire and Libadwaita things are getting even better. After some stagnation, the Linux desktop is gaining momentum again. There are a lot of hate comments for Gnome in this post. My advice for those reading is: Try it for yourself! Most of the haters haven't used Gnome since 2004. Just try it!

christophilus 5y ago
Fedora is a seriously underrated distro. Excellent out of the box experience and up to date packages while still being quite stable.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  sometimes a little bit too fast for my taste. Latest example was pipewire which had a super annoying bug for me of sometimes just losing my audio output. But in general it's been really good for many releases now.
- mardifoufs 5y ago
  As stupid as it sounds, I really think the name has a lot to do with it.
  - dralley 5y ago
    Linus (of Linus media group, not Torvalds) thought it was a meme distro. The name predates the meme
    - Steltek 5y ago
      Linus of LTT is an ascended videogamer. His knowledge ends just past overclocking your watercooled setup to get 2 more FPS out of the latest videogame. He's sometimes entertaining but never informative.
      - pavs 5y ago
        This. Linus knowledge with technical details is very shallow at best. Most of his videos have scripts pre-written and double checked by more knowledgeable members of his teams. His jokes are not even that funny. The amount of followers he has is insane. There are only so maany ways you can overclock/mod a build or "accidentally" drop expensive computer parts.
      - mardifoufs 5y ago
        But he is still more likely to have known about fedora than the average "casually tech literate" user , yet he still associated the name to the meme. Compare the name "fedora" to "pop_os" and it becomes clear which one sounds more "normie friendly". I disagree with you on Linus though. He is still a very reliable source when it comes to product reviews, and his channel is informative when it comes to which part to pick. He realizes that the channel is not very technical, which is why he is investing heavily into equipping and staffing his new test lab.
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    Yeah, unfortunately, it got the name Fedora a few years before that hat style became closely associated with psychosexual toxicity.
    - gtirloni 5y ago
      WHAT?
      - dreamcompiler 5y ago
        https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fedora-shaming https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fedora-shaming
    - sph 5y ago
      > psychosexual toxicity The Fedora hat (actually the Trilby hat) usually is associated with socially inept neckbeards. No need to use such strong words, even though it might describe some of them. Not all neckbeards are incels.
  - jorvi 5y ago
    GIMP has the same problem. I recommended it to someone, and the first minute or two they thought I was joking until they said ‘wow, you are right, it actually has the fetish name’. I know there was a push to have GIMP renamed GLIMP, but it went nowhere because “people shouldn’t be snowflakes lol”.
    - mardifoufs 5y ago
      Yeah names in FOSS are so self defeating sometimes. It might sound superficial to the more practical/technical people who are usually behind those projects... but it has a huge impact! It is starting to get better, and the era of naming everything after weird obscure inside joke acronyms seems to be behind us. (I get that we need to keep software fun, but you can have a lot of fun with nice names too!)
    - kbelder 5y ago
      With other devs I refer to it as GIMP, but sometimes in mixed company (management present) I'll call it "GNU IMP". Just partially expand the acronym.
    - asddubs 5y ago
      Gimp as a name still makes me laugh after all these years, whenever I actively think about it. You'd be hard pressed to find a worse name for your software. not only is it a fetish term, it's simultaneously also a slur against disabled people
      - 2143 5y ago
        English is not my first language. I didn't know what gimp meant, or that it even meant something. Never gave a thought about it before. TIL what it means. Expanded my vocabulary. Thanks buddy! I can now never not think about it whenever I hear gimp.
- hotpotamus 5y ago
  At Red Hat, they give you a laptop with RHEL on it, then the other engineers tell you to blow it away and install Fedora, so there's a lot dogfooding going on. A buddy who works there got the latest Dell XPS (for more or less personal use) and was able to get the sound card driver merged into the next kernel release by knowing who to ask. I'm more of an Ubuntu user going back for over a decade, but he's got me looking at Fedora.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  It's basically immediately downstream from Gnome, systemd, and other core desktop projects that Red Hat invests heavily in. So it gets all of the testing and integration.
silon42 5y ago
Does Gnome still force client side decorations?
- torginus 5y ago
  Well, not sure, but Wayland certainly does in a technical sense, but your window manager handles that for you. If you are asking, whether Gnome apps have dedicated titlebars, then the answer is that most don't.
  - TheCycoONE 5y ago
    There are wayland protocol extensions to support server side decorations: https://wayland.app/protocols/xdg-decoration-unstable-v1 https://wayland.app/protocols/xdg-decoration-unstable-v1 https://wayland.app/protocols/kde-server-decoration https://wayland.app/protocols/kde-server-decoration They are both unstable, but Gnome has indicated that they are not planning to implement server side decorations even if it was a stable extension: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217
    - phkahler 5y ago
      I like Gnome, but this decision always seemed technically wrong to me. From a practical point of view I don't care if GTK or the compositor handles it, but if I put on my programmer hat it seems like the compositor should be doing decorations.
      - vetinari 5y ago
        On the other side of the line, both Windows and macOS do client-side decorations too. Most developers do not realize that, but it is being done in process of each client, by the libraries that are mandatory to link to on these platforms. If is difficult to synchronize two different processes to do frame-perfect rendering. In the end, it is unnecessary complexity, when you can do in-process.
simion314 5y ago
>My advice for those reading is: Try it for yourself! Most of the haters haven't used Gnome since 2004 Until Gnome philosophy and attitude changes I will not touch it. I have vision disabilities so shit looking cool is zero advantage for me, I prefer function over form.
- seb1204 5y ago
  What are your recommendations for users with vision disability?
  - simion314 5y ago
    >What are your recommendations for users with vision disability? I use KDE , some of the features: 1 easy to setup global shortcuts , I can trigger my custom scripts just with a key press (so this is not a casual user feature) 2 the Zoom Kwin plugin, I use this all the time, you can set what kebyoard shortcut you want (when I tested Windows 7 the Zoom feature keys are hard coded and you had to use 2 hands to zoom in and out and it had lag, so KDE Zoom is better then Windows (maybe recent windows improved...)) ... no idea about GNOME Zoom , last time I was using Compiz with Gnome to get it. 3 KDE has an easy way to let you set font sizes for Qt and GTK apps, those GNOME assholes will never attempt to support Qt apps on their desktop 4 I use a deprecated KDE app called joview for text to speech, cool feature is it has a queue and I can put stuff in the queue and have it read it to me. I do not care for natural sounding voices, my TTS is setup to max speed anyway so it will sound unnatural anyway. From what I read from the accessibility mailing list the situation is not as good for blind people, there are still issues that need solving and only volunteers are working on this area , but they will respond and try to fix bugs. 3
    - wongarsu 5y ago
      > (when I tested Windows 7 the Zoom feature keys are hard coded and you had to use 2 hands to zoom in and out and it had lag, so KDE Zoom is better then Windows (maybe recent windows improved...)) Windows Magnifier keys are still hardcoded (as of Windows 10), but zooming in/out with [Win]+[+] and [Win]+[-] can be done with one hand (using right [Win]) and performance is pretty good once it's running (turning it on or changing mode has a huge delay though).
Zardoz84 5y ago
Every time that I touch a Gnome, I feel it uber confuse, and that have a wastefull usage of screen space.
jopsen 5y ago
> After some stagnation, the Linux desktop is gaining momentum again. Yeah, I feel the same way. I guess it's time for gnome 4 :)
- grey_earthling 5y ago
  GNOME 42 is being released this week.
nonameiguess 5y ago
I'm curious what the distros are for the people still seeing issues. Arch and Fedora tend to stay ahead of Ubuntu, for instance. I've been using Arch w/ GNOME for years now and switched silently (i.e. as part of a routine GNOME upgrade, not by doing anything) to Wayland as soon as it became the default for builds with an NVIDIA GPU, I think about a year ago, and have never had any issues.
aidenn0 5y ago
> There are a lot of hate comments for Gnome in this post. My advice for those reading is: Try it for yourself! Most of the haters haven't used Gnome since 2004. Just try it! GNOME 3 seems to have been where people really started to hate Gnome, and that came out in 2011. I suspect that many of the Gnome haters actually loved Gnome in 2004. I currently use KDE and I try out various other desktop environments periodically. 2019 was the last time I tried Gnome and it definitely wasn't "for me" My needs are relatively modest; I rarely game and I use screens that don't require scaling.
- rstuart4133 5y ago
  Yes, the hate coincided with "lets make Gnome look like OSX instead of Windows". I'm forced to use Wayland on my laptop, which sadly means I forced to use Gnome 3. To those saying "try it": I do, it's just not for me. It's choices are just plain weird. To explain, what a good UI looks like largely depends on display size. On a tiny display like a phone there is no space for window decorations or a menu bar going across the entire screen, let alone a 2nd application window. Which is why iOS and Android have no window decorations at all, and often no dedicated menu button either. Increase the screen real estate a bit, and a dedicated menu bar that makes all functions faster to reach becomes an affordable luxury along with a task switcher to reduce flipping between applications a single click. Hell, you might even allow the user to display multiple windows. That's what the Apple desktop has, and it made sense back in the day when they were first released. Scale it up further, and running multiple windows on the same display starts making sense. If you do flipping between application now needs zero clicks. And now you can see the app and it's help screen at same time, and you can happily drag and paste from one window to another. With so much space you can easily afford to give each app it's own menu bar, borders that permit scaling and moving of windows, and more besides. Gnome3 was introduced as a desktop window manager when we were very firmly in the era of HD displays. And for reasons I suspect I'll never don't understand, they chose the same layout the first Mac's used 30 years previously and even more infuriatingly pressed you at every change it got into maximising your window to occupy the entire display - almost as if it was dealing with a phone sized screen. As soon as mint / cinnamon / lxqt moves to Wayland, I'm gone.
  - 5y ago

christophilus 5y ago

Fedora is a seriously underrated distro. Excellent out of the box experience and up to date packages while still being quite stable.

Barrin92 5y ago
sometimes a little bit too fast for my taste. Latest example was pipewire which had a super annoying bug for me of sometimes just losing my audio output. But in general it's been really good for many releases now.
mardifoufs 5y ago
As stupid as it sounds, I really think the name has a lot to do with it.
- dralley 5y ago
  Linus (of Linus media group, not Torvalds) thought it was a meme distro. The name predates the meme
  - Steltek 5y ago
    Linus of LTT is an ascended videogamer. His knowledge ends just past overclocking your watercooled setup to get 2 more FPS out of the latest videogame. He's sometimes entertaining but never informative.
    - pavs 5y ago
      This. Linus knowledge with technical details is very shallow at best. Most of his videos have scripts pre-written and double checked by more knowledgeable members of his teams. His jokes are not even that funny. The amount of followers he has is insane. There are only so maany ways you can overclock/mod a build or "accidentally" drop expensive computer parts.
    - mardifoufs 5y ago
      But he is still more likely to have known about fedora than the average "casually tech literate" user , yet he still associated the name to the meme. Compare the name "fedora" to "pop_os" and it becomes clear which one sounds more "normie friendly". I disagree with you on Linus though. He is still a very reliable source when it comes to product reviews, and his channel is informative when it comes to which part to pick. He realizes that the channel is not very technical, which is why he is investing heavily into equipping and staffing his new test lab.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  Yeah, unfortunately, it got the name Fedora a few years before that hat style became closely associated with psychosexual toxicity.
  - gtirloni 5y ago
    WHAT?
    - dreamcompiler 5y ago
      https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fedora-shaming https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fedora-shaming
  - sph 5y ago
    > psychosexual toxicity The Fedora hat (actually the Trilby hat) usually is associated with socially inept neckbeards. No need to use such strong words, even though it might describe some of them. Not all neckbeards are incels.
- jorvi 5y ago
  GIMP has the same problem. I recommended it to someone, and the first minute or two they thought I was joking until they said ‘wow, you are right, it actually has the fetish name’. I know there was a push to have GIMP renamed GLIMP, but it went nowhere because “people shouldn’t be snowflakes lol”.
  - mardifoufs 5y ago
    Yeah names in FOSS are so self defeating sometimes. It might sound superficial to the more practical/technical people who are usually behind those projects... but it has a huge impact! It is starting to get better, and the era of naming everything after weird obscure inside joke acronyms seems to be behind us. (I get that we need to keep software fun, but you can have a lot of fun with nice names too!)
  - kbelder 5y ago
    With other devs I refer to it as GIMP, but sometimes in mixed company (management present) I'll call it "GNU IMP". Just partially expand the acronym.
  - asddubs 5y ago
    Gimp as a name still makes me laugh after all these years, whenever I actively think about it. You'd be hard pressed to find a worse name for your software. not only is it a fetish term, it's simultaneously also a slur against disabled people
    - 2143 5y ago
      English is not my first language. I didn't know what gimp meant, or that it even meant something. Never gave a thought about it before. TIL what it means. Expanded my vocabulary. Thanks buddy! I can now never not think about it whenever I hear gimp.
hotpotamus 5y ago
At Red Hat, they give you a laptop with RHEL on it, then the other engineers tell you to blow it away and install Fedora, so there's a lot dogfooding going on. A buddy who works there got the latest Dell XPS (for more or less personal use) and was able to get the sound card driver merged into the next kernel release by knowing who to ask. I'm more of an Ubuntu user going back for over a decade, but he's got me looking at Fedora.
NoGravitas 5y ago
It's basically immediately downstream from Gnome, systemd, and other core desktop projects that Red Hat invests heavily in. So it gets all of the testing and integration.

silon42 5y ago

Does Gnome still force client side decorations?

torginus 5y ago
Well, not sure, but Wayland certainly does in a technical sense, but your window manager handles that for you. If you are asking, whether Gnome apps have dedicated titlebars, then the answer is that most don't.
- TheCycoONE 5y ago
  There are wayland protocol extensions to support server side decorations: https://wayland.app/protocols/xdg-decoration-unstable-v1 https://wayland.app/protocols/xdg-decoration-unstable-v1 https://wayland.app/protocols/kde-server-decoration https://wayland.app/protocols/kde-server-decoration They are both unstable, but Gnome has indicated that they are not planning to implement server side decorations even if it was a stable extension: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217
  - phkahler 5y ago
    I like Gnome, but this decision always seemed technically wrong to me. From a practical point of view I don't care if GTK or the compositor handles it, but if I put on my programmer hat it seems like the compositor should be doing decorations.
    - vetinari 5y ago
      On the other side of the line, both Windows and macOS do client-side decorations too. Most developers do not realize that, but it is being done in process of each client, by the libraries that are mandatory to link to on these platforms. If is difficult to synchronize two different processes to do frame-perfect rendering. In the end, it is unnecessary complexity, when you can do in-process.

simion314 5y ago

>My advice for those reading is: Try it for yourself! Most of the haters haven't used Gnome since 2004 Until Gnome philosophy and attitude changes I will not touch it. I have vision disabilities so shit looking cool is zero advantage for me, I prefer function over form.

seb1204 5y ago
What are your recommendations for users with vision disability?
- simion314 5y ago
  >What are your recommendations for users with vision disability? I use KDE , some of the features: 1 easy to setup global shortcuts , I can trigger my custom scripts just with a key press (so this is not a casual user feature) 2 the Zoom Kwin plugin, I use this all the time, you can set what kebyoard shortcut you want (when I tested Windows 7 the Zoom feature keys are hard coded and you had to use 2 hands to zoom in and out and it had lag, so KDE Zoom is better then Windows (maybe recent windows improved...)) ... no idea about GNOME Zoom , last time I was using Compiz with Gnome to get it. 3 KDE has an easy way to let you set font sizes for Qt and GTK apps, those GNOME assholes will never attempt to support Qt apps on their desktop 4 I use a deprecated KDE app called joview for text to speech, cool feature is it has a queue and I can put stuff in the queue and have it read it to me. I do not care for natural sounding voices, my TTS is setup to max speed anyway so it will sound unnatural anyway. From what I read from the accessibility mailing list the situation is not as good for blind people, there are still issues that need solving and only volunteers are working on this area , but they will respond and try to fix bugs. 3
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    > (when I tested Windows 7 the Zoom feature keys are hard coded and you had to use 2 hands to zoom in and out and it had lag, so KDE Zoom is better then Windows (maybe recent windows improved...)) Windows Magnifier keys are still hardcoded (as of Windows 10), but zooming in/out with [Win]+[+] and [Win]+[-] can be done with one hand (using right [Win]) and performance is pretty good once it's running (turning it on or changing mode has a huge delay though).

Zardoz84 5y ago

Every time that I touch a Gnome, I feel it uber confuse, and that have a wastefull usage of screen space.

jopsen 5y ago

> After some stagnation, the Linux desktop is gaining momentum again. Yeah, I feel the same way. I guess it's time for gnome 4 :)

grey_earthling 5y ago
GNOME 42 is being released this week.

nonameiguess 5y ago

I'm curious what the distros are for the people still seeing issues. Arch and Fedora tend to stay ahead of Ubuntu, for instance. I've been using Arch w/ GNOME for years now and switched silently (i.e. as part of a routine GNOME upgrade, not by doing anything) to Wayland as soon as it became the default for builds with an NVIDIA GPU, I think about a year ago, and have never had any issues.

aidenn0 5y ago

> There are a lot of hate comments for Gnome in this post. My advice for those reading is: Try it for yourself! Most of the haters haven't used Gnome since 2004. Just try it! GNOME 3 seems to have been where people really started to hate Gnome, and that came out in 2011. I suspect that many of the Gnome haters actually loved Gnome in 2004. I currently use KDE and I try out various other desktop environments periodically. 2019 was the last time I tried Gnome and it definitely wasn't "for me" My needs are relatively modest; I rarely game and I use screens that don't require scaling.

rstuart4133 5y ago
Yes, the hate coincided with "lets make Gnome look like OSX instead of Windows". I'm forced to use Wayland on my laptop, which sadly means I forced to use Gnome 3. To those saying "try it": I do, it's just not for me. It's choices are just plain weird. To explain, what a good UI looks like largely depends on display size. On a tiny display like a phone there is no space for window decorations or a menu bar going across the entire screen, let alone a 2nd application window. Which is why iOS and Android have no window decorations at all, and often no dedicated menu button either. Increase the screen real estate a bit, and a dedicated menu bar that makes all functions faster to reach becomes an affordable luxury along with a task switcher to reduce flipping between applications a single click. Hell, you might even allow the user to display multiple windows. That's what the Apple desktop has, and it made sense back in the day when they were first released. Scale it up further, and running multiple windows on the same display starts making sense. If you do flipping between application now needs zero clicks. And now you can see the app and it's help screen at same time, and you can happily drag and paste from one window to another. With so much space you can easily afford to give each app it's own menu bar, borders that permit scaling and moving of windows, and more besides. Gnome3 was introduced as a desktop window manager when we were very firmly in the era of HD displays. And for reasons I suspect I'll never don't understand, they chose the same layout the first Mac's used 30 years previously and even more infuriatingly pressed you at every change it got into maximising your window to occupy the entire display - almost as if it was dealing with a phone sized screen. As soon as mint / cinnamon / lxqt moves to Wayland, I'm gone.
- 5y ago