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Am I the only one who really likes gnome? Gnome 40+ are excellent, and I don't really see any flaws with daily use. I haven't seen much change between 41 and 4

Am I the only one who really likes gnome? Gnome 40+ are excellent, and I don't really see any flaws with daily use. I haven't seen much change between 41 and 42, which is fine since everything is already working great.

webkike 4y ago
I love Gnome as well. I think partly because I only use three windowed programs on Linux - emacs, Firefox, console, and okay occasionally music. I really appreciate the nice eye candy and polish - especially for the music app
atemerev 4y ago
I am enjoying it, too. In fact, I like it better than macos.
heywire 4y ago
Nope, I’m a huge fan. There are a couple annoyances (like not having minimize/maximize buttons by default), but they’re all easily remedied with gnome tweak tool or extensions. I’ll admit that I was a little worried when I started seeing screenshots of libadwaita and gnome 42, heading down the path of flat-everything, but in practice, the experience has been nice on both Arch and Fedora 36.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  For maximise you can double click the top bar or window snap it on the top. Minimise I agree should be added in though.
philliphaydon 4y ago
Out of the box I can’t get used to it. I tried fedora 36 for 2 weeks with Gnome and ended up switching to KDE Plasma. I’m constantly trying to find extensions to simplify simple tasks or make it usable and it’s frustrating. Tons of extensions are old and broken and don’t work anymore. Visually I don’t like KDE Out of the box but I don’t need to install anything.
- ropeladder 4y ago
  I tried Gnome for the last year or so and finally got fed up with how opinionated it was, and switched to KDE. But KDE was too janky -- you can customize it to perfection but if things don't work it's not perfection. So I'm back to Cinnamon.
kova12 4y ago
I like gnome, and been using it for years. It's been a bit of an adjustment at first, but after I used it for a couple weeks I got hooked up. Every next version is better in some way, and Gnome 40+ is not an exception. It might be that devs are not entirely consistent, but considering how much I paid for it, I still got quite a deal
amiga-workbench 4y ago
Its the least worst desktop environment on Linux. Its usually pretty fine out of the box on a 12" laptop, but on a desktop machine with multiple monitors, a bevy of extensions are mandatory to make it as quick & efficient as a desktop UI should be.
- fuckcensorship 4y ago
  Care to share some extensions that improve GNOME workflow?
  - amiga-workbench 4y ago
    Dash to dock to make application switching pretty much instant, hiding the dock away in the overview only ever makes sense when you're screen real-estate constrained (12" laptop) Tiling Assistant, this lets you define custom window snapping zones, its most helpful when you have a mix of landscape/portrait displays and you need more flexibility than the built-in behaviour offers. DDterm, this one isn't essential, but its convenient to have a terminal shade ready to go. On my ThinkPads I'd bind this to the ThinkVantage key to quickly get a terminal up. I used to muck around with themes and icon sets years ago, but Adwaita is pretty inoffensive these days, and dark mode is not an afterthought now.
    - digitallyfree 4y ago
      If you like DDterm you may be interested in Tilix, which is designed for Gnome. It also has a dropdown terminal shade as well as regular windowed terminals, and you can drag and drop your sessions between then. I used to use Guake as my shade but it's a lot more convenient to have a unified solution for regular and dropdown terminals.
    - curioussavage 4y ago
      This is why I don’t take criticism of gnome seriously. Why exaggerate. This is hardly a “bevy” of extensions.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
I like GNOME. The hate is practically a meme at this point. It makes me wonder what people need a desktop environment to do. Most of the criticism seems to be that it's not Windows or macOS
- goosedragons 4y ago
  I find they just remove features/make things harder or more annoying than they used to be. It's pretty obvious how to enter a specific path in Dolphin, Windows Explorer, Thunar, etc. In Nautilus you need a key combination. Gedit used to be great but they tucked 95% of features away for no reason, chopped out desktop icons for no reason, ditto title bars, minimize buttons etc. Different is not necessarily bad but it doesn't feel like anything is really better or easier to use with a bunch of features chopped out or hidden.
joelthelion 4y ago
I love it! I get it, not it's not for everyone. But the amount of bad press it gets is hard to understand.
lairv 4y ago
I don't really understand the hate either
- Nursie 4y ago
  When Gnome 3 was introduced, they not only changed everything, without any way to get it functioning anything like how people were used to, but they also made it more or less impossible for Gnome 2 and 3 to reside on the same box. Overnight a system upgrade massively broke workflows with no way to go back. Yes, it was the distros that chose to ship it like this, but the gnome folks also announced the Gnome 2 was deprecated and would receive no support, pretty much instantly. This left a sour taste with a lot of folks. It looked like deliberate sabotage of what had been a nice, stable DE. Personally, at that point I switched to Xfce and I've never looked back. Gnome is about the last DE I would investigate if I did want to switch away, purely because of the history.
- squarefoot 4y ago
  I think it could be actually directed to GTK rather than to Gnome itself. Gnome lately assumes everyone uses it on a mobile platform touch screen; fine, there are many desktop environments so I'll use a different one, but when this assumption comes from GTK now Houston we have a problem since a huge number of Linux desktop applications use it. I don't have anything against Gnome and actually sorta liked it on tablets, but the way GTK devs ignore every standard drives me absolutely insane. They made a sudden paradigm shift so that a plethora of desktop apps today compile with a GUI library that wants to be run on mobile. Sorry, that is not the way to go: want to add mobile functionality? Great! I fully support it, but please don't enforce it. What about a flag to be #defined at compile time and used only if the app code completely honors it? I hope somebody will create a patch or something to undo that behavior.
esarbe 4y ago
You're not. I really like Gnome and how it gets out of my way. Most of the time complaints about Gnome boil down to "It's not behaving the way I think it should" and that - to me - is not a valid criticism. People love to hate and Gnome is very prominent, so it is going to get hate and heat. Let's take the linked article for example. What's its main topic? "Windows management". You know what? It's 2022 and I don't want to play "Window manager" anymore. I want the UI to do that and you know what? Gnome does that for me. I got code to write and bugs to fix - I don't want to waste my time managing windows. But hater's gonna hate - what'cha gonna do?
- simion314 4y ago
  >I don't want to play "Window manager" anymore. I want the UI to do that and you know what? Gnome does that for me. I got code to write and bugs to fix - I don't want to waste my time managing windows. What do you mean? Like GNOME will remove the concept of windows and you will have only 1 window maximum? Do you use Slack or email? How do you get notifications without a System Tray? Or you use a distro that restored some of the features back since GNOME is targeting only people that use only GNOME apps and it seems only 1 window at a time. I dislike GNOME the community for their attitude, and dislike their sotfware for their shit quality and missing features, but you won't see me browsing GNOME forums or reddits to hate on them, they are getting enough hate from people that loved them just a few years back and loved when feature were removed until their favorite shit was removed and then they finally understood that the GNOME community devs and designers are not nice, just a bunch of big ego dudes pretending to be smart developers or genius designers and UX experts.
  - esarbe 4y ago
    > How do you get notifications without a System Tray? What are you even taking about? https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/Notifications https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/Notifications > I dislike GNOME the community for their attitude, and dislike their sotfware ... So... hater's gonna hate?
    - simion314 4y ago
soneca 4y ago
I like it a lot. In my personal computer, I have Fedora 36 with Gnome 42. The “Awesome Tiles” extension makes it great. I prefer it than the new Mac my employer gave me.
jsiepkes 4y ago
I think a better question might be: Is there anyone who really likes stock Gnome? So no extensions for a dock, etc. I like Gnome but without extensions I find it borderline unusable on my desktop.
- addicted 4y ago
  Maybe that’s the point of Gnome. It provides a base DE for OSes to customize and provide a complete package for end users.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  I used to use extensions but now I don’t bother and find the stock experience great. Also none of the extensions were maintained properly so they would break on new releases and when they have bugs it causes gnome to freeze.
verisimilidude 4y ago
I’m with you. Gnome feels like the least janky Linux DE to me. Contrary to the author, I see a lot of the design decisions in Gnome as careful and deliberate. They want the OS to disappear in service of whatever app you have in front of you. And I think they succeed, mostly. But that’s a sensibility that’s not going to work for every user or every task. At this point, Gnome is more opinionated than even macOS or Windows. It’s going to put off some.
modal-soul 4y ago
The only things that have significantly bugged me are the lack of a background app area by default and how they hide path editing in the file browser behind Ctrl + L.
gonzo41 4y ago
I spent so much time getting used to Unity and then ubuntu got soft and switched. Still salty. But yeah it works, I generally don't tweak anything and force myself to learn and love the defaults so upgrades have less friction.
2143 4y ago
I like gnome. 2015: Tried gnome3 on Fedora on my laptop. Hated it. I liked unity more, but I persisted with gnome anyway (because I had better things to worry about than DE), and eventually didn't mind at all. Used plenty of extensions to make life easier. (I hoped between distros for no good reason, but used gnome in all of them). 2018: PopOS came out with their own style of gnome which IMO looked better. Switched to using that on my personal machine. I also stopped using extensions; only a couple of tweaks. 2020: Had to use XFCE on a desktop machine because I needed my machine to use as little resources for itself. I grew to like it eventually. 2022: Tried Fedora 36 with gnome 42, and I like the way gnome has improved. I now use it in the stock version, with absolutely no extensions or tweaks or anything. It just works (or rather, I adapted to what it provides). Some random thoughts: * My baseline criteria for liking a DE is: it should NOT remind me of Windows (the reason for that is a story for another day). This means Cinnamon and KDE are out, though they're pretty cool nevertheless. * Gnome used to be a resource hog. This was really the only problem I had with it. After using XCFE for a while at work I had made up my mind to switch to it the next time I hop distro, but then newest gnome seems to have got resource usage under control again (or am I imagining it?). * XFCE is a good no-bullshit DE. * I don't care too much about DEs anymore.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  I adore the way xfce is set up in endeavour OS, if you're looking to try something new :) . Even the default theme is great.
- Nursie 4y ago
  Xfce is great, I can make it look the way I want by dragging a few things around and setting up a few things, then it stays out of my way. It doesn't try to tell me how to work, I love it.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
Yes you are the only one.
Gigachad 4y ago
Gnome is the only DE I actually like. The rest look like off brand windows clones.
bestouff 4y ago
You're not alone. It's my daily driver and I like it very much.

webkike 4y ago

I love Gnome as well. I think partly because I only use three windowed programs on Linux - emacs, Firefox, console, and okay occasionally music. I really appreciate the nice eye candy and polish - especially for the music app

atemerev 4y ago

I am enjoying it, too. In fact, I like it better than macos.

heywire 4y ago

Nope, I’m a huge fan. There are a couple annoyances (like not having minimize/maximize buttons by default), but they’re all easily remedied with gnome tweak tool or extensions. I’ll admit that I was a little worried when I started seeing screenshots of libadwaita and gnome 42, heading down the path of flat-everything, but in practice, the experience has been nice on both Arch and Fedora 36.

Gigachad 4y ago
For maximise you can double click the top bar or window snap it on the top. Minimise I agree should be added in though.

philliphaydon 4y ago

Out of the box I can’t get used to it. I tried fedora 36 for 2 weeks with Gnome and ended up switching to KDE Plasma. I’m constantly trying to find extensions to simplify simple tasks or make it usable and it’s frustrating. Tons of extensions are old and broken and don’t work anymore. Visually I don’t like KDE Out of the box but I don’t need to install anything.

ropeladder 4y ago
I tried Gnome for the last year or so and finally got fed up with how opinionated it was, and switched to KDE. But KDE was too janky -- you can customize it to perfection but if things don't work it's not perfection. So I'm back to Cinnamon.

kova12 4y ago

I like gnome, and been using it for years. It's been a bit of an adjustment at first, but after I used it for a couple weeks I got hooked up. Every next version is better in some way, and Gnome 40+ is not an exception. It might be that devs are not entirely consistent, but considering how much I paid for it, I still got quite a deal

amiga-workbench 4y ago

Its the least worst desktop environment on Linux. Its usually pretty fine out of the box on a 12" laptop, but on a desktop machine with multiple monitors, a bevy of extensions are mandatory to make it as quick & efficient as a desktop UI should be.

fuckcensorship 4y ago
Care to share some extensions that improve GNOME workflow?
- amiga-workbench 4y ago
  Dash to dock to make application switching pretty much instant, hiding the dock away in the overview only ever makes sense when you're screen real-estate constrained (12" laptop) Tiling Assistant, this lets you define custom window snapping zones, its most helpful when you have a mix of landscape/portrait displays and you need more flexibility than the built-in behaviour offers. DDterm, this one isn't essential, but its convenient to have a terminal shade ready to go. On my ThinkPads I'd bind this to the ThinkVantage key to quickly get a terminal up. I used to muck around with themes and icon sets years ago, but Adwaita is pretty inoffensive these days, and dark mode is not an afterthought now.
  - digitallyfree 4y ago
    If you like DDterm you may be interested in Tilix, which is designed for Gnome. It also has a dropdown terminal shade as well as regular windowed terminals, and you can drag and drop your sessions between then. I used to use Guake as my shade but it's a lot more convenient to have a unified solution for regular and dropdown terminals.
  - curioussavage 4y ago
    This is why I don’t take criticism of gnome seriously. Why exaggerate. This is hardly a “bevy” of extensions.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

I like GNOME. The hate is practically a meme at this point. It makes me wonder what people need a desktop environment to do. Most of the criticism seems to be that it's not Windows or macOS

goosedragons 4y ago
I find they just remove features/make things harder or more annoying than they used to be. It's pretty obvious how to enter a specific path in Dolphin, Windows Explorer, Thunar, etc. In Nautilus you need a key combination. Gedit used to be great but they tucked 95% of features away for no reason, chopped out desktop icons for no reason, ditto title bars, minimize buttons etc. Different is not necessarily bad but it doesn't feel like anything is really better or easier to use with a bunch of features chopped out or hidden.

joelthelion 4y ago

I love it! I get it, not it's not for everyone. But the amount of bad press it gets is hard to understand.

lairv 4y ago

I don't really understand the hate either

Nursie 4y ago
When Gnome 3 was introduced, they not only changed everything, without any way to get it functioning anything like how people were used to, but they also made it more or less impossible for Gnome 2 and 3 to reside on the same box. Overnight a system upgrade massively broke workflows with no way to go back. Yes, it was the distros that chose to ship it like this, but the gnome folks also announced the Gnome 2 was deprecated and would receive no support, pretty much instantly. This left a sour taste with a lot of folks. It looked like deliberate sabotage of what had been a nice, stable DE. Personally, at that point I switched to Xfce and I've never looked back. Gnome is about the last DE I would investigate if I did want to switch away, purely because of the history.
squarefoot 4y ago
I think it could be actually directed to GTK rather than to Gnome itself. Gnome lately assumes everyone uses it on a mobile platform touch screen; fine, there are many desktop environments so I'll use a different one, but when this assumption comes from GTK now Houston we have a problem since a huge number of Linux desktop applications use it. I don't have anything against Gnome and actually sorta liked it on tablets, but the way GTK devs ignore every standard drives me absolutely insane. They made a sudden paradigm shift so that a plethora of desktop apps today compile with a GUI library that wants to be run on mobile. Sorry, that is not the way to go: want to add mobile functionality? Great! I fully support it, but please don't enforce it. What about a flag to be #defined at compile time and used only if the app code completely honors it? I hope somebody will create a patch or something to undo that behavior.

esarbe 4y ago

You're not. I really like Gnome and how it gets out of my way. Most of the time complaints about Gnome boil down to "It's not behaving the way I think it should" and that - to me - is not a valid criticism. People love to hate and Gnome is very prominent, so it is going to get hate and heat. Let's take the linked article for example. What's its main topic? "Windows management". You know what? It's 2022 and I don't want to play "Window manager" anymore. I want the UI to do that and you know what? Gnome does that for me. I got code to write and bugs to fix - I don't want to waste my time managing windows. But hater's gonna hate - what'cha gonna do?

simion314 4y ago
>I don't want to play "Window manager" anymore. I want the UI to do that and you know what? Gnome does that for me. I got code to write and bugs to fix - I don't want to waste my time managing windows. What do you mean? Like GNOME will remove the concept of windows and you will have only 1 window maximum? Do you use Slack or email? How do you get notifications without a System Tray? Or you use a distro that restored some of the features back since GNOME is targeting only people that use only GNOME apps and it seems only 1 window at a time. I dislike GNOME the community for their attitude, and dislike their sotfware for their shit quality and missing features, but you won't see me browsing GNOME forums or reddits to hate on them, they are getting enough hate from people that loved them just a few years back and loved when feature were removed until their favorite shit was removed and then they finally understood that the GNOME community devs and designers are not nice, just a bunch of big ego dudes pretending to be smart developers or genius designers and UX experts.
- esarbe 4y ago
  > How do you get notifications without a System Tray? What are you even taking about? https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/Notifications https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/Notifications > I dislike GNOME the community for their attitude, and dislike their sotfware ... So... hater's gonna hate?
  - simion314 4y ago

soneca 4y ago

I like it a lot. In my personal computer, I have Fedora 36 with Gnome 42. The “Awesome Tiles” extension makes it great. I prefer it than the new Mac my employer gave me.

jsiepkes 4y ago

I think a better question might be: Is there anyone who really likes stock Gnome? So no extensions for a dock, etc. I like Gnome but without extensions I find it borderline unusable on my desktop.

addicted 4y ago
Maybe that’s the point of Gnome. It provides a base DE for OSes to customize and provide a complete package for end users.
Gigachad 4y ago
I used to use extensions but now I don’t bother and find the stock experience great. Also none of the extensions were maintained properly so they would break on new releases and when they have bugs it causes gnome to freeze.

verisimilidude 4y ago

I’m with you. Gnome feels like the least janky Linux DE to me. Contrary to the author, I see a lot of the design decisions in Gnome as careful and deliberate. They want the OS to disappear in service of whatever app you have in front of you. And I think they succeed, mostly. But that’s a sensibility that’s not going to work for every user or every task. At this point, Gnome is more opinionated than even macOS or Windows. It’s going to put off some.

modal-soul 4y ago

The only things that have significantly bugged me are the lack of a background app area by default and how they hide path editing in the file browser behind Ctrl + L.

gonzo41 4y ago

I spent so much time getting used to Unity and then ubuntu got soft and switched. Still salty. But yeah it works, I generally don't tweak anything and force myself to learn and love the defaults so upgrades have less friction.

2143 4y ago

I like gnome. 2015: Tried gnome3 on Fedora on my laptop. Hated it. I liked unity more, but I persisted with gnome anyway (because I had better things to worry about than DE), and eventually didn't mind at all. Used plenty of extensions to make life easier. (I hoped between distros for no good reason, but used gnome in all of them). 2018: PopOS came out with their own style of gnome which IMO looked better. Switched to using that on my personal machine. I also stopped using extensions; only a couple of tweaks. 2020: Had to use XFCE on a desktop machine because I needed my machine to use as little resources for itself. I grew to like it eventually. 2022: Tried Fedora 36 with gnome 42, and I like the way gnome has improved. I now use it in the stock version, with absolutely no extensions or tweaks or anything. It just works (or rather, I adapted to what it provides). Some random thoughts: * My baseline criteria for liking a DE is: it should NOT remind me of Windows (the reason for that is a story for another day). This means Cinnamon and KDE are out, though they're pretty cool nevertheless. * Gnome used to be a resource hog. This was really the only problem I had with it. After using XCFE for a while at work I had made up my mind to switch to it the next time I hop distro, but then newest gnome seems to have got resource usage under control again (or am I imagining it?). * XFCE is a good no-bullshit DE. * I don't care too much about DEs anymore.

stjohnswarts 4y ago
I adore the way xfce is set up in endeavour OS, if you're looking to try something new :) . Even the default theme is great.
Nursie 4y ago
Xfce is great, I can make it look the way I want by dragging a few things around and setting up a few things, then it stays out of my way. It doesn't try to tell me how to work, I love it.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

Yes you are the only one.

Gigachad 4y ago

Gnome is the only DE I actually like. The rest look like off brand windows clones.

bestouff 4y ago

You're not alone. It's my daily driver and I like it very much.