3 ms·

I get much of the praise and dislike for KDE. What I've never understood is the success of gnome. KDE isn't perfect but gnome is a textbook example of broken

I get much of the praise and dislike for KDE. What I've never understood is the success of gnome. KDE isn't perfect but gnome is a textbook example of broken workflows and poor UI design. How it became the default for many distros never made sense to me.

LarryMullins 4y ago
GNOME became "the default" in large part due to the licensing uncertainty that has historically clouded Qt and by extension KDE. After that, it's been inertia.
- lpcvoid 4y ago
  For me it was very good out of the box Wayland support which made me use GNOME for a long time.
  - LarryMullins 4y ago
    Wayland wasn't relevant until very recently, and hasn't existed even in concept for much longer than that. The Qt licensing matter I'm talking about was back in the 90s.
    - chungy 4y ago
      GNOME's been pretty damn usable with Wayland since around 2015 or so. Enough time that I can distinctly remember three Debian stable releases that run it by default.
chungy 4y ago
GNOME takes a hard-nose approach to application and technology design, making each application they ship feel like part of a greater whole. Rather than feeling like applications made by developers each with their own ideas of how to design an application (which is very much what KDE looks and feels like), GNOME pushes every one of its components into a unified look and feel and it really makes it feel like everything was made by the same people (despite the actual development story). It permeates everything from user interface design to what libraries the applications use (eg: GNOME applications use SQLite for database needs. And that's it. You don't get some using SQLite, others using PostgreSQL, others using MySQL; that's the situation KDE found/finds itself in.) On top of all that, IBM and Novell have put some serious development money behind making GNOME check all the accessibility boxes and the remote administration boxes. It's the only environment outside of Windows that can match the accessibility and administrative control Windows offers.
ludston 4y ago
I really don't get it. What's wrong with gnome? Where exactly are the sharp edges on gnome that you cut yourself on? Or what exactly is the missing feature that is important to your flow? Is it just the vibe? Every criticism of gnome I've seen is just so unspecific and vague that it seems more like group virtue signalling than anything else.
- tmtvl 4y ago
  There are a lot of sharp unfriendly edges to GNOME, like having to use GConf to customize keyboard shortcuts, not being able to change mouse scroll speed (note for people who have difficulty understanding English: scroll speed is not pointer speed. Scroll speed is how fast you can scroll with the scroll wheel, not how fast the pointer moves over the screen. These are not the same things), not being able to set date+time format to DayOfWeek YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm, applications not having friendly menu bars with a clear and obvious "Help" menu, frequent breakage of user extensions,... some of those may seem like small nitpicks, but they add up.

LarryMullins 4y ago

GNOME became "the default" in large part due to the licensing uncertainty that has historically clouded Qt and by extension KDE. After that, it's been inertia.

lpcvoid 4y ago
For me it was very good out of the box Wayland support which made me use GNOME for a long time.
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  Wayland wasn't relevant until very recently, and hasn't existed even in concept for much longer than that. The Qt licensing matter I'm talking about was back in the 90s.
  - chungy 4y ago
    GNOME's been pretty damn usable with Wayland since around 2015 or so. Enough time that I can distinctly remember three Debian stable releases that run it by default.

chungy 4y ago

GNOME takes a hard-nose approach to application and technology design, making each application they ship feel like part of a greater whole. Rather than feeling like applications made by developers each with their own ideas of how to design an application (which is very much what KDE looks and feels like), GNOME pushes every one of its components into a unified look and feel and it really makes it feel like everything was made by the same people (despite the actual development story). It permeates everything from user interface design to what libraries the applications use (eg: GNOME applications use SQLite for database needs. And that's it. You don't get some using SQLite, others using PostgreSQL, others using MySQL; that's the situation KDE found/finds itself in.) On top of all that, IBM and Novell have put some serious development money behind making GNOME check all the accessibility boxes and the remote administration boxes. It's the only environment outside of Windows that can match the accessibility and administrative control Windows offers.

ludston 4y ago

I really don't get it. What's wrong with gnome? Where exactly are the sharp edges on gnome that you cut yourself on? Or what exactly is the missing feature that is important to your flow? Is it just the vibe? Every criticism of gnome I've seen is just so unspecific and vague that it seems more like group virtue signalling than anything else.

tmtvl 4y ago
There are a lot of sharp unfriendly edges to GNOME, like having to use GConf to customize keyboard shortcuts, not being able to change mouse scroll speed (note for people who have difficulty understanding English: scroll speed is not pointer speed. Scroll speed is how fast you can scroll with the scroll wheel, not how fast the pointer moves over the screen. These are not the same things), not being able to set date+time format to DayOfWeek YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm, applications not having friendly menu bars with a clear and obvious "Help" menu, frequent breakage of user extensions,... some of those may seem like small nitpicks, but they add up.