4 ms·

As a game developer I can see how you would be tied. I'm pretty lucky in that my gaming sticks to a few specific games for multiplayer (GTA online, counter-stri

As a game developer I can see how you would be tied. I'm pretty lucky in that my gaming sticks to a few specific games for multiplayer (GTA online, counter-strike, sometimes red alert 2, nrs games) an a few specific AAA titles I want to play for campaigns. Gnome is pretty nice...I never understood why KDE was so popular with their childish naming scheme and some of the bloat that came in 4. Awesome was a gamechanger for me though, when I realized how easy it was to have a perfect gui, every little details perfectly to my specificaions.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
> I never understood why KDE was so popular with their childish naming scheme and some of the bloat that came in 4 And I could never understand why GNOME is so popular with its desire to be a tablet interface and complete disdain for the very concept of user customization.
- vetinari 4y ago
  I don't get why people think GNOME has a desire to be a tablet interface. It has not. It is just repeated ad nauseam by people, who never used it. Sure, it sucks at 14" 1376x768 displays, but 14" 1600x900 or fullhd -- you know, what you could find a poweruser using? It's perfect, without having 125% scale or whatever.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > I don't get why people think GNOME has a desire to be a tablet interface. That seems obvious. Because GNOME threw away GNOME 2, which people liked, and decided GNOME 3 would be a copy of Unity, which was supposed to be a tablet interface, and which distinguished itself only in being terrible?
    - vetinari 4y ago
      It's incorrect then, on several fronts. Unity was supposed to be netbook interface, not a tablet one. Tablets (as we know them today, not tablet pc, which sucked) were not yet a thing then. Gnome 3 decided not to be a clone of Unity, but not to be a clone of Windows 95. If you want a Windows 95 clone, you have a wide range of offers. If you do not want that, the choice was much worse. Gnome 3 improved that for those, who didn't want Windows 95 clone. Incidentally, the only people who think Gnome 3 is terrible are those, who cannot let Windows 95 concepts go. Everything that is different, is going to be terrible, simply by the virtue of being different.
    - p1necone 4y ago
      Wasn't Unity built on top of Gnome 3 because the Ubuntu maintainers didn't like stock Gnome 3? Or have I got my timeline wrong?
      - thaumasiotes 4y ago
        Well, going by wikipedia: > Unity is a graphical shell for the GNOME desktop environment originally developed by Canonical Ltd. for its Ubuntu operating system. It debuted in 2010 in the netbook edition of Ubuntu 10.10. > GNOME 3 was released in 2011.
      - wkat4242 4y ago
        No unity was built as a standalone product. Then later they stopped development and skinned gnome 3 to mimic the look.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    This is really weird. Almost no one push GNOME tablet or 2 in 1 style laptop like Surface. Red hat is a big sponsor for GNOME but they also not seems to pushing tablets. Windows 8 and successor was somewhat reasonable shift because MS has been pushed tablets.
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    Hi, long time GNOME user by force here. I find it very difficult to believe an interface with a full-screen app switcher, slide to unlock, and massive title bars and buttons compared to every other desktop UI is intended to be anything other than designed for tablets first. All of these are touch-centric concepts and have no reason to exist where keyboard and mouse is the primary input method.
    - vetinari 4y ago
      > very difficult to believe an interface with a full-screen app switcher, slide to unlock, and massive title bars and buttons compared to every other desktop UI is intended to be anything other than designed for tablets first. If you take a note, Gnome development trails hardware development, it does not lead it. There is a lot of hardware features it still cannot use and which have much higher staying potential, ergo are much lower risk to implement than a tablet interface: HDR, fractional hidpi scaling, VRR comes to mind. At the time when Gnome development was conceived, there were no tablets, no mass market for them, with the exception of tablet pcs, which were clunky and expensive and definitely not popular. What Gnome does with massive title bars and buttons is optimizing for a hardware that did exist then: higher-resolution, but not hidpi yet, displays. Most software at the time was written for 96 dpi, but these displays were slightly higher (14" full hd is 157 dpi; 14" HD+ [1600x900] is 131 dpi, 14" WSXGA [1440x900] is 121 dpi). The kind of sizing Gnome uses optimizes for this kind of hardware, without having to support "proper" fractional hidpi scaling. So yes; it was cheap, minimal way to support popular hardware (and in a way contributed to a late real hidpi support). If you use Gnome on such a display, the sizing is exactly right; unlike Windows, which was tiny at these displays and was a cause why many mainstream users preferred the low resolution 1376x768 ones. > All of these are touch-centric concepts and have no reason to exist where keyboard and mouse is the primary input method. They are not touch-centric at all; did you ever use ipad or android tablet? Floating windows are not optimal for touch use. Tiling WM with a gesture support is much more suited for this use. As a long time Gnome user, you probably learned keyboard shortcuts. What you consider missing there? Gnome is one of most keyboard oriented UIs available.
      - Karunamon 4y ago
- p1necone 4y ago
  Gnome 3 is kind of awesome as a keyboard driven system too. It's only really when you try to navigate with the mouse rather than keyboard shortcuts that it feels worse than more traditional DEs. Laptop trackpads with multi finger gestures feel right at home as well. The massive and uncustomizable window titlebars suck though.
shrimp_emoji 4y ago
I like having a desktop, not a tablet, GUI, which is why I like KDE. ;p KDE and Qt apps (since Qt is so superior to GTK in almost every way) are superior to anything you find in Windows. Compare Windows's Explorer, the file manager, to Dolphin. The next best FM is PCManFM, which switched from GTK to Qt. Nautilus (now GNOME Files), which is still GTK, is a comical toy by comparison. The GNOME desktop looks very nice and has high polish but is very feature limited. Here's a feature that might interest gamers: KDE lets you disable desktop composition, which makes your desktop (including games) much smoother, but you lose DE animations and transparency effects. Try it and then drag some windows around on a high-refresh screen, on and then off, to sense the difference. In fact, the smoothness you'll feel is how smooth the Windows 10 DE is by default (it pains me to note). This difference is also felt in games. Fullscreen games are supposed to disable composition on most DEs, but whether they actually do this is unknown and I don't think they do at all if you keep your games windowed (which I do since some Proton games, like Fallout 4, work way better in windowed mode, and it's easier to access stuff on neighboring monitors without Alt-tabbing). I don't think you have any control over composition in GNOME, and conversations with GNOME devs on this topic made it seem like they see no reason at all to not have composition in current year and that a DE without composition is broken in their eyes.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  I love KDE too, and the Qt apps. I'm not even sure if the toolkit is better but the whole philosophy of giving as many options and choices as needed is a breath of fresh air in this day where opinionated design is so popular due to people copying Apple.
  - alexklarjr 4y ago
    If you happen to have AMD gpu on Windows you not only face buggy and unstable drivers, but also their Adrenalin control panel made with Qt. It takes up to 20% of gpu just to render text and do it so slow you have to wait it to appear. Moving mouse over consuming up to full core of 4+ ghz core i7.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

> I never understood why KDE was so popular with their childish naming scheme and some of the bloat that came in 4 And I could never understand why GNOME is so popular with its desire to be a tablet interface and complete disdain for the very concept of user customization.

vetinari 4y ago
I don't get why people think GNOME has a desire to be a tablet interface. It has not. It is just repeated ad nauseam by people, who never used it. Sure, it sucks at 14" 1376x768 displays, but 14" 1600x900 or fullhd -- you know, what you could find a poweruser using? It's perfect, without having 125% scale or whatever.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > I don't get why people think GNOME has a desire to be a tablet interface. That seems obvious. Because GNOME threw away GNOME 2, which people liked, and decided GNOME 3 would be a copy of Unity, which was supposed to be a tablet interface, and which distinguished itself only in being terrible?
  - vetinari 4y ago
    It's incorrect then, on several fronts. Unity was supposed to be netbook interface, not a tablet one. Tablets (as we know them today, not tablet pc, which sucked) were not yet a thing then. Gnome 3 decided not to be a clone of Unity, but not to be a clone of Windows 95. If you want a Windows 95 clone, you have a wide range of offers. If you do not want that, the choice was much worse. Gnome 3 improved that for those, who didn't want Windows 95 clone. Incidentally, the only people who think Gnome 3 is terrible are those, who cannot let Windows 95 concepts go. Everything that is different, is going to be terrible, simply by the virtue of being different.
  - p1necone 4y ago
    Wasn't Unity built on top of Gnome 3 because the Ubuntu maintainers didn't like stock Gnome 3? Or have I got my timeline wrong?
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      Well, going by wikipedia: > Unity is a graphical shell for the GNOME desktop environment originally developed by Canonical Ltd. for its Ubuntu operating system. It debuted in 2010 in the netbook edition of Ubuntu 10.10. > GNOME 3 was released in 2011.
    - wkat4242 4y ago
      No unity was built as a standalone product. Then later they stopped development and skinned gnome 3 to mimic the look.
- fomine3 4y ago
  This is really weird. Almost no one push GNOME tablet or 2 in 1 style laptop like Surface. Red hat is a big sponsor for GNOME but they also not seems to pushing tablets. Windows 8 and successor was somewhat reasonable shift because MS has been pushed tablets.
- Karunamon 4y ago
  Hi, long time GNOME user by force here. I find it very difficult to believe an interface with a full-screen app switcher, slide to unlock, and massive title bars and buttons compared to every other desktop UI is intended to be anything other than designed for tablets first. All of these are touch-centric concepts and have no reason to exist where keyboard and mouse is the primary input method.
  - vetinari 4y ago
    > very difficult to believe an interface with a full-screen app switcher, slide to unlock, and massive title bars and buttons compared to every other desktop UI is intended to be anything other than designed for tablets first. If you take a note, Gnome development trails hardware development, it does not lead it. There is a lot of hardware features it still cannot use and which have much higher staying potential, ergo are much lower risk to implement than a tablet interface: HDR, fractional hidpi scaling, VRR comes to mind. At the time when Gnome development was conceived, there were no tablets, no mass market for them, with the exception of tablet pcs, which were clunky and expensive and definitely not popular. What Gnome does with massive title bars and buttons is optimizing for a hardware that did exist then: higher-resolution, but not hidpi yet, displays. Most software at the time was written for 96 dpi, but these displays were slightly higher (14" full hd is 157 dpi; 14" HD+ [1600x900] is 131 dpi, 14" WSXGA [1440x900] is 121 dpi). The kind of sizing Gnome uses optimizes for this kind of hardware, without having to support "proper" fractional hidpi scaling. So yes; it was cheap, minimal way to support popular hardware (and in a way contributed to a late real hidpi support). If you use Gnome on such a display, the sizing is exactly right; unlike Windows, which was tiny at these displays and was a cause why many mainstream users preferred the low resolution 1376x768 ones. > All of these are touch-centric concepts and have no reason to exist where keyboard and mouse is the primary input method. They are not touch-centric at all; did you ever use ipad or android tablet? Floating windows are not optimal for touch use. Tiling WM with a gesture support is much more suited for this use. As a long time Gnome user, you probably learned keyboard shortcuts. What you consider missing there? Gnome is one of most keyboard oriented UIs available.
    - Karunamon 4y ago
p1necone 4y ago
Gnome 3 is kind of awesome as a keyboard driven system too. It's only really when you try to navigate with the mouse rather than keyboard shortcuts that it feels worse than more traditional DEs. Laptop trackpads with multi finger gestures feel right at home as well. The massive and uncustomizable window titlebars suck though.

shrimp_emoji 4y ago

I like having a desktop, not a tablet, GUI, which is why I like KDE. ;p KDE and Qt apps (since Qt is so superior to GTK in almost every way) are superior to anything you find in Windows. Compare Windows's Explorer, the file manager, to Dolphin. The next best FM is PCManFM, which switched from GTK to Qt. Nautilus (now GNOME Files), which is still GTK, is a comical toy by comparison. The GNOME desktop looks very nice and has high polish but is very feature limited. Here's a feature that might interest gamers: KDE lets you disable desktop composition, which makes your desktop (including games) much smoother, but you lose DE animations and transparency effects. Try it and then drag some windows around on a high-refresh screen, on and then off, to sense the difference. In fact, the smoothness you'll feel is how smooth the Windows 10 DE is by default (it pains me to note). This difference is also felt in games. Fullscreen games are supposed to disable composition on most DEs, but whether they actually do this is unknown and I don't think they do at all if you keep your games windowed (which I do since some Proton games, like Fallout 4, work way better in windowed mode, and it's easier to access stuff on neighboring monitors without Alt-tabbing). I don't think you have any control over composition in GNOME, and conversations with GNOME devs on this topic made it seem like they see no reason at all to not have composition in current year and that a DE without composition is broken in their eyes.

wkat4242 4y ago
I love KDE too, and the Qt apps. I'm not even sure if the toolkit is better but the whole philosophy of giving as many options and choices as needed is a breath of fresh air in this day where opinionated design is so popular due to people copying Apple.
- alexklarjr 4y ago
  If you happen to have AMD gpu on Windows you not only face buggy and unstable drivers, but also their Adrenalin control panel made with Qt. It takes up to 20% of gpu just to render text and do it so slow you have to wait it to appear. Moving mouse over consuming up to full core of 4+ ghz core i7.