11 ms·

Lobotomizing Gnome (2018)

113 points by signa11 3y ago

superkuh 3y ago
>Configuration With dconf If you do this just know that the Gtk devs consider most gsettings to be private and any end user changes made with dconf might just disappear one day and never come back. Or they might be left in but just not respected by gtk so that setting them does nothing. As a GNOME user on the latest Gtk4 you're not supposed to be customizing your desktop like in the article. It is not supported even if you can (for now) technically do it. Support issues related to removal/ignoring of gsettings will be told this and closed.
- hellodanylo 3y ago
  I would rephrase this concern as "dconf is not a stable API" rather than "you are not supposed to do this". It's my computer, I am supposed to do whatever I want, but using unstable API comes with costs that should be understood.
  - lmm 3y ago
    > It's my computer, I am supposed to do whatever I want I don't think the Gnome devs share that view.
    - endorphine 3y ago
      Does it matter though?
      - lmm 3y ago
        Unless you're able to maintain a fork of the whole system by yourself, yes it does.
      - pizza234 3y ago
        In the case of GNOME, absolutely. GNOME devs are infamous for actively fighting users' desire for customization. They have a long history; here's[¹] an example from a couple of years ago (not sure how the situation described evolved); this [²] is an article that describes the wider point of view. [¹] https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming-wider-community-not-happy https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming... [²] https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti...
    - bzzzt 3y ago
      I suppose Gnome is aimed at the Red Hat enterprise customer base. Those computers are no private systems, they are company hardware. What matters for company hardware is standardization: easy to roll out, easy to train users, which means a standardized, simple GUI. Building @hellodanylo 's dream workflow isn't the mission and doesn't scale anyway. If you want a custom desktop workflow exactly to your specification build it yourself or pay someone to build it. Expecting people with different opinions to do it for you for free will certainly be a disappointment.
      - thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
        >> Gnome is aimed at the Red Hat enterprise customer base. Those computers are no private systems, they are company hardware. What matters for company hardware is standardization: easy to roll out, easy to train users, which means a standardized, simple GUI. This is largely the case: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/gnome-desktop-project https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/gnome-desktop... As stated in https://lwn.net/Articles/600506/ https://lwn.net/Articles/600506/: "When a project is controlled by a single company, that company's needs will almost certainly win out over anything that the wider community may want to do."
        bzzzt 3y ago
        On the other hand, when a project tries to please everybody it will undoubtedly regress into a mess of options, toggles, extra buttons, have an atrocious UX and only be usable for the 'in crowd'. The few OSS tools I know to not have a terrible UX are tools built by a single author or a small team with a coherent vision. It's definitely a place where the bazaar model of software development doesn't seem to work as wonderful as with OS kernels or development tools.
        thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
        I agree that there is a balance between customization and "cleanness" in design and implementation. However, I think the GNOME 3 and 4 designers went too far and alienated many users: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-finds-gnome-3-4-to-be-a-total-user-experience-design-failure/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-finds-gnome-3-4... https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-42-the-nonsense-continues-7d96c3287f7 https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-42-the-nonsense-continues-... https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/wte7tr/gnomes_design_is_antipattern/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/wte7tr/gnomes_design... https://linuxreviews.org/GNOME_Developers_have_Made_Their_Moves_against_Themes https://linuxreviews.org/GNOME_Developers_have_Made_Their_Mo... https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming-wider-community-not-happy/ https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming... When a designer's "coherent vision" eclipses the needs of the software's users then users get frustrated and either fork the project or go to another project. MATE (https://mate-desktop.org/ https://mate-desktop.org/), Cinnamon (https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon), and Unity (https://unityd.org/ https://unityd.org/) exist largely because of how far the GNOME 3 designers went and how they were not willing to compromise their "coherent vision": https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=121162 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=121162 https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1910 https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1910 https://web.archive.org/web/20101129161856/http://www.pcworld.com/article/208708/canonical_ubuntu_splits_from_gnome_over_design_issues.html https://web.archive.org/web/20101129161856/http://www.pcworl...
    - Vinnl 3y ago
      They do, as long as you do it without expecting them to bend over backwards to accommodate your specific snowflake setup.
      - superkuh 3y ago
        Ah yes... my snowflake setup where I expect to be able to paste file paths into Gtk file->open dialogs without it erroring out.
        Vinnl 3y ago
        Bugs will always happen, of course, but let's not pretend that those are conscious decisions.
        superkuh 3y ago
        Generally true. But this one 100% is, and it's been a concious decision since it was introduced by the removal of the gsetting org.gtk.Settings.FileChooser location-mode. This was done intentionally by Gtk dev mclassen and he has been downright hostile about not fixing it since then. Gtk/GNOME devs do not think being able to type/paste file paths in File->Open dialogs (gtkfilechooserwidget.c) should be allowed. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/938 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/938 They didn't even acknowledge or leave the bug reports it caused until this month: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872 despite it being introduced in 2014 and me reporting it 2 times every year since then. And there's about 0% chance of this bug being fixed despite them finally leaving the bug report there instead of closing it.
        Vinnl 3y ago
        Hmm, maybe I'm misunderstanding, but AFAICS I am able to paste file paths into those dialogs? Steps to reproduce: copy a file path, Ctrl+O, Ctrl+L, Ctrl+V. So I guess I'm misunderstanding what behaviour you're referring to?
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Yeah, that attitude is one of the things that leads me to avoid Gnome.
- its-summertime 3y ago
  Additionally noting that some of the dconf keys in the article have already been depreciated in the meantime. e.g. `/org/gnome/desktop/interface/gtk-theme` is to be replaced with `/org/gnome/desktop/interface/color-scheme` (though even worse, some apps specifically look for the former, so you need to set the latter through the settings app, then the former through dconf anyways, for full dark theme through all apps!)
  - userbinator 3y ago
    e.g. `/org/gnome/desktop/interface/gtk-theme` is to be replaced with `/org/gnome/desktop/interface/color-scheme` That's an ominous sign of things to come --- no more themes, all you get is (some) colours to choose from. It already happened to Windows.
    - realusername 3y ago
      Theming is not a thing anymore since Gnome 3 anyways. I really regret the amount of themes you had available for Gnome in the past...
      - FeepingCreature 3y ago
        So do the developers, it seems. (I think you mean "miss"?)
        realusername 3y ago
        Yes indeed, I always had my favorite theme from gnome-look.org
      - vintagedave 3y ago
        For real - no more theming Gnome? I haven't used it for a few years, but custom themes and styles is one of the key features for a customisable desktop environment and was half the fun from using something like Gnome or KDE now that Windows makes it hard and macOS makes it impossible. Googling shows that as recently as 2022 there are articles on using themes. Is this a very recent change?
jitl 3y ago
> I think that GNOME Shell is the most attractive and useful window manager for any operating system out there. > I set /org/gnome/shell/disable-user-extensions to false, which completely disables the user extensions feature of GNOME. User extensions are a mechanism that allow users to write GNOME extensions in Javascript, similar to how Chrome and Firefox extensions work. […] I'm not sure that disabling user extensions actually disables the Javascript engine completely, but it definitely minimizes it to the least possible scope. Gnome Shell itself is largely written in JavaScript. From https://gjs.guide/extensions/overview/architecture.html#shell https://gjs.guide/extensions/overview/architecture.html#shel... > GNOME Shell's JavaScript codebase uses these libraries to create the user interface you interact with every day, organized into modules. A number of these modules are re-used throughout GNOME Shell and are commonly used in extensions I wrote a tiling window manager extension for myself in 2010. At least back then it was a very weird JavaScript environment and I didn’t enjoy programming for it. It was best to write all the code for browser and use dependency injection with small Gnome Shell specific parts because debugging in the browser was so much easier.
- emmelaich 3y ago
  There's a typo/thinko there too? Should be true not false.
- physicles 3y ago
  Good observation. Turning off extensions is where OP lost me. In the last year, the single biggest quality of life improvement for me has been discovering the Argos[0] extension, which basically lets you put whatever text/menus you want in the top bar by writing scripts that print to stdout. To save space, I hid the dock (I use [1] as a replacement alt-tab), so the top bar is the only piece of screen that isn't OS chrome. On my top bar right now I have the time in four time zones (including the ever-important UTC to save a mental calculation when logging at logs), the name of the current Wifi access point, and some VPN details gleaned using a combination of ip r, ping, nc, and curl. Another extension shows free RAM. I look at them dozens of times a day. [0] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1176/argos/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1176/argos/ [1] https://gist.github.com/cbd32/cbec9a32b32bd9e93b0d2696c71b5f03 https://gist.github.com/cbd32/cbec9a32b32bd9e93b0d2696c71b5f...
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
While I appreciate the goal, I'm surprised that it ends up being less work to start with GNOME and rip that much out rather than starting with a lighter option. I get that the listed goals/features are perhaps well covered by GNOME, but I can't imagine it's really the only - or easiest - way to get there.
doodlesdev 3y ago
(2018)
thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
"GNOME is huge and kind of bloated, and it's hard to disable various unwanted components. GNOME Shell is amazing, but a lot of the other components of GNOME are simply unwanted. This is what turns a lot of power users away from GNOME, which I think is a shame given all of the other amazing things about GNOME." GNOME needs a lobotomy and an enema. Lobotomy: there is too much opinionated stuff as default and trying to change it is WAY more work than it should be. The configuration steps shown in the article illustrate this pretty well. Enema: the bloat needs to be removed. Let me choose my own apps rather than trying to be a kitchen sink with its own default apps: * cheese * evolution * evolution-ews * evolution-help * gfbgraph * gnome-boxes * gnome-calendar * gnome-contacts * gnome-dictionary * gnome-documents * gnome-getting-started-docs * gnome-initial-setup * gnome-maps * gnome-online-miners * gnome-photos * gnome-software * gnome-user-docs * gnome-user-share * gnome-video-effects * gnome-weather * simple-scan * totem * tracker-miners * yelp Why not ask me what I want / need instead of installing it all? Windows lets me disable optional components, why not GNOME?
- its-summertime 3y ago
  The article is about removing such components from GNOME. Windows doesn't ask before installing its components. Both break subtly when you go around removing/disabling things that arn't meant to be removed/disabled
- midoridensha 3y ago
  >Let me choose my own apps rather than trying to be a kitchen sink with its own default apps: >Windows lets me disable optional components, why not GNOME? Because that isn't in-line with the Gnome devs' vision, or how they want you to use Gnome. If you don't agree with their vision, then why are you using their software? If you want a desktop environment that lets you configure it the way you want and disable things you don't want, Gnome simply isn't the DE for you. I really don't understand why this is so difficult a concept for so many Linux users. It's been like this for well over 10 years now (Gnome3 was released in 2011), it's not something new. The Gnome devs have infamously been hostile to users who want to do things differently from their vision.
londons_explore 3y ago
I'd be happy if, after a long work day, it wasn't "gnome-shell" that was top of my CPU time list... Seriously - today so far it has used 1 hour 15 mins of CPU time! In that time, we could have computed pi to billions of digits, yet somehow all gnome-shell has to show for it is that it managed to keep a clock updated and occasionally switch apps.
- pengaru 3y ago
  You do realize it's the thing compositing your desktop, right? it's not 1995
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    For which, no CPU time is needed - all it's doing is pointing the GPU towards the right buffers to render in the right places.
    - pengaru 3y ago
      It's a long-running process that's waking up constantly for IPC+compositing duties alone. If you're still on X I'd expect more of the compositing cost reflected in the Xorg process than gnome-shell. But on a "modern" Wayland-based gnome session, the gnome-shell process encompasses what used to occur in Xorg. So all that time is now attributed to gnome-shell. It's not like you just arrange the GPU with some buffers and never wake up to send it commands on what to draw when. The compositor is a rather busy process, esp. if you have many clients/windows active. This stuff was easier to reason about in the Xorg days with WM "policy" running in a clearly separate process from the X "mechanism" side. Wayland tends to conflate everything, unless the compositor developers choose to use separate well-labeled threads for things like input/compositing/policy... I don't personally use gnome so it's inconvenient for me to check despite mild curiosity. It may be interesting to look at a threaded view of `top` if you're on Wayland, and see if gnome-shell has clearly separated threads. Interestingly, modern Xorg uses separate threads now, from this machine: 524 anon 20 0 637516 92996 53592 S 5.3 0.6 82:54.35 Xorg 525 anon 39 19 637516 92996 53592 S 0.0 0.6 0:00.00 Xorg:disk$0 526 anon 20 0 637516 92996 53592 S 1.0 0.6 36:32.18 Xorg:gdrv0 527 anon 39 19 637516 92996 53592 S 0.0 0.6 0:00.00 Xorg:disk$0 529 anon 20 0 637516 92996 53592 S 1.0 0.6 1:10.52 InputThread So gdrv0 alone has consumed 36.5 hours during my ~1.5 day uptime. If this were a Wayland situation, that time would be reflected in my compositor process instead. ~83 hours for the main Xorg thread, which I presume is largely IPC but X also does heaps of crap from its huge protocol on-CPU so I think it's best to just ignore that.
its-summertime 3y ago
> I version control my Firefox preferences using Firefox's obscure user.js feature Noting that enterprise policy replaces a lot of this, and works easier with flatpak based firefox et al. It also allows for auto-installing extensions.
bstar77 3y ago
For someone that only runs 3 programs (terminal, emacs and firefox) gnome is a terrible choice. In fact, a desktop environment is a terrible choice. > I want good text rendering and windows and buttons with rounded corners You don't need gnome or KDE for this. I run a primarily terminal oriented desktop, but my GTK apps still look great. I still run picom and could easily do rounded corners if I wanted. My point is that there are much better options than gnome if you want a beautiful minimal setup especially if you get into tilers.
- nvy 3y ago
  I'd be interested in reading a writeup on this subject; I've always enjoyed running linux without a DE but the awful text rendering makes it a sub-par experience. I have one of the lcdfans modded thinkpads running Fedora and awesomewm in lieu of gnome shell. But I still have most of gnome involved because something in there somewhere makes things look "nice" and if you just do a barebones install of X/wayland plus your WM of choice, things tend to look awful, and frankly I haven't got time nor energy to figure out what the magic sauce is.
  - bstar77 3y ago
    This is my DE free terminal-centric setup: https://imgur.com/a/8mAoT2u https://imgur.com/a/8mAoT2u It took me about 3 weeks to figure everything out. You ideally need to use a distro where you can build from scratch (Arch/NixOS/Void/etc) if you want to truly be minimal. If you are OK using NixOS I can give you my configuration.nix.
  - kelvinjps 3y ago
    I have the same problem
  - creshal 3y ago
    It used to be that you have to fiddle with a lot of fontconfig settings to get decent rendering results, but they've been shipping mostly sane defaults for quite a while now. Hinting for some reason still has to be enabled manually, but very lightweight tools like `lxappearance` make that a single click, if you don't want to touch XML by hand. For the past 15 years, my desktop has been • openbox (also handles keyboard shortcuts etc., can be configured visually with obconf, which can also handle font settings iirc) • picom (for compositing; before, the tools it was forked from) • dunst (for notifications) • arandr (for configuring external displays) • flameshot (for screenshotting) • Random LXDE bits as necessary (lxpanel at the absolute minimum, lxsession when I need to deal with polkit things, lxappearance sometimes) It doesn't do much in terms of system configuration etc., but I didn't find I need much anyway these days. Printers etc. I no longer use, and most system settings can be configured with systemd's localectl/timedatectl once and left alone.
canistel 3y ago
XFCE twitches its fingers and smirks. LXDE, which has always had trouble with sleep, muffles a yawn...
- kstenerud 3y ago
  And I'd use them in a heartbeat if it weren't for the 1px wide window borders with hard grab edges that make window manipulation a hassle. Fortunately, Mate doesn't have this problem.
  - npteljes 3y ago
    I hated this too, until I discovered Start+Left Right click drag Moves / Resizes windows. Since then, the Windows way of hunting the edge is the more annoying one.
    - lproven 3y ago
      > Start+Left Right click drag I cannot parse this. What do you mean?
      - ragnese 3y ago
        You hold the Windows/Super key on your keyboard while clicking and dragging on the window with either the left or right mouse button. If you hold Super and left-click-drag, it moves the window around the screen as though you are clicking and dragging from the title bar (like most people would normally move a window around). If you hold Super and right-click-drag, it will resize the window depending on what quadrant of the window you initially clicked and which direction you're dragging. Similar to if you clicked and dragged the corresponding corner of the window. It's extremely nice to not have to aim for the precise edge of a window.
        kstenerud 3y ago
        > It's extremely nice to not have to aim for the precise edge of a window. This is why all modern window managers don't require you to hit the precise edge, but rather have a "grace" zone around the edge that also activates moving/resizing. It's nice to be able to do these kinds of things one-handed.
bobajeff 3y ago
For me I needed like 5 extensions to mold gnome into an acceptable desktop. (I forget which ones) Then during one install I was having trouble getting one of the work arounds to work. (I believe it was a distro bug) Which lead me to give up and try KDE again. (Hadn't used in years) I was kicking myself for not doing that sooner everything works as it's supposed to. I do miss gnome's Expose-like windows overview thing though. KDE has one too but it's not as good. But it's not as important as having my desktop behave like a desktop without some third party hacks (which will probably break at some point or stop being maintained) tricking it into behaving normally.
- n3storm 3y ago
  Give a chance to XFCE 4.18 please.
  - kelvinjps 3y ago
    I find it that has way to many buttons
  - bobajeff 3y ago
    That's actually the desktop I was using the longest before I realized I wanted a more feature complete desktop. For example I prefer a file manager with integrated file search over Thunar + Catfish. Also xfce has a bug where it will change the resolution everytime the screen goes to sleep. That being said I might've been happy with LXDE + xfce4-panel + Dolphin but it seemed safer to me to use one desktop environment rather than mix and match parts from the different ones.
    - n3storm 3y ago
      Thunar search now lets you filter directory and offers a button to search with Catfish , click and it then opens Catfish with search results of the term you where looking for (no need to reenter search term)
      - bobajeff 3y ago
nathants 3y ago
might as well just switch to dwm, dmenu, and st?
- bolangi 3y ago
  i3 floats my boat, but similar thinking. For multiple monitors, there's xrandr, solve it once and you're good forever. Why hire a secretary if the only thing you need to learn is to type?
  - nathants 3y ago
    yes. solve it once, then solve other things.
  - jitl 3y ago
    I’d rather hire a secretary so I can spend my copious time doing things other than figuring out a daemon so I can plug in a monitor
everybodyknows 3y ago
The article does not mention the app gsettings (in package libglib2.0-bin, at least on Ubuntu 20.04). Perhaps it came along after the authorship of this 2018 article. Anyway, gsettings provides a convenient CLI to a fair amount of customization -- I have myself a script of over 20 invocations to set various look-and-feel tweaks. To get yourself started, have a look at the output of gsettings --list-recursively.
bartvk 3y ago
The article is from 2018, but to find and script settings, this person almost exactly does what I do with macOS. I usually do: % defaults read > 1 then tweak settings and then do % defaults read > 2 % diff 1 2 I look at the diff and add those to a shell script, which I run when I do a new macOS installation.
dang 3y ago
Discussed at the time: Lobotomizing Gnome - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17185569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17185569 - May 2018 (221 comments)
beebeepka 3y ago
These days I find Gnome (with Dash to Dock) to be the best DE for me. Better than Windows, better than Mac, better than KDE. It feels like every other DE, including Windows and the plethora of Gnome 2 clones literally hates the very idea vertical task bars. It's like these people live in a parallel universe where most monitors aren't 16:9 or 16:10, thus wasting vertical space. Thanks but no thanks. Windows 95 supported that out of the gate but windows 11 doesn't. What a crazy world. I used to prefer XFCE for the longest time but it's just too old school and I get tired of configuring it on my laptops.
- okasaki 3y ago
  You can put XFCE and KDE panels on the left or right, resulting in a vertical task bar. This is a 10 second operation...
  - beebeepka 3y ago
    I know I can but the vertical bars are not first class citizens was my point
    - FeepingCreature 3y ago
      What's missing in KDE? Far as I can tell, it works exactly as it did in Windows 95. Unlock taskbar, grab taskbar, move to side of the screen.
      - beebeepka 3y ago
        Did I not just confirm that KDE and XFCE have vertical taskbars? Of course they do. XFCE is just too old school for me. I have launch icons and launched items. Clumsy and it wasting space. Easy to screw things up while managing launchers UI items/placeholders. These problems are not vertical bar specific. KDE? I only speak for myself here - it is not missing anything but simplicity. Too much stuff to configure and I get lost, then frustrated. I think I liked it a bit more in the early 2000s.
nsonha 3y ago
I like Gnome's default look (rounded cornesrs and sensible font size comparing to, say, KDE's) but I hate that it copied the stupid MacOS layout with the menubar and dock, so wasteful. DEs in the 90s, including Gnome itself were fine with the taskbar. Idk why we suddenly need 2 bars now.
- lproven 3y ago
  > MacOS layout with the menubar and dock It doesn't have a menu bar. If GNOME used the top panel for menus, and I could control them with the keyboard and turn off hamburger menus everywhere, I'd dislike it a lot less. Do you mean the top panel? No menus there. Not even status icons, if the GNOME devs get their way. It's not Mac-like. Unity was Mac-like. GNOME is more like iOS on your desktop.
hyperman1 3y ago
I always wonder why Gnome is the default in most distros. It has no API stability guarantee, so long term software investment is not possible. It actively fights against the choices of its end users. It is severely dumbed down, locking its end users in less efficient workflows. Corporate backing was an upside for providing accessibility, but a recent post here on HN stated things were quickly detoriating. So it's not the right choice for developers, power users, basic users, users with acccessibility needs. But what's left? At this point, gnome seems optimized for being a demo model. You may look at it and marvel at its glorious platonic art, but do not dare to touch it with your grubby fingers or get any work done. This is a shame, really. The Windows 11 experience is at an all-time low right now, and leaves end users actively looking for alternatives. A Debian+KDE is great for non-technical end users, who mostly are used to and want win95 on steroids.
- petepete 3y ago
  > So it's not the right choice for developers, power users, basic users, users with acccessibility needs. But what's left? Oh come on, most people use it just fine without needing to complain about every last design choice. There are alternatives but for most people, most of the time, GNOME is more than enough. I'm a developer, I use it all day on desktop and laptop without the need for any extra config. I use one extension to hide the panel to avoid any risk of burn in on my oled monitor.
  - xeyownt 3y ago
    Exactly my experience too for 10-ish years. I will never want more than what Gnome provides and when I want less, I usually go for xfce.
    - happymellon 3y ago
      On my personal devices I have to install the system tray extension, because Steam, but apart from that Gnome works far better than anything else including OSX for me.
dvh 3y ago
I'm using jwm as lobotomized gnome 2x
arun-mani-j 3y ago
I love GNOME and Debian. But Debian's live install of GNOME contains a lot of unnecessary packages like games, dictionaries, Thai terminal etc. And it is difficult to hunt the package name of an app too. Annoyed by all this, this is my way of installing OS: 1. Install Debian Netinstall with only standard packages. 2. sudo apt install gnome-core --not install-recommends 3. You get a very minimal GNOME installation now. There are minor inconveniences by this method too like Evolution services being installed. But it is way better than a lot of bloats present in Debian live.
wooque 3y ago
I did the same when I ran GNOME, but I realized I'm doing too much work to mold it to my taste and I still end up unsatisfied. So I switched to tilling window manager and never looked back. I can customize and setup up things just like I want. Tilling window management is to be honest secondary function for me. Customization is number one.
egberts1 3y ago
My problem is that both KDE and Gnome do not stabilize their API like X11 did. Although Gnome API appears a bit less changing than KDE. Packaging-wise, both KDE and Gnome suffered equally (despite Gnome-dev's huge resistance to do many-package approach). I favor the KDE approach to minimize presence of untested bloatware. Right now, I have been fighting vulnerability abuse against dbus usage of both KDE and Gnome (by red team) so I've settled on Xfce for now. (My friends have been suggesting Cinnamon/Mint so my early eval seems promising after having applied basic Whonix/CISecurity lockdown).
stuaxo 3y ago
Everyone has a different 80%, I like the automation, I would use it to enable my favourite extensions and configure them, I just feel more comfortable with wobbly windows and a desktop cube (and many others l).
pshirshov 3y ago
Linux desktop experience is degrading quickly. For me Gnome is unusable because it doesn't natively support fractional scaling under X (and crashes frequently wïh Ubuntu patches). Also it can't render XWayland fonts without heavy blur. I'm wondering how is this guy working with 3 x 4k displays in Gnome. KDE, despite all its problems, is the only environment which, at least, supports modern displays. > my personal feeling is the less Javascript in my life the better Don't tell him that the whole Shell is JS.
cultofmetatron 3y ago
I thought I would try learning gtk a few days ago. went to the website and couldn't even get the hello world example to compile on my system (PopOS). I tried to trouble shoot but as a fairly newbie c programmer, it was futile. these kinds of things matter if you want to ring in new users.
- no_time 3y ago
  They do have an onboarding workflow inteded for newbies: The Gnome Builder flatpak. Even as a "Gnome hater", I'd say it works pretty well for what it sets out to accomplish.
  - cultofmetatron 3y ago
    I'll check it out. would have been nice if they mentioned that in the onboarding tutorial

113 points by signa11 3y ago

>Configuration With dconf If you do this just know that the Gtk devs consider most gsettings to be private and any end user changes made with dconf might just disappear one day and never come back. Or they might be left in but just not respected by gtk so that setting them does nothing. As a GNOME user on the latest Gtk4 you're not supposed to be customizing your desktop like in the article. It is not supported even if you can (for now) technically do it. Support issues related to removal/ignoring of gsettings will be told this and closed.

hellodanylo 3y ago
I would rephrase this concern as "dconf is not a stable API" rather than "you are not supposed to do this". It's my computer, I am supposed to do whatever I want, but using unstable API comes with costs that should be understood.
- lmm 3y ago
  > It's my computer, I am supposed to do whatever I want I don't think the Gnome devs share that view.
  - endorphine 3y ago
    Does it matter though?
    - lmm 3y ago
      Unless you're able to maintain a fork of the whole system by yourself, yes it does.
    - pizza234 3y ago
      In the case of GNOME, absolutely. GNOME devs are infamous for actively fighting users' desire for customization. They have a long history; here's[¹] an example from a couple of years ago (not sure how the situation described evolved); this [²] is an article that describes the wider point of view. [¹] https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming-wider-community-not-happy https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming... [²] https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti...
  - bzzzt 3y ago
    I suppose Gnome is aimed at the Red Hat enterprise customer base. Those computers are no private systems, they are company hardware. What matters for company hardware is standardization: easy to roll out, easy to train users, which means a standardized, simple GUI. Building @hellodanylo 's dream workflow isn't the mission and doesn't scale anyway. If you want a custom desktop workflow exactly to your specification build it yourself or pay someone to build it. Expecting people with different opinions to do it for you for free will certainly be a disappointment.
    - thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
      >> Gnome is aimed at the Red Hat enterprise customer base. Those computers are no private systems, they are company hardware. What matters for company hardware is standardization: easy to roll out, easy to train users, which means a standardized, simple GUI. This is largely the case: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/gnome-desktop-project https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/gnome-desktop... As stated in https://lwn.net/Articles/600506/ https://lwn.net/Articles/600506/: "When a project is controlled by a single company, that company's needs will almost certainly win out over anything that the wider community may want to do."
      - bzzzt 3y ago
        On the other hand, when a project tries to please everybody it will undoubtedly regress into a mess of options, toggles, extra buttons, have an atrocious UX and only be usable for the 'in crowd'. The few OSS tools I know to not have a terrible UX are tools built by a single author or a small team with a coherent vision. It's definitely a place where the bazaar model of software development doesn't seem to work as wonderful as with OS kernels or development tools.
        thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
        I agree that there is a balance between customization and "cleanness" in design and implementation. However, I think the GNOME 3 and 4 designers went too far and alienated many users: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-finds-gnome-3-4-to-be-a-total-user-experience-design-failure/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-finds-gnome-3-4... https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-42-the-nonsense-continues-7d96c3287f7 https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-42-the-nonsense-continues-... https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/wte7tr/gnomes_design_is_antipattern/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/wte7tr/gnomes_design... https://linuxreviews.org/GNOME_Developers_have_Made_Their_Moves_against_Themes https://linuxreviews.org/GNOME_Developers_have_Made_Their_Mo... https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming-wider-community-not-happy/ https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming... When a designer's "coherent vision" eclipses the needs of the software's users then users get frustrated and either fork the project or go to another project. MATE (https://mate-desktop.org/ https://mate-desktop.org/), Cinnamon (https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon), and Unity (https://unityd.org/ https://unityd.org/) exist largely because of how far the GNOME 3 designers went and how they were not willing to compromise their "coherent vision": https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=121162 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=121162 https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1910 https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1910 https://web.archive.org/web/20101129161856/http://www.pcworld.com/article/208708/canonical_ubuntu_splits_from_gnome_over_design_issues.html https://web.archive.org/web/20101129161856/http://www.pcworl...
  - Vinnl 3y ago
    They do, as long as you do it without expecting them to bend over backwards to accommodate your specific snowflake setup.
    - superkuh 3y ago
      Ah yes... my snowflake setup where I expect to be able to paste file paths into Gtk file->open dialogs without it erroring out.
      - Vinnl 3y ago
        Bugs will always happen, of course, but let's not pretend that those are conscious decisions.
        superkuh 3y ago
        Generally true. But this one 100% is, and it's been a concious decision since it was introduced by the removal of the gsetting org.gtk.Settings.FileChooser location-mode. This was done intentionally by Gtk dev mclassen and he has been downright hostile about not fixing it since then. Gtk/GNOME devs do not think being able to type/paste file paths in File->Open dialogs (gtkfilechooserwidget.c) should be allowed. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/938 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/938 They didn't even acknowledge or leave the bug reports it caused until this month: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872 despite it being introduced in 2014 and me reporting it 2 times every year since then. And there's about 0% chance of this bug being fixed despite them finally leaving the bug report there instead of closing it.
        Vinnl 3y ago
        Hmm, maybe I'm misunderstanding, but AFAICS I am able to paste file paths into those dialogs? Steps to reproduce: copy a file path, Ctrl+O, Ctrl+L, Ctrl+V. So I guess I'm misunderstanding what behaviour you're referring to?
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Yeah, that attitude is one of the things that leads me to avoid Gnome.
its-summertime 3y ago
Additionally noting that some of the dconf keys in the article have already been depreciated in the meantime. e.g. `/org/gnome/desktop/interface/gtk-theme` is to be replaced with `/org/gnome/desktop/interface/color-scheme` (though even worse, some apps specifically look for the former, so you need to set the latter through the settings app, then the former through dconf anyways, for full dark theme through all apps!)
- userbinator 3y ago
  e.g. `/org/gnome/desktop/interface/gtk-theme` is to be replaced with `/org/gnome/desktop/interface/color-scheme` That's an ominous sign of things to come --- no more themes, all you get is (some) colours to choose from. It already happened to Windows.
  - realusername 3y ago
    Theming is not a thing anymore since Gnome 3 anyways. I really regret the amount of themes you had available for Gnome in the past...
    - FeepingCreature 3y ago
      So do the developers, it seems. (I think you mean "miss"?)
      - realusername 3y ago
        Yes indeed, I always had my favorite theme from gnome-look.org
    - vintagedave 3y ago
      For real - no more theming Gnome? I haven't used it for a few years, but custom themes and styles is one of the key features for a customisable desktop environment and was half the fun from using something like Gnome or KDE now that Windows makes it hard and macOS makes it impossible. Googling shows that as recently as 2022 there are articles on using themes. Is this a very recent change?

jitl 3y ago

> I think that GNOME Shell is the most attractive and useful window manager for any operating system out there. > I set /org/gnome/shell/disable-user-extensions to false, which completely disables the user extensions feature of GNOME. User extensions are a mechanism that allow users to write GNOME extensions in Javascript, similar to how Chrome and Firefox extensions work. […] I'm not sure that disabling user extensions actually disables the Javascript engine completely, but it definitely minimizes it to the least possible scope. Gnome Shell itself is largely written in JavaScript. From https://gjs.guide/extensions/overview/architecture.html#shell https://gjs.guide/extensions/overview/architecture.html#shel... > GNOME Shell's JavaScript codebase uses these libraries to create the user interface you interact with every day, organized into modules. A number of these modules are re-used throughout GNOME Shell and are commonly used in extensions I wrote a tiling window manager extension for myself in 2010. At least back then it was a very weird JavaScript environment and I didn’t enjoy programming for it. It was best to write all the code for browser and use dependency injection with small Gnome Shell specific parts because debugging in the browser was so much easier.

emmelaich 3y ago
There's a typo/thinko there too? Should be true not false.
physicles 3y ago
Good observation. Turning off extensions is where OP lost me. In the last year, the single biggest quality of life improvement for me has been discovering the Argos[0] extension, which basically lets you put whatever text/menus you want in the top bar by writing scripts that print to stdout. To save space, I hid the dock (I use [1] as a replacement alt-tab), so the top bar is the only piece of screen that isn't OS chrome. On my top bar right now I have the time in four time zones (including the ever-important UTC to save a mental calculation when logging at logs), the name of the current Wifi access point, and some VPN details gleaned using a combination of ip r, ping, nc, and curl. Another extension shows free RAM. I look at them dozens of times a day. [0] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1176/argos/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1176/argos/ [1] https://gist.github.com/cbd32/cbec9a32b32bd9e93b0d2696c71b5f03 https://gist.github.com/cbd32/cbec9a32b32bd9e93b0d2696c71b5f...

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

While I appreciate the goal, I'm surprised that it ends up being less work to start with GNOME and rip that much out rather than starting with a lighter option. I get that the listed goals/features are perhaps well covered by GNOME, but I can't imagine it's really the only - or easiest - way to get there.

doodlesdev 3y ago

(2018)

thesuperbigfrog 3y ago

"GNOME is huge and kind of bloated, and it's hard to disable various unwanted components. GNOME Shell is amazing, but a lot of the other components of GNOME are simply unwanted. This is what turns a lot of power users away from GNOME, which I think is a shame given all of the other amazing things about GNOME." GNOME needs a lobotomy and an enema. Lobotomy: there is too much opinionated stuff as default and trying to change it is WAY more work than it should be. The configuration steps shown in the article illustrate this pretty well. Enema: the bloat needs to be removed. Let me choose my own apps rather than trying to be a kitchen sink with its own default apps: * cheese * evolution * evolution-ews * evolution-help * gfbgraph * gnome-boxes * gnome-calendar * gnome-contacts * gnome-dictionary * gnome-documents * gnome-getting-started-docs * gnome-initial-setup * gnome-maps * gnome-online-miners * gnome-photos * gnome-software * gnome-user-docs * gnome-user-share * gnome-video-effects * gnome-weather * simple-scan * totem * tracker-miners * yelp Why not ask me what I want / need instead of installing it all? Windows lets me disable optional components, why not GNOME?

its-summertime 3y ago
The article is about removing such components from GNOME. Windows doesn't ask before installing its components. Both break subtly when you go around removing/disabling things that arn't meant to be removed/disabled
midoridensha 3y ago
>Let me choose my own apps rather than trying to be a kitchen sink with its own default apps: >Windows lets me disable optional components, why not GNOME? Because that isn't in-line with the Gnome devs' vision, or how they want you to use Gnome. If you don't agree with their vision, then why are you using their software? If you want a desktop environment that lets you configure it the way you want and disable things you don't want, Gnome simply isn't the DE for you. I really don't understand why this is so difficult a concept for so many Linux users. It's been like this for well over 10 years now (Gnome3 was released in 2011), it's not something new. The Gnome devs have infamously been hostile to users who want to do things differently from their vision.

londons_explore 3y ago

I'd be happy if, after a long work day, it wasn't "gnome-shell" that was top of my CPU time list... Seriously - today so far it has used 1 hour 15 mins of CPU time! In that time, we could have computed pi to billions of digits, yet somehow all gnome-shell has to show for it is that it managed to keep a clock updated and occasionally switch apps.

pengaru 3y ago
You do realize it's the thing compositing your desktop, right? it's not 1995
- londons_explore 3y ago
  For which, no CPU time is needed - all it's doing is pointing the GPU towards the right buffers to render in the right places.
  - pengaru 3y ago
    It's a long-running process that's waking up constantly for IPC+compositing duties alone. If you're still on X I'd expect more of the compositing cost reflected in the Xorg process than gnome-shell. But on a "modern" Wayland-based gnome session, the gnome-shell process encompasses what used to occur in Xorg. So all that time is now attributed to gnome-shell. It's not like you just arrange the GPU with some buffers and never wake up to send it commands on what to draw when. The compositor is a rather busy process, esp. if you have many clients/windows active. This stuff was easier to reason about in the Xorg days with WM "policy" running in a clearly separate process from the X "mechanism" side. Wayland tends to conflate everything, unless the compositor developers choose to use separate well-labeled threads for things like input/compositing/policy... I don't personally use gnome so it's inconvenient for me to check despite mild curiosity. It may be interesting to look at a threaded view of `top` if you're on Wayland, and see if gnome-shell has clearly separated threads. Interestingly, modern Xorg uses separate threads now, from this machine: 524 anon 20 0 637516 92996 53592 S 5.3 0.6 82:54.35 Xorg 525 anon 39 19 637516 92996 53592 S 0.0 0.6 0:00.00 Xorg:disk$0 526 anon 20 0 637516 92996 53592 S 1.0 0.6 36:32.18 Xorg:gdrv0 527 anon 39 19 637516 92996 53592 S 0.0 0.6 0:00.00 Xorg:disk$0 529 anon 20 0 637516 92996 53592 S 1.0 0.6 1:10.52 InputThread So gdrv0 alone has consumed 36.5 hours during my ~1.5 day uptime. If this were a Wayland situation, that time would be reflected in my compositor process instead. ~83 hours for the main Xorg thread, which I presume is largely IPC but X also does heaps of crap from its huge protocol on-CPU so I think it's best to just ignore that.

its-summertime 3y ago

> I version control my Firefox preferences using Firefox's obscure user.js feature Noting that enterprise policy replaces a lot of this, and works easier with flatpak based firefox et al. It also allows for auto-installing extensions.

bstar77 3y ago

For someone that only runs 3 programs (terminal, emacs and firefox) gnome is a terrible choice. In fact, a desktop environment is a terrible choice. > I want good text rendering and windows and buttons with rounded corners You don't need gnome or KDE for this. I run a primarily terminal oriented desktop, but my GTK apps still look great. I still run picom and could easily do rounded corners if I wanted. My point is that there are much better options than gnome if you want a beautiful minimal setup especially if you get into tilers.

nvy 3y ago
I'd be interested in reading a writeup on this subject; I've always enjoyed running linux without a DE but the awful text rendering makes it a sub-par experience. I have one of the lcdfans modded thinkpads running Fedora and awesomewm in lieu of gnome shell. But I still have most of gnome involved because something in there somewhere makes things look "nice" and if you just do a barebones install of X/wayland plus your WM of choice, things tend to look awful, and frankly I haven't got time nor energy to figure out what the magic sauce is.
- bstar77 3y ago
  This is my DE free terminal-centric setup: https://imgur.com/a/8mAoT2u https://imgur.com/a/8mAoT2u It took me about 3 weeks to figure everything out. You ideally need to use a distro where you can build from scratch (Arch/NixOS/Void/etc) if you want to truly be minimal. If you are OK using NixOS I can give you my configuration.nix.
- kelvinjps 3y ago
  I have the same problem
- creshal 3y ago
  It used to be that you have to fiddle with a lot of fontconfig settings to get decent rendering results, but they've been shipping mostly sane defaults for quite a while now. Hinting for some reason still has to be enabled manually, but very lightweight tools like `lxappearance` make that a single click, if you don't want to touch XML by hand. For the past 15 years, my desktop has been • openbox (also handles keyboard shortcuts etc., can be configured visually with obconf, which can also handle font settings iirc) • picom (for compositing; before, the tools it was forked from) • dunst (for notifications) • arandr (for configuring external displays) • flameshot (for screenshotting) • Random LXDE bits as necessary (lxpanel at the absolute minimum, lxsession when I need to deal with polkit things, lxappearance sometimes) It doesn't do much in terms of system configuration etc., but I didn't find I need much anyway these days. Printers etc. I no longer use, and most system settings can be configured with systemd's localectl/timedatectl once and left alone.

canistel 3y ago

XFCE twitches its fingers and smirks. LXDE, which has always had trouble with sleep, muffles a yawn...

kstenerud 3y ago
And I'd use them in a heartbeat if it weren't for the 1px wide window borders with hard grab edges that make window manipulation a hassle. Fortunately, Mate doesn't have this problem.
- npteljes 3y ago
  I hated this too, until I discovered Start+Left Right click drag Moves / Resizes windows. Since then, the Windows way of hunting the edge is the more annoying one.
  - lproven 3y ago
    > Start+Left Right click drag I cannot parse this. What do you mean?
    - ragnese 3y ago
      You hold the Windows/Super key on your keyboard while clicking and dragging on the window with either the left or right mouse button. If you hold Super and left-click-drag, it moves the window around the screen as though you are clicking and dragging from the title bar (like most people would normally move a window around). If you hold Super and right-click-drag, it will resize the window depending on what quadrant of the window you initially clicked and which direction you're dragging. Similar to if you clicked and dragged the corresponding corner of the window. It's extremely nice to not have to aim for the precise edge of a window.
      - kstenerud 3y ago
        > It's extremely nice to not have to aim for the precise edge of a window. This is why all modern window managers don't require you to hit the precise edge, but rather have a "grace" zone around the edge that also activates moving/resizing. It's nice to be able to do these kinds of things one-handed.

bobajeff 3y ago

For me I needed like 5 extensions to mold gnome into an acceptable desktop. (I forget which ones) Then during one install I was having trouble getting one of the work arounds to work. (I believe it was a distro bug) Which lead me to give up and try KDE again. (Hadn't used in years) I was kicking myself for not doing that sooner everything works as it's supposed to. I do miss gnome's Expose-like windows overview thing though. KDE has one too but it's not as good. But it's not as important as having my desktop behave like a desktop without some third party hacks (which will probably break at some point or stop being maintained) tricking it into behaving normally.

n3storm 3y ago
Give a chance to XFCE 4.18 please.
- kelvinjps 3y ago
  I find it that has way to many buttons
- bobajeff 3y ago
  That's actually the desktop I was using the longest before I realized I wanted a more feature complete desktop. For example I prefer a file manager with integrated file search over Thunar + Catfish. Also xfce has a bug where it will change the resolution everytime the screen goes to sleep. That being said I might've been happy with LXDE + xfce4-panel + Dolphin but it seemed safer to me to use one desktop environment rather than mix and match parts from the different ones.
  - n3storm 3y ago
    Thunar search now lets you filter directory and offers a button to search with Catfish , click and it then opens Catfish with search results of the term you where looking for (no need to reenter search term)
    - bobajeff 3y ago

nathants 3y ago

might as well just switch to dwm, dmenu, and st?

bolangi 3y ago
i3 floats my boat, but similar thinking. For multiple monitors, there's xrandr, solve it once and you're good forever. Why hire a secretary if the only thing you need to learn is to type?
- nathants 3y ago
  yes. solve it once, then solve other things.
- jitl 3y ago
  I’d rather hire a secretary so I can spend my copious time doing things other than figuring out a daemon so I can plug in a monitor

everybodyknows 3y ago

The article does not mention the app gsettings (in package libglib2.0-bin, at least on Ubuntu 20.04). Perhaps it came along after the authorship of this 2018 article. Anyway, gsettings provides a convenient CLI to a fair amount of customization -- I have myself a script of over 20 invocations to set various look-and-feel tweaks. To get yourself started, have a look at the output of gsettings --list-recursively.

bartvk 3y ago

The article is from 2018, but to find and script settings, this person almost exactly does what I do with macOS. I usually do: % defaults read > 1 then tweak settings and then do % defaults read > 2 % diff 1 2 I look at the diff and add those to a shell script, which I run when I do a new macOS installation.

dang 3y ago

Discussed at the time: Lobotomizing Gnome - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17185569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17185569 - May 2018 (221 comments)

beebeepka 3y ago

These days I find Gnome (with Dash to Dock) to be the best DE for me. Better than Windows, better than Mac, better than KDE. It feels like every other DE, including Windows and the plethora of Gnome 2 clones literally hates the very idea vertical task bars. It's like these people live in a parallel universe where most monitors aren't 16:9 or 16:10, thus wasting vertical space. Thanks but no thanks. Windows 95 supported that out of the gate but windows 11 doesn't. What a crazy world. I used to prefer XFCE for the longest time but it's just too old school and I get tired of configuring it on my laptops.

okasaki 3y ago
You can put XFCE and KDE panels on the left or right, resulting in a vertical task bar. This is a 10 second operation...
- beebeepka 3y ago
  I know I can but the vertical bars are not first class citizens was my point
  - FeepingCreature 3y ago
    What's missing in KDE? Far as I can tell, it works exactly as it did in Windows 95. Unlock taskbar, grab taskbar, move to side of the screen.
    - beebeepka 3y ago
      Did I not just confirm that KDE and XFCE have vertical taskbars? Of course they do. XFCE is just too old school for me. I have launch icons and launched items. Clumsy and it wasting space. Easy to screw things up while managing launchers UI items/placeholders. These problems are not vertical bar specific. KDE? I only speak for myself here - it is not missing anything but simplicity. Too much stuff to configure and I get lost, then frustrated. I think I liked it a bit more in the early 2000s.

nsonha 3y ago

I like Gnome's default look (rounded cornesrs and sensible font size comparing to, say, KDE's) but I hate that it copied the stupid MacOS layout with the menubar and dock, so wasteful. DEs in the 90s, including Gnome itself were fine with the taskbar. Idk why we suddenly need 2 bars now.

lproven 3y ago
> MacOS layout with the menubar and dock It doesn't have a menu bar. If GNOME used the top panel for menus, and I could control them with the keyboard and turn off hamburger menus everywhere, I'd dislike it a lot less. Do you mean the top panel? No menus there. Not even status icons, if the GNOME devs get their way. It's not Mac-like. Unity was Mac-like. GNOME is more like iOS on your desktop.

hyperman1 3y ago

I always wonder why Gnome is the default in most distros. It has no API stability guarantee, so long term software investment is not possible. It actively fights against the choices of its end users. It is severely dumbed down, locking its end users in less efficient workflows. Corporate backing was an upside for providing accessibility, but a recent post here on HN stated things were quickly detoriating. So it's not the right choice for developers, power users, basic users, users with acccessibility needs. But what's left? At this point, gnome seems optimized for being a demo model. You may look at it and marvel at its glorious platonic art, but do not dare to touch it with your grubby fingers or get any work done. This is a shame, really. The Windows 11 experience is at an all-time low right now, and leaves end users actively looking for alternatives. A Debian+KDE is great for non-technical end users, who mostly are used to and want win95 on steroids.

petepete 3y ago
> So it's not the right choice for developers, power users, basic users, users with acccessibility needs. But what's left? Oh come on, most people use it just fine without needing to complain about every last design choice. There are alternatives but for most people, most of the time, GNOME is more than enough. I'm a developer, I use it all day on desktop and laptop without the need for any extra config. I use one extension to hide the panel to avoid any risk of burn in on my oled monitor.
- xeyownt 3y ago
  Exactly my experience too for 10-ish years. I will never want more than what Gnome provides and when I want less, I usually go for xfce.
  - happymellon 3y ago
    On my personal devices I have to install the system tray extension, because Steam, but apart from that Gnome works far better than anything else including OSX for me.

dvh 3y ago

I'm using jwm as lobotomized gnome 2x

arun-mani-j 3y ago

I love GNOME and Debian. But Debian's live install of GNOME contains a lot of unnecessary packages like games, dictionaries, Thai terminal etc. And it is difficult to hunt the package name of an app too. Annoyed by all this, this is my way of installing OS: 1. Install Debian Netinstall with only standard packages. 2. sudo apt install gnome-core --not install-recommends 3. You get a very minimal GNOME installation now. There are minor inconveniences by this method too like Evolution services being installed. But it is way better than a lot of bloats present in Debian live.

wooque 3y ago

I did the same when I ran GNOME, but I realized I'm doing too much work to mold it to my taste and I still end up unsatisfied. So I switched to tilling window manager and never looked back. I can customize and setup up things just like I want. Tilling window management is to be honest secondary function for me. Customization is number one.

egberts1 3y ago

My problem is that both KDE and Gnome do not stabilize their API like X11 did. Although Gnome API appears a bit less changing than KDE. Packaging-wise, both KDE and Gnome suffered equally (despite Gnome-dev's huge resistance to do many-package approach). I favor the KDE approach to minimize presence of untested bloatware. Right now, I have been fighting vulnerability abuse against dbus usage of both KDE and Gnome (by red team) so I've settled on Xfce for now. (My friends have been suggesting Cinnamon/Mint so my early eval seems promising after having applied basic Whonix/CISecurity lockdown).

stuaxo 3y ago

Everyone has a different 80%, I like the automation, I would use it to enable my favourite extensions and configure them, I just feel more comfortable with wobbly windows and a desktop cube (and many others l).

pshirshov 3y ago

Linux desktop experience is degrading quickly. For me Gnome is unusable because it doesn't natively support fractional scaling under X (and crashes frequently wïh Ubuntu patches). Also it can't render XWayland fonts without heavy blur. I'm wondering how is this guy working with 3 x 4k displays in Gnome. KDE, despite all its problems, is the only environment which, at least, supports modern displays. > my personal feeling is the less Javascript in my life the better Don't tell him that the whole Shell is JS.

cultofmetatron 3y ago

I thought I would try learning gtk a few days ago. went to the website and couldn't even get the hello world example to compile on my system (PopOS). I tried to trouble shoot but as a fairly newbie c programmer, it was futile. these kinds of things matter if you want to ring in new users.

no_time 3y ago
They do have an onboarding workflow inteded for newbies: The Gnome Builder flatpak. Even as a "Gnome hater", I'd say it works pretty well for what it sets out to accomplish.
- cultofmetatron 3y ago
  I'll check it out. would have been nice if they mentioned that in the onboarding tutorial