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Personally I feel that KDE is what GNOME wanted to be but can’t. Not just the DE itself but the KDE applications too, just look at Krita for example compared to

Personally I feel that KDE is what GNOME wanted to be but can’t. Not just the DE itself but the KDE applications too, just look at Krita for example compared to GIMP. Somehow KDE could accomplish much more and feels more mature and robust too. I loved GNOME2 back then but feels like something went wrong with GNOME3 regarding the whole project and how users reacted to the different UI. I’d say the classic Windows NT era UI (95, 98, 2000, Xp) was peak design so I’m glad KDE stick to that more or less and made it even better and modern.

6581 3y ago
> just look at Krita for example compared to GIMP They're not really comparable. GIMP is for picture editing, Krita is for painting.
- vonjuice 3y ago
  Regardless of that, not being able to select multiple layers at once (in GIMP) is downright inexcusable.
  - HKH2 3y ago
    It's still the only open source image program I know that will not only let me print, but also show where the image will be on the page, and let me move it and scale it up/down. Seems like overkill, but I keep it installed for that reason.
    - sho_hn 3y ago
      As a KDE developer, I think Gimp is pretty great and has made massive progress in the upcoming 3.0 release (also on things only Krita could do so far, like reasonable colorspace-independence, also UI-wise). Obviously we're very proud of the Krita team. I use both regularly for different tasks, and that they have slightly different objectives and mission statements has been great for open source content authoring.
- dagw 3y ago
  Krita may have started out as a digital painting tool, but today it is also a pretty good picture editing tool, and certainly easier to use than GIMP for many common photo editing tasks.
Theizestooke 3y ago
I don't know, I'm not really impressed by their mail-client or their calendar software. Lots of room for improvement, but then again there's already Thunderbird.
- binkHN 3y ago
  So don't use those two programs? KDE is an entire DE and ecosystem; I don't see how you can fault it for two programs that you don't like.
sph 3y ago
Meh, GNOME has 1/10th of the features of KDE, but it's much more stable and consistent. I've used KDE for the past year, and it's just too much, too many options, and if you stray out of the happy path, you encounter plenty of bugs. Then what's the point of offering so many options. I'm back to GNOME. KDE enjoys a lot of reputation from people that believe the Windows-style UI paradigm to be the best. That's arguable. I would certainly install KDE to a user new to Linux, but I have been running Linux long enough not to get lost if I don't have a taskbar or desktop icons. GNOME could be so much better, sure, but I prefer 2 options that work (4 code paths to test), than 10 that don't really work all that well (1024 code paths to test). My dream DE has the simplicity and design of GNOME with the completeness of QT. GTK is a dead-end, but at least it's written in C, so it is future-proof compatible with better languages such as Rust, instead of being stuck with C++ until the heat death of the universe.
- notarget137 3y ago
  My personal KDE looks and operates nothing like Windows and more copies the MacOS workflow (although I am not a Mac user at all). GNOME is not that much customizable and it is the main reason I stick to KDE. Also, quite stable. I do rarely have any issues to be honest and it usually is Latte that has bugs but it is in the state maintaining limbo for a while now.
- pid-1 3y ago
  Just a single data point, but I had GNOME hanging and crashing in clean Ubuntu and Fedora installs as recently as 2022. I've migrated to Mint and haven't tried KDE for the last 10 years, but I would have a hard time calling GNOME stable.
  - sph 3y ago
    On the other hand, I haven't had GNOME crash in years. KDE 3 or 4 times in the past year. YMMV
  - jlpcsl 3y ago
    Yeah similar experience here, At work we are forced to use a distro with GNOME (well at least it is GNU/Linux and not that Microsoft bloated spyware) and yeah I have plenty of crashes in GNOME. No crashes at home with KDE Plasma on openSUSE Tumbleweed. It has been rock stable.
saltymug76 3y ago
That's basically why I stick to KDE. Feels like the natural evolution of the pre-vista windows ui.
EverForever 3y ago
Gnome has a completely different workflow than KDE. Gnome is the reason why I use Linux. If I had to use KDE I would stay with Windows, the workflow has the same logic, is almost the same, except that with Windows I have no restrictions with applications.
- xcdzvyn 3y ago
  I'm almost the opposite. If I had to use Linux with GNOME, I'd just use macOS instead. The Linux desktop needs a shtick. Maybe when desktop cubes make a comeback we can make peace :)
  - realusername 3y ago
    GNOME might look a bit macOS-like from far away but it's really not when using it. I personally hate macOS but do love GNOME.
    - l72 3y ago
      I agree, especially when it comes to window management and virtual desktops. I have been running Linux desktop since the late 90s and used A LOT of different desktops and window managers. I remember when gnome 2 came out and everyone hated it! (sound familiar?) For work, I have my desktop running gnome and I have a macbook that I also use when traveling or at the office. I find my productivity on mac os drops with its absolutely terrible window management and terrible virtual desktop implementation. I instead run fedora in a UTM VM fullscreen and only use mac as a "host" for the VM. Gnome (with version 3) required a change in how you use it as a desktop. In gnome 2 days, I used to have a grid of virtual desktops and maybe always assigned email to 1, chat to 2, etc. The task bar was heavily used and important. But with Gnome > 3, I really love the dynamic virtual desktops. Every task I am working gets is own virtual desktop. As I finish a task and close windows with that task, that virtual desktop goes away. If I have a long running multi-day task, that virtual desktop with windows associated with it stay open for that whole duration. Only things related to that task are on the virtual desktop. I might have 25 browser tabs open in total, but 3 of them are tied to a specific task on the firefox window on desktop 2, 5 are tied to another firefox window on desktop 5 and so on. Everything is _very_ keyboard driven, and I don't ever touch a mouse to interact with gnome itself. This makes task switching really nice. There is no need for a tab bar with 50 items on it, or a browser window with 50+ tabs open. One thing I do miss from some of the older window managers, is the ability for the window manager to do grouping/tabbing. I'd prefer if now application implemented tabs, and instead the window manager did it.
amykhar 3y ago
KDE has spoiled me. I installed a Gnome distribution a short while back, but used it for a couple of hours and missed KDE so much that I wiped the hard drive and went back to Manjaro and KDE.
- tcbawo 3y ago
  > wiped the hard drive and went back to Manjaro I think this is the reason Linux hasn't penetrated the desktop more than it has. “Just reinstall” is too often the solution to issues. Starting over will often throw away hours of someone’s time. This can be catastrophic for a non-technical user. I wish the Linux desktop was implemented more like a user extension on top of a rock solid base server layer (eg hypervisor). Maybe such a setup exists, but I’m unaware of it.
  - georgyo 3y ago
    It's not "the solution", it is a solution. It is the easiest solution, requires no research or technical ability, and will not have any left over cruft from the hours of customizing. The same goes for windows, I know people who reinstall every 6 months just to keep their system clean and working optimally. > I wish the Linux desktop was implemented more like a user extension on top of a rock solid base server layer. I would argue that the Linux kernel is that server layer, but let's not open that can of worms. Maybe Fedora Silverblue is up your ally. All the apps, including the desktop environment are containers. Or if you really want an actual hypervisor you could try Qubes, but that is not for the faint of heart.
    - qwertox 3y ago
      > I would argue that the Linux kernel is that server layer, but let's not open that can of worms. Yes, the package manager is definitely not a part of the desktop.
    - tcbawo 3y ago
      I was not familiar with Silverblue. It looks very promising. The idea of creating a fundamental, shared base system should make troubleshooting significantly easier — possibly an exponential reduction in the possible installed permutations. Thanks for the suggestion!
maxloh 3y ago
I know HN users hate modern UI trends. But for the record, GNOME actually has professional UI designers (Red Hat employees or volunteers) designing their UI. https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/os-mockups https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/os-mockups
- RedShift1 3y ago
  Do they test with end users thoroughly, like Microsoft and Apple did back in the 80's and 90's?
  - netdur 3y ago
    Yes, The team behind Ximian, before being acquired by SUSE, was involved in early efforts to improve the usability of desktop Linux for end users. They conducted usability studies and published videos of these sessions to highlight where users encountered difficulties. These efforts were part of a broader initiative within the GNOME project to enhance user experience and make the GNOME desktop environment more intuitive and accessible to a wider audience.
    - sho_hn 3y ago
      FWIW, we've also had professional usability experts involved with KDE many times over the years. E.g. the OpenUsability initiative, which KDE helped set up, was run by HCI professionals and conducted a fair number of user studies, produced research docs, and so on. The difference perhaps is that OpenUsability didn't limit itself to working only on KDE (and also helped out, e.g. LibreOffice), that's why it somehow didn't get booked as a KDE thing and didn't become a similar anecdote people cite now.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Gnome 2 was indeed pretty ok though not very comfortable for lack of configurability. Gnome 3 is really the problem which is why there's so many that replicate gnome 2, like cinnamon and mate. Gnome 3 is really like KDE 4, too much messing around for the sake of it. But another thing I really like about KDE is that there's not a giant behind it like redhat, they're free from commercial motives to make their own choices.
pavlov 3y ago
KDE’s underlying GUI framework is Qt which is backed by a successful corporation and is used by lots of high-end professional desktop apps. That goes a long way to explain why Krita feels more right than GIMP.
- orbital-decay 3y ago
  Simplifying Krita vs GIMP as a difference between application frameworks is reductionist. Krita has much better connection with actual users and their needs, in the first place. Same with Kate and many other KDE apps which became fairly competent in their niches in recent years. KDE ecosystem in general has a working user feedback loop, something that is historically hard to come by in FOSS world.
  - pavlov 3y ago
    Yes, that’s absolutely what makes the difference in the end. But if you’re going to build an app for professional content creators, it definitely helps to be using the framework that powers Autodesk Maya and many other tools that they’re already familiar with. A lot of non-obvious product needs on the framework level for this niche have already been solved. GNOME just never had that kind of solution pull. It’s always been more of a research project.
    - badsectoracula 3y ago
      > But if you’re going to build an app for professional content creators, it definitely helps to be using the framework that powers Autodesk Maya and many other tools that they’re already familiar with. Qt isn't that sort of framework though, it is just a GUI toolkit[0] and there is nothing special about it that makes it better than Gtk for an application like Krita. The reason Krita is so successful is because of what orbital-decay wrote, they connect and listen to the users, not because of Qt. Obviously Krita is built on the KDE frameworks and the KDE frameworks are built on Qt, so Krita relies a ton on Qt to the point where if you consider on replacing it you might as well just rewrite the program from scratch. But Krita could have been written on, say, Java Swing, wxWidgets, Gtk or whatever other mature GUI framework and it'd still be as successful. After all keep in mind that many other popular digital content creation tools use custom toolkits instead of Qt (e.g. Blender which is way more popular than Krita). [0] ok, it has more functionality than GUI, but that's the main functionality and everything else can be found in many other libraries
esarbe 3y ago
I'm extremely happy with a keyboard focused interface like Gnome is. I also like Gnome for giving me sensible defaults and for staying out of my way. The whole "desktop metaphor" with icons littering the display never made sense to me, so I really appreciated the new take that Gnome tried and keeps exploring.
topaz0 3y ago
Is GIMP even associated with GNOME? The G stands for GNU, not GNOME.
- haunter 3y ago
  Yes https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp
  - tristan957 3y ago
    That doesn't actually mean much. See the sibling comment.
- lallysingh 3y ago
  Gnome's toolkit, gtk, originated as the toolkit the gimp folks wrote to get off of Motif a long time ago. Since then the Gs have had reassigned meanings.
- asoneth 3y ago
  Sort of. It was part of GNU, now it's sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, but I don't think it is considered a "GNOME App". As per https://discourse.gnome.org/t/relation-between-gimp-and-gnome/2376 https://discourse.gnome.org/t/relation-between-gimp-and-gnom...: "The GNOME Foundation provides the GNU Image Manipulation Program community and developers with services like fiscal sponsorship, technical infrastructure, promotion, and copyright assignment." However, it's not considered a GNOME "Core App" or even a "Circle App" (see https://apps.gnome.org/ https://apps.gnome.org/) and I believe that it doesn't attempt to follow the GNOME guidelines or have any GNOME designers/developers working on it.
- ColonelPhantom 3y ago
  GNOME originally stood for GNU Network Object Model Environment, so both G's are in some pedantic sense the same. I don't think there's a very close relationship between GNOME and GIMP, but do keep in mind that GTK, the 'defining' part of GNOME, originated in GIMP (Gimp ToolKit!)
rtpg 3y ago
The simple 2-bit explanation is KDE is following Windows trends, Gnome is following Mac trends. Even the screenshot widgets are both following the closed-source versions (recent Gnome screenshot widget is exactly the new MacOS screenshot widget) I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches" distro, but ships with a DE that will annoy nerds much more than KDE does. My Linux experience got so much better under KDE. I respect what Gnome does a lot but I feel at home in KDE land.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  IMHO the difference is that KDE took the classic Windows desktop as starting point and has developed it into something that's now actually better than the Win10/11 desktop. GNOME OTH might be trying to imitate macOS but if that's actually the case they are doing a very poor job (I spend most of my time on a Mac, but have recently switched from GNOME to KDE on my Linux laptop because after updating to Ubuntu 24 I was finally fed up with GNOME's UX only ever getting worse, never improving). PS: switching from GNOME to a KDE desktop session was absolutely trivial and quick on Ubuntu btw.
  - AlienRobot 3y ago
    Ignoring all the other bad stuff with Windows 11, one thing that made me switch to Linux was the ugly "modern" design. iirc, someone on HN said that Windows designers don't even use Windows, they use Mac. But then I switched to Linux and a lot of apps, specially gnome and gnome-inspired apps, have such terrible design as well. I'm going to spare you the details because I could rant about it for hours.
    - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - khimaros 3y ago
        i think you could have communicated this more effectively without the ad hominems.
aryonoco 3y ago
Horses for courses. I loved KDE 2 and KDE 3 and even contributed minor patches to it (using CVS. .. shivers) Back then there was no contest IMO on what is the best Linux DE. KDE 4 was an unmitigated disaster of course, which pushed me to look at Gnome. I then discovered the Gnome 3 workflow (as intended by upstream, not as implemented in distributions such as Ubuntu), and absolutely fell in love. Nowadays Gnome is absolutely my favourite environment, followed by macOS, with KDE and Win 11 way behind.
- ParetoOptimal 3y ago
  Can you link to a description of this intended workflow?
  - walteweiss 3y ago
    I’m curious as well, as I missed quite many Gnomes. I used it back in Gnome-2 days, and now it’s 45. I think I accidentally tried it a couple of years back (43, if I’m not wrong) and I like it so much that I use it till this day. Combining with Swaywm on my laptop, but sometimes I think that I like Gnome even more. Which is quite a statement! As I really love Sway and thought that’s the final thing I’ll ever use as a DE.
toyg 3y ago
> KDE is what GNOME wanted to be Lol, from a historical perspective this is quite literally true: GNOME was born to be a GPL clone of KDE, back when QT had a gnarly license.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  GNOME doesn't seem ideologically similar to KDE at all though, it's very hardcoded with hardly anything is adjustable. KDE is like the opposite of that, it can mimic most Windows features as well, e.g. quicklaunch, non-grouped taskbar windows with titles.
  - toyg 3y ago
    This philosophy emerged later, when GNOME tried to differentiate. In the first few versions it was as flexible as KDE, it had fewer trinkets only because they came later and had to catch-up. It was only with version 3 that they went "full Apple", when they adopted a somewhat-dictatorial style of development.
    - MrDrMcCoy 3y ago
      I wonder how much of that dictatorial nature comes from more and more of the developers getting hired by Red Hat, who basically decides everything related to systemd/gnome/freedesktop these days...
  - rodgerd 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_1#/media/File:GNOME_1.0_(1999,_03)_with_file_manager_application.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_1#/media/File:GNOME_1.0_... is what GNOME 1 looked like.
badsectoracula 3y ago
> just look at Krita for example compared to GIMP FWIW technically the programs have different purposes, even if they also have a lot of overlapping functionality: Krita is primarily a digital painting application, which you can also use to do some general image editing while GIMP is primarily an image editing application which you can also use to do some digital painting. However if you compare the focus of each application to the equivalent of the other you'll see that Krita's image editing functionality - especially on things outside digital painting - is lacking while GIMP is stronger there and at the same time GIMP's digital painting functionality much more limited when compared to Krita's.
- lukan 3y ago
  "Krita's image editing functionality ..is lacking" What is missing, compared to gimp?
  - kuschku 3y ago
    Moving selections with handles after the fact. Precise selection positioning in general. And where gimp has an always visible panel for filters, krita has always visible panels for brushes. It'd be awesome if krita gained more such functionality, but considering krita's recent expansion into vector images, these features are likely on the horizon anyway.
    - Blackthorn 3y ago
      Fwiw I don't think selection positioning is that precise in gimp either. It's nothing compared to, like, a cad kernel.
    - Intralexical 3y ago
      IMO Krita is still miles ahead with robust support for NDE via filter masks, better layer grouping, and proper support for colour spaces and high bit depth. It's had all of these features for years, while GIMP always squeezed everything into an lossy 8-bit RGB raster and is just barely catching up now. Even the individual image-focused tools, like a single Transform tool with Warp and Liquify modes, or the Fill tool with adaptive expansion, seem much better thought out in Krita than in GIMP. Plus UI-wise I've always found GIMP to be quite obtuse/rigid/clunky. About the only thing that GIMP is good at is when you just want to move a raster grid made out of pixels around while very aware that it's a raster grid made of pixels, like cropping or lining up images.
ufo 3y ago
This GNOME3 bashing feels gratuitous. I like both KDE abd GNOME, in their own ways.
ponorin 3y ago
oh no, this again aside from the usual "to each their own," i can't help but feel that kde nags you down with mostly inconsequential options meanwhile failing to nail the basics such as the basic aesthetic or performance. and, ironically, gnome being the solid blank slate it is makes it perfect for customisation. since gtk4 my application has been anything but black and white, and it has always been easier to make qt follow gtk theme than the other way around. granted, some default gnome behaviour does annoy me, especially the new nautilus. nautilus simply doesn't show me anything useful in a dual window setup as it tries to cram every column of the list view, and the sidebar refuses to go away in my middling-dpi laptop monitor. still i can't live without type to search (somehow missing in nemo).

6581 3y ago

> just look at Krita for example compared to GIMP They're not really comparable. GIMP is for picture editing, Krita is for painting.

vonjuice 3y ago
Regardless of that, not being able to select multiple layers at once (in GIMP) is downright inexcusable.
- HKH2 3y ago
  It's still the only open source image program I know that will not only let me print, but also show where the image will be on the page, and let me move it and scale it up/down. Seems like overkill, but I keep it installed for that reason.
  - sho_hn 3y ago
    As a KDE developer, I think Gimp is pretty great and has made massive progress in the upcoming 3.0 release (also on things only Krita could do so far, like reasonable colorspace-independence, also UI-wise). Obviously we're very proud of the Krita team. I use both regularly for different tasks, and that they have slightly different objectives and mission statements has been great for open source content authoring.
dagw 3y ago
Krita may have started out as a digital painting tool, but today it is also a pretty good picture editing tool, and certainly easier to use than GIMP for many common photo editing tasks.

Theizestooke 3y ago

I don't know, I'm not really impressed by their mail-client or their calendar software. Lots of room for improvement, but then again there's already Thunderbird.

binkHN 3y ago
So don't use those two programs? KDE is an entire DE and ecosystem; I don't see how you can fault it for two programs that you don't like.

sph 3y ago

Meh, GNOME has 1/10th of the features of KDE, but it's much more stable and consistent. I've used KDE for the past year, and it's just too much, too many options, and if you stray out of the happy path, you encounter plenty of bugs. Then what's the point of offering so many options. I'm back to GNOME. KDE enjoys a lot of reputation from people that believe the Windows-style UI paradigm to be the best. That's arguable. I would certainly install KDE to a user new to Linux, but I have been running Linux long enough not to get lost if I don't have a taskbar or desktop icons. GNOME could be so much better, sure, but I prefer 2 options that work (4 code paths to test), than 10 that don't really work all that well (1024 code paths to test). My dream DE has the simplicity and design of GNOME with the completeness of QT. GTK is a dead-end, but at least it's written in C, so it is future-proof compatible with better languages such as Rust, instead of being stuck with C++ until the heat death of the universe.

notarget137 3y ago
My personal KDE looks and operates nothing like Windows and more copies the MacOS workflow (although I am not a Mac user at all). GNOME is not that much customizable and it is the main reason I stick to KDE. Also, quite stable. I do rarely have any issues to be honest and it usually is Latte that has bugs but it is in the state maintaining limbo for a while now.
pid-1 3y ago
Just a single data point, but I had GNOME hanging and crashing in clean Ubuntu and Fedora installs as recently as 2022. I've migrated to Mint and haven't tried KDE for the last 10 years, but I would have a hard time calling GNOME stable.
- sph 3y ago
  On the other hand, I haven't had GNOME crash in years. KDE 3 or 4 times in the past year. YMMV
- jlpcsl 3y ago
  Yeah similar experience here, At work we are forced to use a distro with GNOME (well at least it is GNU/Linux and not that Microsoft bloated spyware) and yeah I have plenty of crashes in GNOME. No crashes at home with KDE Plasma on openSUSE Tumbleweed. It has been rock stable.

saltymug76 3y ago

That's basically why I stick to KDE. Feels like the natural evolution of the pre-vista windows ui.

EverForever 3y ago

Gnome has a completely different workflow than KDE. Gnome is the reason why I use Linux. If I had to use KDE I would stay with Windows, the workflow has the same logic, is almost the same, except that with Windows I have no restrictions with applications.

xcdzvyn 3y ago
I'm almost the opposite. If I had to use Linux with GNOME, I'd just use macOS instead. The Linux desktop needs a shtick. Maybe when desktop cubes make a comeback we can make peace :)
- realusername 3y ago
  GNOME might look a bit macOS-like from far away but it's really not when using it. I personally hate macOS but do love GNOME.
  - l72 3y ago
    I agree, especially when it comes to window management and virtual desktops. I have been running Linux desktop since the late 90s and used A LOT of different desktops and window managers. I remember when gnome 2 came out and everyone hated it! (sound familiar?) For work, I have my desktop running gnome and I have a macbook that I also use when traveling or at the office. I find my productivity on mac os drops with its absolutely terrible window management and terrible virtual desktop implementation. I instead run fedora in a UTM VM fullscreen and only use mac as a "host" for the VM. Gnome (with version 3) required a change in how you use it as a desktop. In gnome 2 days, I used to have a grid of virtual desktops and maybe always assigned email to 1, chat to 2, etc. The task bar was heavily used and important. But with Gnome > 3, I really love the dynamic virtual desktops. Every task I am working gets is own virtual desktop. As I finish a task and close windows with that task, that virtual desktop goes away. If I have a long running multi-day task, that virtual desktop with windows associated with it stay open for that whole duration. Only things related to that task are on the virtual desktop. I might have 25 browser tabs open in total, but 3 of them are tied to a specific task on the firefox window on desktop 2, 5 are tied to another firefox window on desktop 5 and so on. Everything is _very_ keyboard driven, and I don't ever touch a mouse to interact with gnome itself. This makes task switching really nice. There is no need for a tab bar with 50 items on it, or a browser window with 50+ tabs open. One thing I do miss from some of the older window managers, is the ability for the window manager to do grouping/tabbing. I'd prefer if now application implemented tabs, and instead the window manager did it.

amykhar 3y ago

KDE has spoiled me. I installed a Gnome distribution a short while back, but used it for a couple of hours and missed KDE so much that I wiped the hard drive and went back to Manjaro and KDE.

tcbawo 3y ago
> wiped the hard drive and went back to Manjaro I think this is the reason Linux hasn't penetrated the desktop more than it has. “Just reinstall” is too often the solution to issues. Starting over will often throw away hours of someone’s time. This can be catastrophic for a non-technical user. I wish the Linux desktop was implemented more like a user extension on top of a rock solid base server layer (eg hypervisor). Maybe such a setup exists, but I’m unaware of it.
- georgyo 3y ago
  It's not "the solution", it is a solution. It is the easiest solution, requires no research or technical ability, and will not have any left over cruft from the hours of customizing. The same goes for windows, I know people who reinstall every 6 months just to keep their system clean and working optimally. > I wish the Linux desktop was implemented more like a user extension on top of a rock solid base server layer. I would argue that the Linux kernel is that server layer, but let's not open that can of worms. Maybe Fedora Silverblue is up your ally. All the apps, including the desktop environment are containers. Or if you really want an actual hypervisor you could try Qubes, but that is not for the faint of heart.
  - qwertox 3y ago
    > I would argue that the Linux kernel is that server layer, but let's not open that can of worms. Yes, the package manager is definitely not a part of the desktop.
  - tcbawo 3y ago
    I was not familiar with Silverblue. It looks very promising. The idea of creating a fundamental, shared base system should make troubleshooting significantly easier — possibly an exponential reduction in the possible installed permutations. Thanks for the suggestion!

maxloh 3y ago

I know HN users hate modern UI trends. But for the record, GNOME actually has professional UI designers (Red Hat employees or volunteers) designing their UI. https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/os-mockups https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/os-mockups

RedShift1 3y ago
Do they test with end users thoroughly, like Microsoft and Apple did back in the 80's and 90's?
- netdur 3y ago
  Yes, The team behind Ximian, before being acquired by SUSE, was involved in early efforts to improve the usability of desktop Linux for end users. They conducted usability studies and published videos of these sessions to highlight where users encountered difficulties. These efforts were part of a broader initiative within the GNOME project to enhance user experience and make the GNOME desktop environment more intuitive and accessible to a wider audience.
  - sho_hn 3y ago
    FWIW, we've also had professional usability experts involved with KDE many times over the years. E.g. the OpenUsability initiative, which KDE helped set up, was run by HCI professionals and conducted a fair number of user studies, produced research docs, and so on. The difference perhaps is that OpenUsability didn't limit itself to working only on KDE (and also helped out, e.g. LibreOffice), that's why it somehow didn't get booked as a KDE thing and didn't become a similar anecdote people cite now.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Gnome 2 was indeed pretty ok though not very comfortable for lack of configurability. Gnome 3 is really the problem which is why there's so many that replicate gnome 2, like cinnamon and mate. Gnome 3 is really like KDE 4, too much messing around for the sake of it. But another thing I really like about KDE is that there's not a giant behind it like redhat, they're free from commercial motives to make their own choices.

pavlov 3y ago

KDE’s underlying GUI framework is Qt which is backed by a successful corporation and is used by lots of high-end professional desktop apps. That goes a long way to explain why Krita feels more right than GIMP.

orbital-decay 3y ago
Simplifying Krita vs GIMP as a difference between application frameworks is reductionist. Krita has much better connection with actual users and their needs, in the first place. Same with Kate and many other KDE apps which became fairly competent in their niches in recent years. KDE ecosystem in general has a working user feedback loop, something that is historically hard to come by in FOSS world.
- pavlov 3y ago
  Yes, that’s absolutely what makes the difference in the end. But if you’re going to build an app for professional content creators, it definitely helps to be using the framework that powers Autodesk Maya and many other tools that they’re already familiar with. A lot of non-obvious product needs on the framework level for this niche have already been solved. GNOME just never had that kind of solution pull. It’s always been more of a research project.
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    > But if you’re going to build an app for professional content creators, it definitely helps to be using the framework that powers Autodesk Maya and many other tools that they’re already familiar with. Qt isn't that sort of framework though, it is just a GUI toolkit[0] and there is nothing special about it that makes it better than Gtk for an application like Krita. The reason Krita is so successful is because of what orbital-decay wrote, they connect and listen to the users, not because of Qt. Obviously Krita is built on the KDE frameworks and the KDE frameworks are built on Qt, so Krita relies a ton on Qt to the point where if you consider on replacing it you might as well just rewrite the program from scratch. But Krita could have been written on, say, Java Swing, wxWidgets, Gtk or whatever other mature GUI framework and it'd still be as successful. After all keep in mind that many other popular digital content creation tools use custom toolkits instead of Qt (e.g. Blender which is way more popular than Krita). [0] ok, it has more functionality than GUI, but that's the main functionality and everything else can be found in many other libraries

esarbe 3y ago

I'm extremely happy with a keyboard focused interface like Gnome is. I also like Gnome for giving me sensible defaults and for staying out of my way. The whole "desktop metaphor" with icons littering the display never made sense to me, so I really appreciated the new take that Gnome tried and keeps exploring.

topaz0 3y ago

Is GIMP even associated with GNOME? The G stands for GNU, not GNOME.

haunter 3y ago
Yes https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp
- tristan957 3y ago
  That doesn't actually mean much. See the sibling comment.
lallysingh 3y ago
Gnome's toolkit, gtk, originated as the toolkit the gimp folks wrote to get off of Motif a long time ago. Since then the Gs have had reassigned meanings.
asoneth 3y ago
Sort of. It was part of GNU, now it's sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, but I don't think it is considered a "GNOME App". As per https://discourse.gnome.org/t/relation-between-gimp-and-gnome/2376 https://discourse.gnome.org/t/relation-between-gimp-and-gnom...: "The GNOME Foundation provides the GNU Image Manipulation Program community and developers with services like fiscal sponsorship, technical infrastructure, promotion, and copyright assignment." However, it's not considered a GNOME "Core App" or even a "Circle App" (see https://apps.gnome.org/ https://apps.gnome.org/) and I believe that it doesn't attempt to follow the GNOME guidelines or have any GNOME designers/developers working on it.
ColonelPhantom 3y ago
GNOME originally stood for GNU Network Object Model Environment, so both G's are in some pedantic sense the same. I don't think there's a very close relationship between GNOME and GIMP, but do keep in mind that GTK, the 'defining' part of GNOME, originated in GIMP (Gimp ToolKit!)

rtpg 3y ago

The simple 2-bit explanation is KDE is following Windows trends, Gnome is following Mac trends. Even the screenshot widgets are both following the closed-source versions (recent Gnome screenshot widget is exactly the new MacOS screenshot widget) I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches" distro, but ships with a DE that will annoy nerds much more than KDE does. My Linux experience got so much better under KDE. I respect what Gnome does a lot but I feel at home in KDE land.

flohofwoe 3y ago
IMHO the difference is that KDE took the classic Windows desktop as starting point and has developed it into something that's now actually better than the Win10/11 desktop. GNOME OTH might be trying to imitate macOS but if that's actually the case they are doing a very poor job (I spend most of my time on a Mac, but have recently switched from GNOME to KDE on my Linux laptop because after updating to Ubuntu 24 I was finally fed up with GNOME's UX only ever getting worse, never improving). PS: switching from GNOME to a KDE desktop session was absolutely trivial and quick on Ubuntu btw.
- AlienRobot 3y ago
  Ignoring all the other bad stuff with Windows 11, one thing that made me switch to Linux was the ugly "modern" design. iirc, someone on HN said that Windows designers don't even use Windows, they use Mac. But then I switched to Linux and a lot of apps, specially gnome and gnome-inspired apps, have such terrible design as well. I'm going to spare you the details because I could rant about it for hours.
  - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - khimaros 3y ago
      i think you could have communicated this more effectively without the ad hominems.

aryonoco 3y ago

Horses for courses. I loved KDE 2 and KDE 3 and even contributed minor patches to it (using CVS. .. shivers) Back then there was no contest IMO on what is the best Linux DE. KDE 4 was an unmitigated disaster of course, which pushed me to look at Gnome. I then discovered the Gnome 3 workflow (as intended by upstream, not as implemented in distributions such as Ubuntu), and absolutely fell in love. Nowadays Gnome is absolutely my favourite environment, followed by macOS, with KDE and Win 11 way behind.

ParetoOptimal 3y ago
Can you link to a description of this intended workflow?
- walteweiss 3y ago
  I’m curious as well, as I missed quite many Gnomes. I used it back in Gnome-2 days, and now it’s 45. I think I accidentally tried it a couple of years back (43, if I’m not wrong) and I like it so much that I use it till this day. Combining with Swaywm on my laptop, but sometimes I think that I like Gnome even more. Which is quite a statement! As I really love Sway and thought that’s the final thing I’ll ever use as a DE.

toyg 3y ago

> KDE is what GNOME wanted to be Lol, from a historical perspective this is quite literally true: GNOME was born to be a GPL clone of KDE, back when QT had a gnarly license.

moffkalast 3y ago
GNOME doesn't seem ideologically similar to KDE at all though, it's very hardcoded with hardly anything is adjustable. KDE is like the opposite of that, it can mimic most Windows features as well, e.g. quicklaunch, non-grouped taskbar windows with titles.
- toyg 3y ago
  This philosophy emerged later, when GNOME tried to differentiate. In the first few versions it was as flexible as KDE, it had fewer trinkets only because they came later and had to catch-up. It was only with version 3 that they went "full Apple", when they adopted a somewhat-dictatorial style of development.
  - MrDrMcCoy 3y ago
    I wonder how much of that dictatorial nature comes from more and more of the developers getting hired by Red Hat, who basically decides everything related to systemd/gnome/freedesktop these days...
- rodgerd 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_1#/media/File:GNOME_1.0_(1999,_03)_with_file_manager_application.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_1#/media/File:GNOME_1.0_... is what GNOME 1 looked like.

badsectoracula 3y ago

> just look at Krita for example compared to GIMP FWIW technically the programs have different purposes, even if they also have a lot of overlapping functionality: Krita is primarily a digital painting application, which you can also use to do some general image editing while GIMP is primarily an image editing application which you can also use to do some digital painting. However if you compare the focus of each application to the equivalent of the other you'll see that Krita's image editing functionality - especially on things outside digital painting - is lacking while GIMP is stronger there and at the same time GIMP's digital painting functionality much more limited when compared to Krita's.

lukan 3y ago
"Krita's image editing functionality ..is lacking" What is missing, compared to gimp?
- kuschku 3y ago
  Moving selections with handles after the fact. Precise selection positioning in general. And where gimp has an always visible panel for filters, krita has always visible panels for brushes. It'd be awesome if krita gained more such functionality, but considering krita's recent expansion into vector images, these features are likely on the horizon anyway.
  - Blackthorn 3y ago
    Fwiw I don't think selection positioning is that precise in gimp either. It's nothing compared to, like, a cad kernel.
  - Intralexical 3y ago
    IMO Krita is still miles ahead with robust support for NDE via filter masks, better layer grouping, and proper support for colour spaces and high bit depth. It's had all of these features for years, while GIMP always squeezed everything into an lossy 8-bit RGB raster and is just barely catching up now. Even the individual image-focused tools, like a single Transform tool with Warp and Liquify modes, or the Fill tool with adaptive expansion, seem much better thought out in Krita than in GIMP. Plus UI-wise I've always found GIMP to be quite obtuse/rigid/clunky. About the only thing that GIMP is good at is when you just want to move a raster grid made out of pixels around while very aware that it's a raster grid made of pixels, like cropping or lining up images.

ufo 3y ago

This GNOME3 bashing feels gratuitous. I like both KDE abd GNOME, in their own ways.

ponorin 3y ago

oh no, this again aside from the usual "to each their own," i can't help but feel that kde nags you down with mostly inconsequential options meanwhile failing to nail the basics such as the basic aesthetic or performance. and, ironically, gnome being the solid blank slate it is makes it perfect for customisation. since gtk4 my application has been anything but black and white, and it has always been easier to make qt follow gtk theme than the other way around. granted, some default gnome behaviour does annoy me, especially the new nautilus. nautilus simply doesn't show me anything useful in a dual window setup as it tries to cram every column of the list view, and the sidebar refuses to go away in my middling-dpi laptop monitor. still i can't live without type to search (somehow missing in nemo).