It sure looks like Gnome 3 took the wind out of Gnome's sails. This correlates with my experience as a Gnome user, as it was Gnome 3 where the project really took on a condescending user-demeaning attitude. Gnome 3 is where the project shifted from 'user friendly' to 'assume the user is an imbecile.' I now tell novices to use XFCE instead.
To add another opinion. I love gnome 3, Its by far the nicest DE I have used on linux and what I would recommend to anyone to start with. I have used XFCE/Mate/Plasma/Unity and none of them worked as well. Its usually not even so much the design (although xfce does look very dated) but that they seem to have such little development resources that many parts of the DE are lagging software wise 5 to 10 years behind what they should.
XFCE is still in the process of upgrading to GTK3 when GTK4 is already out and they still have made no progress on migrating to wayland so its not a usable DE for a modern desktop experience.
Gnome just works and it just works very well. After using xcfe for a year I would go to report multiple bugs only to find they have already been reported years ago while on gnome I have only opened feature requests.
Gnome 3 was when they started taking over keybinds from common software on linux, so you had to hunt down the 3 or 4 places where they were configured to unbind them back for the user.
I just miss Menu bars. Which is why I use Mac OS now (thrown back to using Linux now for a few months until my new MacBook arrives). I used gnome since gnome 1.x and it apps like evince were totally cool and now they are just confusing and hard to use.
Want to print something? Hamburger menu and find the Print Symbol. Want to open a recently opened file? No submenu under „files“, you need to open a new window to find a selection. So much stuff one needs to learn ...
This is exactly my experience of Evince earlier this year when I attempted to upgrade. Some of the menus are on the left and some are on the right and why oh why does it not do what it used to do
FWIW I adore Gnome 3 too. I very recently switched to Linux from Windows 10 on my gaming PC (my last experience with Linux was with Mandrake a couple decades ago...), and of course I had to try every DE under the Sun. None quite works perfectly (for me) like Gnome 3 does. But that's the beauty of it: there's a choice for everyone!
Why does a user care that XFCE is on an old version of GTK? I can see why that would frustrate developers, but I don't see how that surfaces to users as a usability issue.
GTK2 fails in a lot of ways. The main one that bothers me is when I open a GTK2 app, it picks the DPI scale of one of my monitors so when I drag it over, instead of resizing to the new dpi scale, it will either become massive or tiny.
Gnome with wayland supports it but every time you start an xwayland app you notice issues. Native wayland/gtk3 apps have been flawless for me. Things just snap to the new scale when you drag them across.
OK, but I'd still like to know whether a firefox-wayland window will flawlessly snap to the new scaling factor when you drag it to another monitor whose scaling factor is different from the original monitor.
(Same question for Electron apps, particularly VS Code.)
This doesn't make sense to me. Surely scaling the window according to the settings that apply to the monitor it's on is a job for the window manager, and not a job for the software running inside the window?
If the window manager were to upscale a window, you would get the typical artifacting, such as blurriness, from the upscaling. The application toolkit is the best place to do scaling, as it knows how to render text etc.
This is how it works on Windows as well; if the application reports it correctly supports scaling, Windows will let the application handle scaling (otherwise Windows will do it for the application, with the usual caveats).
>if the application reports it correctly supports scaling, Windows will let the application handle scaling
In contrast, unless I am severely mistaken, MacOS has the application render the window normally, then applies a scaling algorithm to the output when the user has set a scaling factor (which on a Mac is set usually through System Preferences > Display) that is not an integer. (I.e., has set fractional scaling.)
I much prefer how Windows and Wayland do it. (When I use Windows, I have the luxury of free choice in the apps I use: I spend .99 of my time in VS Code, Google Chrome and a few recently-written Microsoft-provided apps like Settings. A Windows user who needs old apps or apps written by less sophisticated developers might have a much worse experience.)
In fact, I am leaving MacOS after 11 years largely because of its relatively bad implementation of fractional scaling. I find it too blurry. (If my lifestyle required the use of a laptop, I might have stuck with Apple.) But I am unusual in ways that probably make a good implementation of fractional scaling much more valuable to me that it would be to the average user.
I ran into a bug with GTK2 stalling out with some malformed DBUS messages (symptom: your application takes an additional 20 seconds to start). So I made a sample app that demonstrated the problem, ran some system traces, tried to engage the GTK developer community and only got an "eww, gross, not touching that".
It's pretty clear that GTK2 has been left out to bit rot at this point and it's going to completely collapse at some point. Only option is to update your old apps.
Thanks for the link, I had not found that myself and the workaround suggested (installing the Unity integration module for GTK) worked! It generates a spurious error message about Unity not being on the machine, but that's way less annoying than a 25 second pause on startup.
I also like GNOME, but only with a couple of extensions installed. It totally blows my mind that the way Dash to Dock works is not the default behavior.
Are they perhaps scared of patents? The whole UI tries hard to be not like Windows or Mac OS, for IMHO little user benefit.
I have tried to use Gnome in the past, seeking an easier life, but the multiscreen support was just not good enough. I use i3 instead.
No, they just think the current UI is better, and they're doubling down on that. E.g. in the next version, the app/workspace picker will be shown after login, and not the desktop.
At least for the dash to dock behavior, the Gnome designers opted against a permanent dock to minimise "distractions" and allow one to "focus on the task at hand". This language pervades much of the literature explaining Gnome's design. See for example https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/shell-introdu...
Which is nonsense, because the default behavior is not a permanent dock, it is a hidden dock that appears on mouseover. And it is tuned perfectly IMO, it never comes up by accident and always comes up when I intended to do so.
I agree with the rationale about not having a visible dock, the extra space and lack of distraction is great. But Dash to Dock doesn't harm that goal whatsoever IMO.
> To add another opinion. I love gnome 3, Its by far the nicest DE I have used on linux and what I would recommend to anyone to start with. I have used XFCE/Mate/Plasma/Unity and none of them worked as well.
Sure, XFCE doesn't work as well as Gnome 2. But you can't use Gnome 2 anymore. XFCE is way better than Gnome 3! (At least, as of the time Gnome put out version 3.)
And yeah, this indicates a very serious problem on the part of Gnome.
I've also used a couple of DEs. Unity aside, GNOME is bold enough to stick out and do something different. The GTK human interface guidelines result in apps that are something different (also usable!) and the activities view is a genuinely awesome approach to alt+tab.
KDE is just windows and a bunch of panels. It's expertly put together, but there's really nothing more to it than that. Rainmeter can do much the same that it can on Windows.
I don't understand how this can be argued to be a point in gnome's favor. Gnome's HIG is only followed by the 5 or 6 core apps that ship with it. The rest of my apps do their own thing (yes, even gtk-based ones).
From my personal perspective as someone who uses both KDE and Gnome daily, both are just windows and a bunch of panels. What gives KDE an edge is that it doesn't try to force its weird conventions on me.
Only in the default config... To be nice to Windows expats.
> It's expertly put together, but there's really nothing more to it than that.
It's ultimately configurable! So it can be anything you want. (Plasma can "simulate" any DE with the right config).
Additionally modern KDE/Plasma is more lightweight than "anything GTK". (This may sound strange to the older people but things changed over the last years).
You’re being downvoted but I don’t see a clear reason for it. The parent gave their opinion, you give your opinion, it’s all a fair discussion. I suspect you’re getting downvoted just because people don’t agree with you.
XFCE is still in the process of upgrading to GTK3 when GTK4 is already out and they still have made no progress on migrating to wayland so its not a usable DE for a modern desktop experience.
What's wrong with GTK3? And "modern desktop experience" just reads like meaningless marketing fluff.
There is nothing wrong with GTK3. Clearly we have been using it for a long time just fine. I mention it because gtk3 came out in 2011. Which means it took the xfce team 9 years to perform a migration which still isn't complete yet.
Now I don't want to shit on the work of the xfce team because they work on this on their free time and provide us alternative options and ask nothing in return, but its a data point showing why one would preference Gnome over XFCE. The Gnome team has a lot of resources behind it to just get things done and push new technology out faster than the rest.
The problem is that to get the new features you have to accept a new way of working. One that is worse than the classic MacOS or Windows 2000 was. Another reason many folks are in no hurry.
> It sure looks like Gnome 3 took the wind out of Gnome's sails.
For me, GNOME made three mistakes and made them back to back:
- No 3D graphics, no desktop for you (wrong timing).
- All advanced settings is embedded in a registry-like structure (too much OS X influence, sent the wrong message, made a lot of things hard).
- Extreme paradigm shift without communication (GNOME 3 became something different, almost OS X like, also Canonical's influence did this IMHO).
As a result GNOME3 didn't evolve. It went through metamorphosis. It's core qualities (low resource usage, balance between customization power & approachability, and more importantly familiarity) disappeared. Compounded with backlash (MATE mainly) took the excitement out of GNOME.
> It's core qualities (low resource usage, balance between customization power & approachability, and more importantly familiarity) disappeared.
I think you hit the nail on the head. KDE gave you the full DE experience, but there was that pesky Qt license. GNOME was full GPL/LGPL and it felt like it was built to attract power users. Skins were at the height of their popularity (remember Winamp?), and GNOME gave users an easy way to customize everything without having to muck with some arcane config file format. Every release felt closer to some platonic ideal of a fully customizable yet easy-to-use DE.
Then came the iPhone, and suddenly the world went hyper-modern and hyper-minimal. Restaurants names like "The Heavenly Chicken" are now old-fashioned; today the same restaurant is simply "chicken". GNOME was also affected by this cultural shift, and as you point out, ended up abandoning its core qualities.
I believe that hyper-modernism, like other movements, is just a fad, and in a few years we will "rediscover" modding. Everything will be customizable, from the color of your keyboard to the genes that control your eye color. Who knows, we might even shake the dust off the blink tag.
GNOME left in the middle of a perfect storm IMHO. I remember GTK being much faster and lighter than Qt/KDE and boasting this fact with blog posts with performance metrics.
These years also were problematic for Linux on laptops. Power management, wireless and overall experience was very bad. MacBook had a considerable mind and market share among Linux developers. I remember a slide saying "Linux on desktop cannot move forward because of MacOS's advantages and features on mobile", which was very true for that day.
With the rise of Ubuntu, iPhone and MacOS, GNOME wanted to be the MacOS of Linux. Straightforward, minimal and somewhat capable. However, leaning heavily on GConf, burial of features, dumbing down of UI marked their downfall.
I've moved to KDE before that time and was spoiled by kio, integrated DE features and other stuff. 4.0 was rough but, I endured and KDE became something different. A class by itself. The so-called Qt Agreement and dual-licensing also saved them.
I also believe that customization will return. I wish GNOME best of luck and give me some reason to try them, at least in a VM. I won't change my primary DE, but I'll play with others at least. GTK has some nice qualities but, GNOME3 is not treating its foundations and features as it should IMHO.
I can still dig my .kde folder and look what are the settings and how things configured though. GNOME, while being the flagship DE of GNU movement, feels closed, bloated and devoid of any GNU/Linux spirit. Maybe that's the aim for mass market adoption. I don't know.
---
Addendum:
I want to add that initial GNOME3 and GTK3 documentation was horrible. They moved everything to JS based introspection stuff and generated documentation automatically with no explanation whatsoever. We've tried to develop a gigantic project with GNOME3 and the best way to develop software was via trial'n'error in their new and shiny developer console. It was like being insulted continuously while walking in the dark in a room full of Lego bricks on the floor and sharp corners at head level.
To add insult to injury, their touch implementation was buggy. I dug the WM implementation for two weeks and found a comment basically saying that "We hacked this together. It's not X protocol compliant & needs to be re-implemented from ground up. Since you've found here, maybe you can do that, thanks." Grr...
However, the WM code was very clean and readable. I'll give them that.
I still remember how their developers requested that transmission (a popular third-party torrent app) remove support for system tray icons because Gnome removed them.
They eventually decided to side-step developers and remove system tray support from GTK entirely.
Edit: changed "demanded" to "requested" to be more neutral. See comment bellow.
Reading further down, it's hard for me to see a demand there, I see a heads-up about an upcoming deprecation and a suggestion of what to do about it. The reason the system tray support was deprecated and removed eventually was because nobody was keeping it up-to-date.
> I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I'm sorry that this is the case but it wasn't GNOME's fault that Ubuntu has started this fork. And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry.
This is the point where I realized that person was not commenting in good faith. It simply isn't plausible that a GNOME developer was earnestly unaware of XFCE's existence.
That's like someone on Microsoft's kernel team claiming that they've never heard of QNX.
It's certainly possible, even likely, but such an admission would be a gross condemnation of the knowledge of the developer regarding their necessary domain knowledge.
Maybe for a startup employee or a senior level. For a junior/mid level developer at a large firm transferred from another team, absolutely not. Knowing all alternatives that exist on the market is the job of management, not ICs.
I politely disagree with you. From my experience, cross pollination of ideas from alternatives makes both the person and the product much better.
I personally always try to use some alternatives at the same time (XFCE, KDE, macOS / C++, Python, Go, etc.) to see what others are doing.
This allowed me to think both out of the box and carry good ideas between systems. Some examples:
- Implement just works approach in a set of python utilities developed for a project. Extended development time a little but, removed setup from so many nodes so it compensated itself and allowed me to sleep well at night.
- Copying GNOME2's desktop layout to KDE with some macOS influences allows me to become extremely efficient in my Desktop systems. Since it contains something from everything, everything other DE is familiar and I'm also more efficient in them ("This is UNIX, I know how to use it!" effect).
>I personally always try to use some alternatives at the same time (XFCE, KDE, macOS / C++, Python, Go, etc.) to see what others are doing.
That's great, I do the same thing so I can relate to you, but I hope you understand that the bar for contributions to an open source project is generally more like "did you write code that the maintainer wants to merge" and not "you must familiarize yourself with all alternatives." How you achieve that varies and not everybody has the time to spend searching around on distro forums and Github. Some people might only ever familiarize themselves with one or two open source projects that they use and contribute to. And it's hard for me to see something wrong with that, that's their prerogative.
That's a dismal view, and a condemnation of the quality of work done by such individuals. If they aren't aware of the current state of technology and the market competition, how can they partake meaningfully in decision making?
In a a lot of bigger companies, developers don't need to partake in certain kinds of decision making, management makes the hard decisions for them. Why is this a dismal view? Not everything is a startup, and some people who I've talked to who enjoy the corporate life have told me they see this as a positive because it makes their job easier.
You might say this is "fragmentation." Up until two years ago Ubuntu had a different shell (Unity) with a different API for this, and up until last year XFCE was mostly still using GTK2 and its deprecated APIs. Things are getting better now (Ubuntu's tray is just an ordinary GNOME extension, XFCE supports the new API) but it's taken time to reconcile everything.
It was a big step, yeah, but it was also something new in open source. There are lots of choices if you want desktops that are plainer than Gnome. There's only one choice if you want something simple and slick and sort of luxurious on your Linux machine. I wouldn't be without it, and having just received my Pinephone I'm happy and looking forward to it being with me wherever I go.
> There's only one choice if you want something simple and slick and sort of luxurious on your Linux machine. I wouldn't be without it, and having just received my Pinephone I'm happy and looking forward to it being with me wherever I go.
FWIW, I have a PinePhone and Plasma is just all-around superior to Phosh; faster, more responsive, and uses less battery. I don't even like KDE, but such as it is, Gnome on mobile is not great.
Ten years of pushing touch UI design on us, and it's... Still five to ten years undercooked.
> There's only one choice if you want something simple and slick and sort of luxurious on your Linux machine.
According to /r/unixporn... i3-gaps? :-P
(honestly, people in that subreddit seem to manage to make any window manager look totally unexpected visually, e.g. see this[0] for a DWM customization - someone from Suckless must be digging their grave so they can roll in it :-P).
XFCE is barely maintained, unfortunately. The recent port to Gtk3 lost some functionality as a result of regressions in the toolkit: keybindings in menus are no longer hover-rebindable, and the themes have not been properly ported, leaving me only with bloated Adwaita. For some reason, the package with window manager themes has not been released for 4.12 (the package from 4.10 works fine, though). There’s no path for migration to Wayland. Integration with display managers (i.e. screen locking) and systemd’s power management is flaky.
And I am saying all this with regret, as a long time user; I consider it the best desktop environment I have used.
I almost wish they had forked Gtk2 instead of porting to Gtk3 (or even more crazily, ported Gtk2 to Gdk3 to take advantage of ‘plumbing’ improvements in the latter, like Wayland support), but I do realise they just don’t have the manpower.
Why migrate form a project that decays because of lack of manpower to another tiny one which could end the same?
Did you give Plasma a try recently? It's featureful, configurable, maintained, and lightweight (even more than the newest XFCE to the surprise of many).
I've been running KDE since I set up my computer to work from home back in February. I don't have the latest hardware, since I mostly built it from parts I had lying around, but it's not bottom of the barrel. 8-core AMD FX-8350, 20GB of DDR3, GeForce GT 720.
One problem I've had with KDE is that after running it for a few hours, it would get really really slow. It was so slow that I could actually watch the title bar redraw when I would switch windows. Turns out that a 1GB graphics card isn't enough to do compositing at 4K when you have more than a few windows on the screen. Fair enough.
So I turn off hardware compositing in firefox, chrome, and plasma. I boot the computer, and check memory usage in nvidia-settings. With just plasma running and a few docked widgets, I've already used 342/978MB. Perhaps the widgets are at fault, but I'm pretty I was able to run fvwm and gkrellm on my S3 Virge back in the day, and it had far less than 1GB of video memory.
I also notice that sometimes I lock my computer for the night, then I come back in the morning to login, and the hard disk churns for minutes before I can type my password. I never had this problem with xscreensaver. There's plenty of RAM available. I know my 5400rpm RAID 1 setup isn't the fastest, but this is absurd.
Then there's the K gear menu. Why is it so slow? I click the icon, go to Applications, then go to Utilities. Then I wait a few seconds. Eventually they all show up. Then I go back to All Applications. The menu stalls for a few seconds. What is it doing? I don't know. The fluxbox menu never stalled like this.
The default picture viewer seems to be gwenview. I've imported a bunch of pictures from my phone and they are stored on my HDD. I double-click on an image, and then I want. And I wait. And I wait. No indication that it's doing anything; maybe my double-click didn't register. So I double-click again. I wait some more, and suddenly I see two gwenview windows. After a few seconds neither one has fully initialized the UI or loaded the image. I close one of them, wait some more, and eventually the image shows up. Why is it so slow? I don't remember images loading this slow in xv or eog. Should I be using digikam? I just used the default.
The apps in the system tray are terribly slow. Let's say I want to change my volume while a video is playing. That should be simple enough. So I click on the volume control. I wait for it to show up. Then I drag the volume slider. It is slow enough to respond that I overshoot. Oops, too low. Bring it back up again. Overshoot again. I really need to set up some volume up/down key bindings so I don't have to mess with that thing. Oh, and my headphone volume always starts out muted after I boot the computer. No idea why. The slider doesn't show up in KDE, but I can adjust it just fine in alsamixer. I blame pulseaudio. If I were young and without kids I might have time to figure out how to go back to OSS. I remember when sound was as simple as running sndconfig and then listening to that wonderful voice say, "Hello, my name is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux, 'Linux'". The good old days. Life was simple.
I think it's fine that they assume it; imbecile's need interfaces too.
My problem with GNOME developers is that they consistently deny that they cater to the least technically savvy base and use euphemisms such as “normal people”. They are not “normal” they are technically far less literate than the normal man, and they too of course should be able to own and operate a computer.
GNOME in fact seems to think it's own users to be even less savvy than I do, but they continue to deny this.
The other problem is that everything that Red Hat has it's tendrils in overflows with meaningless marketing language such as that, in general.
I idle in a Linux IRC channel where support is provided voluntarily 24/7x365.
The fact that your assessment doesn't stand up to is that "normal man" seems misplaced. The average person I know cannot figure out how to install Linux much less troubleshoot issues along the way. I don't think this makes them imbeciles or anything of the like. Even GNOMEs definition of a normal person is probably off kilter because the bar for their basic user is so high.
The average adult is unskilled to a degree that most of HN would find surprising. There's a really good article[0] on this from the Nielsen Norman Group's blog. 26% of adults in the OECD can't use a computer, 14% are unable to perform tasks like "find all emails from John Smith", another 26% are unable to perform tasks like "look through these emails and use the information in them to book a meeting room".
I think that, whatever definition of "normal" GP was using, it's automatically excluding anywhere from 45% to 95%+ of the population.
They're escalating levels of technical skill, as defined in the linked article. I see no indication that there should be significant overlap.
While young adults might be better able to e.g. use Gmail, I'd be willing to bet most of them can't configure and recompile DWM, modify the gtk3 settings.ini by hand, or make changes to their xorg.conf.
Being able to install Linux is itself something of a quality filter. Without aid from someone competent, those who cannot ascertain how to write an image to a usb stick and get their computer to boot from it won't be using Linux.
There used to be Linux distributions that installed to one's C: drive and booted as a windows launch option; I haven't heard of that being a thing in years.
In retrospect, the years following Gnome 3's release are really what hurt my enthusiasm for linux on the desktop.
Prior to that I'd had a few different linux systems (I started with Gentoo... that was an odyssey and a half) and at the time the mainstream-ness of Debian and Ubuntu pushed me into what I perceived to be more hipster RPM distros like Fedora. Well of course Fedora being what it is, they had Gnome 3 and I used it as a daily driver on my Thinkpad X220 doing web dev/devops (we called it "sysadmin" back then) for an indie marketing firm.
Well, Gnome 3 was neat at first, but they made what I felt were several boneheaded decisons such as removing options from menus, removing menus entirely in some cases, gconf, and of course the early 2010s were peak "copy whatever the fuck the Freedesktop people are doing without critical thinking" so of course systemd featured prominently.
Those couple of years of tweaking and fixing systemd problems and finding menu options being removed seemingly every fucking week really killed any enjoyment I had and it's part of the reason I own a mac today. I have better things to do with my time than find workarounds for whatever way Poettering's latest fetish is broken. I'm sick of awful battery life, awful track pads, awful suspend-resume, awful external display support, and awful wifi.
I'm convinced the only people who have good things to say about using linux (or BSD for that matter, been there done that, no thanks) on a laptop are the kind of people who keep their "laptops" on the same desk, plugged in to ethernet, and are effectively using a desktop with poor thermals, and I think a large part of the reason why the desktop linux ecosystem is in such a poor state today is because of the choices made by some Freedesktop.org people and aped by the rest of the community back in the late 2000's and early 2010s.
The last time I used Linux on a laptop, I had to edit a config file to get it to suspend or hibernate when I close the lid. Even then, sometimes it kept running, and I would run out of battery. To me that seems like such a basic feature, and it's always worked fine on Windows. After waiting a decade and a half for someone smart to solve this problem, I eventually just started running Windows and Cygwin on all my laptops. Problem solved.
> I'm convinced the only people who have good things to say about using linux (or BSD for that matter, been there done that, no thanks) on a laptop are the kind of people who keep their "laptops" on the same desk, plugged in to ethernet, and are effectively using a desktop with poor thermals
Good for you for making your own decisions, but don't be a condecending arschloch. Personally I prefer linux because it works fine and consider Apple is overpriced piece of spyware and many their users smug idiot hipsters.
Ha this is my experience exactly! The first few years of gnome 3 was nothing but frustrating XFCE was such a breath of fresh air. Running crouton with XFCE @ 1:1 on a second hand Chromebook pixel from Google IO made me switch to MacBooks because there was really nothing else with the same build quality between chassis, display, trackoad and audio quality. Chromebook pixels were really quite something.
In my opinion the shift from desktop to mobile across the wider industry took the wind out of Gnome's sails (and desktops in general, no matter the platform). It feels like there's been very little (visible) progress made on any desktop in the last 10 years.
The problem is Gnome seemed to look at mobile and "pre-sabotage" itself. Both Gnome 3 and Unbuntu Unity wound-up creating "tablet/mobile ready" shells when no one was going to be using them that way. Tablets only seemed to be the wave of the future because they were new and everyone was buying them. It only became evident later that laptops were going stick around for a while and be what most people still used if they were doing "real work".
But with the narrative being "this is the future", they were more or less pressured into it. The designers as well as programmers are volunteers and I would imagine designers want to work on the "cutting edge" even if that cutting edge is a complete disaster for users (just Microsoft's redesigned UI was).
Their target wasn't just tablets, but any device with a touchscreen and/or a small screen. As a Netbook user, I loved Unity and was excited about the Gnome 3 shell. It seemed like the logical progression of Ubuntu Netbook Remix.
What changed is that display and battery technology got better. I went from carrying around a tiny PC with an undersized keyboard (remember the Eee PC?) to one that weighs less, has a full size keyboard, and sports a display larger than the one the came with my first desktop computer. On this hardware, a traditional desktop environment feels cozy, while Gnome Shell feels foreign.
I owned one of the later models of the Asus EeePC and let me tell you, Gnome 3 ran like a old dog on it. Totally unusable. I don't know how you could use it. The processor was awful, the screen resolution tiny, while Gnome was a CPU hog and wasted screen space the eeepc simply didn't have with spacial bloat of interfaces evidently designed to be fat fingered on touch screens the eeepc didn't have.
That, plus the shift to SAAS apps so that everything runs in a web browser. Basically, the two things I have open most of the time are Firefox and a bunch of terminal windows.
I think the shift to web apps and repackaged web apps happened largely because of how insanely hard it is to roll a decent multiplatform app between mac, windows and the various linux platforms even before considering mobile. For example, the OGL backend for GTK3 has been broken on MacOS for years and while there's been a rewrite for GTK4, porting from 3 to 4 is non trivial and so is maintaining 3+4 so GG if you're a small project.
True enough, but Gnome has the advantage of being the basis of Phosh + being able to share applications with it, as per on Pinephone and Librem 5.
It works as a converged desktop too. Windows can't do that, OSX is only just getting there. It is impressive that an open source project is so ready for it, really.
The problem with GNOME as the basis of Phosh is that little work has been done to optimize GNOME for low-memory, low-CPU-power environments. The Pinephone has limited memory (especially the first board with only 2GB of RAM) and an ancient, low-end processor, and while it will run all this GNOME stuff, it does so only at a snail’s pace. On the Pinephone takes several seconds just to open the wi-fi settings to activate or deactivate wi-fi, for example, something that most mobile-phone users today expect to be a near-instant thing, because on Android it is just a quick swipe and tap.
I’m not talking about the Phosh executable as much as all the other things that Phosh on Mobian is meant to provide an interface with: so much of those preinstalled applications and libs in Mobian are derived from the GNOME project, and they just haven’t been optimized enough to run well on the PinePhone’s hardware.
Oh I see, misunderstood you there. Yeah, many apps are basically just the desktop version with some pre-configured scaling to make them barely usable - but as far as I know it is only by necessity until the mobile friendlier alternative emerges.
But while it is good to see the advances mobile linux GUIs make, they are still far from usable as a primary device :/
True, but I also feel this might also be part in staying relevant with touch displays. The dumbification of UI coincided with the rise of tablet computers and touchscreen devices. Windows 8 came out around that time too.
I personally preferred Gnome 2 when Gnome 3 came out, but I've gotten pretty used to the top-left corner flick after a couple weeks. I sometimes do it on Windows and get disappointed when nothing happens :) This sounds somewhat perverse, but I kind of like the fact that it takes a little extra effort to switch applications. I'd say it keeps me maybe 5-10% more productive!
Ideally, UI's should be tailored for the device they get installed on, but I'm happy Gnome was able to accept a few design compromises in order to keep moving the project forward.
> True, but I also feel this might also be part in staying relevant with touch displays.
Undoubtedly - at about the same time, they introduced a swipe-to-unlock screen which is crucial on a tablet or smartphone, but useless on a desktop or laptop.
The thing is, Gnome don't seem to have achieved any success in the smartphone/tablet market. So with the benefit of hindsight, trading off mouse and keyboard power user UX to improve touchscreen UX doesn't seem to have paid dividends.
I agree with you on Gnome 3's attitude - I know in design there's a point to be made for being bold, but I wish Gnome 3 had reconsidered.
I know that this is probably me being old and resisting change, but: I switched to Mate (which is essentially Gnome 2) and I haven't looked back. For me, a Desktop Manager's job is getting out of my way, which is exactly what Gnome 2 achieved. Gnome 3, OTOH, often got in my way.
Why not KDE? It easily seems like the best Linux DE, and it's so weird that Gnome is so often the default in comparison. As a bonus, all the best Linux apps are Qt-based (e.g., Dolphin [compared to which any other file manager, including Windows's Explorer, will seem unusable], Okular, Gwenview, Clementine, and Kate).
I've gotta second kde. I went through a bunch of different DE's and window managers and stuff. KDE was the one I eventually settled on and haven't looked back. It's easy to customize and setup everything just the way you want it and after that it stays out of your way. The default qt apps like you say are all great pieces od software. Going back to windows explorer after using dolphin is like jumping back in time 20 years. Kate's been my favourite text editor for years. It's got just the right balance of being light, but full of useful things.
I wanna throw in KDE connect too, honestly, the best and easiest way to work with an android device from a PC hands down.
I personally use KDE and XFCE every day. While KDE is very nice, it reflects the spirit of the Linux very well. Extremely customizable, extremely extensible. When everything settles down, it's a productivity monster, and I love it.
On the other hand, XFCE is much more approachable and usable for a newcomer. It's not intimidating. It's not infinite. It's more resource friendly and straightforward. For a newcomer I recommend GNOME or XFCE. When they're seasoned enough, they automatically gravitate towards KDE most of the time.
Historical reasons due to Qt's original license and the whole C vs C++ on the Linux world (both are anyway Bell Labs languages designed for UNIX).
So C camp went with GNOME, and C++ camp with KDE.
Naturally then GNOME got bindings for C++ (actually quite good), however it is a big difference being the main language or one that always needs someone to write bindings.
KDE does have some nice applications but it's a bit of a usability nightmare. Fine for power users or people who want 238 separate screens in their control panel.
Can you please explain why it seems obviously superior to GNOME? I'm in the market for a new DE after using i3 for a while and would be interested in your reasoning.
KDE is an extremely integrated and batteries included DE. File manager can manage SVN/Git/Mercurial repositories and connect to anything. Akonadi can handle your mail and calendars at the background. Included apps (Gwenview and Okular) are very powerful.
Desktop effects are not gimmicky but useful (e.g: dim inactive windows). Power management makes sense and is reliable.
KDE can behave like anything you like and doesn't bury power-user related features somewhere. It's all visible. Multi-speaker & multi sound card management is also better, more obvious.
I used KDE for a while and liked it, but KDE 4.0 burned me and I never looked back.
I've heard it's much better now, but haven't tried it. Okular, and gwenview were always nice, even during 4.0 days. Amarok used to be great, though I've not tried Clementine and I'm no longer a user of that sort of music library software. The reason I don't recommend KDE today is because I'm just not very familiar with it.
> I've heard it's much better now, but haven't tried it.
I'm using KDE since 3.5.x including 4.0 release train. Its infinitely better. Stable, fast, extensible and infinitely useful (esp. Dolphin's services).
I'm not using too many widgets and/or activities, but it's better than anything I use (incl. macOS, albeit they're close).
It's safe to come back. The bad old days are long past; KDE is a great DE and you should revisit now. Kubuntu 20.04 LTS is an excellent choice and will serve you for many years.
KDE is an unstable, bloated and buggy mess. I give it a shot about once a year and uninstall it when the DE crashes; it doesn't matter what hardware I use, it never lasts longer than a few hours.
Are you trying nightly builds? Or some suspicious distri (Like KDE Neon)?
KDE is rock stable in my experience. Runs for weeks or sometimes even month (between kernel update reboots) without any crash or this like.
I'm running Debian Testing. So it's usually not the newest release of the desktop. I guess this makes it so rock solid for me.
Anecdotical story regarding stability of a DE: I had to use Windows 10 lately. I think the compositor crashes quite often if one has to may open windows. :-D
The change from GNOME 1 to 2 was much greater than the change from 2 to 3, and there were people who complained (and attributed malice to GNOME contributors) on both occasions.
The project has a point of view: that software freedom should be accessible and usable for everyone.
If that doesn't excite you, cool. But it has improved the entire FLOSS / Linux stack over the last couple of decades, whether you use GNOME or not.
It looks to me like the build up to gnome 3 caused a large increase in contributors, which then naturally petered off back to pre-3.0 levels. Could it be possible your personal experience as a gnome user is clouding your interpretation of the data?
I think for novices the most friendly experience is Pantheon, the desktop environment shipped with the elementary OS distro.
https://elementary.io/ (you can either donate, or choose to donate $0 and get it for free).
Now with regards to:
> Gnome 3 is where the project shifted from 'user friendly' to 'assume the user is an imbecile.'
I don't think that is what they had in mind. If I recall correctly one of the design motivations for Gnome 3 was removing the excessive distractions found in the numerous graphical elements of most desktop environments and make things a bit more minismalistic.
I have been using KDE since pre 1.0. Back in the days my internet was so slow I went to the university and copied KDE down on 5? floppy disks.
I used KDE through all iterations and looked at Gnome in dismayal.
Two years ago I tried Gnome. I was fed up with KDE screwing up with Wayland. And should I tell you? I love Gnome!
I was productive from day two. Ok, its opinionated and there is much less to configure than in KDE. But otoh it keeps me focused on work instead of fiddling with the DE. Imho a DE should just do two things: Make frequent steps easy to do but otherwise go out of the way. Gnome does that for me.
Kde took a turn at 5 / plasma. It's not the long pages of configuration anymore. It's close to as opinionated as gnome or at least not putting the options in your face until you ask for it. It's a massive difference from kde 3 times.
I couldn't stand gnome shell and moved to plasma as it was starting. Didn't really experience option overload.
To paraphase Churchill, Gnome is the worst DE, except for all the others.
I don't particularly love Gnome, but it's still what I use, as I don't really like any of the others more.
Gnome Shell has a lot of javascript, which must go down in history as one of the worst 'modern computing' ideas ever.
