I already see the commends and only have one question, why are Linux users so fucking dum? countless people enjoy KDE, countless enjoy Gnome and others prefer Cinnamon or Pantheon, can’t we agree to say which we like/don’t like whenever it’s relevant rather than trash on the other DEs every time the name pops up?..
Someone here used many words to try to convince me that I was incapable of good decision making and therefore owed him and the thread an apology for saying that I liked debloated OS installs while also liking GNOME.
The way I see it, gnome is friendly enough to use that new users who don’t care about its flexibility will continue using it without issues while people who are bothered by the lack of flexibility are knowledgeable enough to change their DE or install a spin of the distro with their favourite DE
Most people just want a browser and a word processor plus simple spreadsheets once in a blue moon. For extremely simple and popular use cases many distros already work okayish OOTB, including those with GNOME DE.
While I absolutely don’t like GNOME and its design principles (prefer KDE), but I can see why it works for many people.
Now, for anything but the most popular use cases, that’s a whole different story altogether. I just spent the whole weekend installing and reinstalling every imaginable flavour or Arch and OpenSUSE and trying to get Hyprland or KDE to work on my NVIDIA gpu without issues and failing, then trying to stop my screen from flickering like a drowning sailor desperately trying to Morse code and SOS while on Alder Lake iGPU, and failed too. Two hours ago I wiped for what seemed like the 420th time and went crawling back to W11.
I can’t be the only one who couldn’t care less about Epiphany. I have zero faith behind a completely random browser that’s just made on the side. What’s the point, who is it for? Firefox beats it on like every use case scenario. Waste of dev time imo.
The ultimate desktop would be something like: KDE’s usability in terms of a bottom bar, notification area and menu (or ArcMenu and Dash to Panel under GNOME) + the design consistency of GNOME + optional desktop icons + window switching like Apple’s old Exposé or the current Windows Task View (Win+Tab).
Windows got one thing (almost) right, fast and snappy multitasking and that’s about it. GNOME adds long animations and takes the focus from the applications to itself - it become the “center of user’s attention”. This isn’t good, a DE should be almost invisible, as minimalistic as it can be so the user can quickly switch between windows and get their job done specially on smaller screens. I guess most people run/enjoy GNOME never touched Apple’s old Exposé (macos Tiger and before?) or the current Windows Task View (Win+Tab) thus aren’t aware how far and how productive they can be on a very small screen with a simple way to move around.
The problem with plugins is what we can see with desktop icon extensions nowadays. GNOME removed their native desktop icons some time ago and all the subsequent extensions that popped up to get that functionality simply aren’t are good - you can’t drag and drop to some other places, there are weird things happening when you move icons and/or the selection box doesn’t make sense.
Gnome was nothing but terrible for me. Lacking of very basic features and many apps, including the freaking file explorer, would constantly crash. I cannot fathom how people use this garbage. Really made me appreciate KDE even more.
For the file explorer it mostly boiled down to the fact that every time I searched something, which is mandatory since it does not have a "jump to" feature, it would very likely crash.
That seems very convoluted to me. Let's say I have a mod folder for a game, somewhat deep folder structure thanks to Wine and such, containing hundreds of mod folders and sub folders. I download updated mod files for one mod, how would you quickly reach the corresponding folder and copy the files into that? I typically have a shortcut to the mod folder in my gaming folder, so that's somewhat quickly to reach. I'd then go into / through the correct subfolders by typing out the letters contained in the folder names and then just copypasta the corresponding files. Is there a better way than that without losing track of things?
Hmm. This case comes up for me regularly. I usually have a hidden file on level lower than my home directory that is linked to the directory in question. I then launch nautilus, and drag and drop as needed.
If it happens often enough I create a bash script that automatically launches nautilus at that location.
That's similar to the shortcut I mentioned, but wouldn't really solve reaching the corresponding sub folders within the folder structure. It would only work if I'd threw all the mod files in the same folder, and pray that the mod authors never actually rename their mod files and that I never have to remove any specific mod. I tried that once, it wasn't a good idea. :)
Yeah, that's as far as I know usually just graphical mods, mostly of the kinky kind.
It gets more complicated when you look at mods that add functionality through script mods, with various mod dependencies, update breakages, etc.
Games like the Sims, or Bethesda RPGs, which are highly moddable and where you install hundreds or even thousands of mods & assets.
You were using a niche distro maintained by a single person and encountered problems? Shocking.
To be fair, I used Nobara myself for a bit until I got tired of suffering from the problems GE was creating himself. But regardless, experience on something like Nobara is not a fair way to evaluate Gnome. Try it on actual Fedora or something else mainstream that isn't constantly fuckering around with all kinds of shit and breaking stuff.
I'm not sure what he could've done that affected the file explorer to such a degree? And obviously that was just one extreme example of many other problems I had. I don't think he removed basic functionalities that I require, I am pretty sure that's just Gnome being so hell bent on being puristic that they just don't ship with it, which breaks my workflow entirely without offering any sort of replacement steps.
And if his stuff breaks so much, why does KDE just works? I only have / had two issues since then. First one was that Dolphin just crashed instantly, which was a known Dolphin bug and required me to manually create the thumbnail folder. The second is the inability to drag & drop out of Firefox, like my finished downloads can't be dragged into a folder anymore - and I know this was a feature from my previous distros (namely EndeavourOS & Manjaro). So, if it was caused by GE, then surely there would be all sorts of things broken with KDE too, right?
@Bogasse and @Gutless2615 just to make my position clear, I hate KDE and all it’s design inconsistency but they actually got a better bottom bar / notifications area. GNOME designs things well but they kinda kill it all with their backwards approach and total refusal to have basic desktop functionality.