Gnome is good for people who like their philosohy and design and opt for less customisation. That’s enough.
Pretending that Gnome is good because you can customise it with just these few tools (that will totally not break with every upgrade) however is stupid and in line with “look Windows is totally okay after you spend 12 hours with tweaking the install with these 3rd party tools”.
that will totally not break with every upgrade
While I agree that it’s a lot more brittle than it has any right to be, it hasn’t been that bad in my experience. For example, it only took me 1-2 days after its official release to upgrade to Fedora 44 (and with it, GNOME 50). Out of the 5/6 extensions I had installed, only 1 has broken on me. Arguably, that is one too many. But as GNOME offers a very stable and polished experience otherwise, I suppose this is pretty acceptable.
Ok but being good out of the box where i dont have to fuck with it is better. Gnome 3 is a mess.
I would possibly upvote this if it were just a GNOME customization guide, and if it didn’t try to insist that “GNOME is good, actually.”
I like Gnome and have been using it as long as I’ve been using Linux. The best part of open source is you can use whatever works best for you.
What I do wonder is why people who don’t like it need to remind everyone they don’t on any Gnome thread.
What I do wonder is why people who don’t like it need to remind everyone they don’t on any Gnome thread.
Because if people aren’t vocal about their opinions then they get drowned out by those who are.
If all everyone saw was “gnome is good” but never “gnome is bad,” then we can expect other DEs to start copying the bad ideas gnome has because they never see criticism of it.
But let’s be real. You already had an inkling of why this is and you’re feigning ignorance because you don’t want people criticizing things you like.
because they make bold , divisive design choices. Also, this title is worded in a conflictive way, so people come in here to gripe about the parts of gnome they dislike.
I’ve said it before in this thread, I hate what they are doing, but I’m glad they’re doing their own thing.
Yep, GNOME isn’t for me and that’s okay. I probably should give it another try some point soon. I think last I tried was 2022. And every significant update several addons would break for days and weeks. Maybe it’s gotten better in the last 4 to 5 years. But when it comes to customization I don’t need any KDE addons. It just works outside the app menu bar MacOS like setting.
I had a good laugh the other day though about the questionable 14 year old decision that the gnome team made that has left their users confused and unable to log out in many cases.
I probably should give it another try some point soon. I think last I tried was 2022. And every significant update several addons would break for days and weeks.
well, it might have gotten more stable, but when I tried it on Nyarch, it has only gotten more gnomish in the intervening time.
Admittedly, Nyarch probably didn’t help it look more “serious” but I think the general design principles of gnome were similar to when I installed it accidentally on debian 13.
After installing all of these tools, the actual tweaking can commence.
KDE users: “Look at what they need to mimic a fraction of our power.”
even fucking XFCE has out the box “easy” customisation
All of the old 2000s DEs were more customizable, including GNOME itself.
For me what ended up being an important difference is that Remote Desktop is a screen share in KDE (meaning it only works if you’re already logged on, everyone sees what you are doing and the remote view does not adapt to the monitor you’re connecting with). In Gnome it is a real private remote session with virtual monitors.
I am told something like NoMachine will solve this on KDE but I haven’t set that up yet.
The KDE team is also working on solving this with their new login manager being a part of the puzzle, but it will take a while until it all works.
Is karousel on kde already as good as paperwm on gnome?
I’ve used karousel for months already. While I really like the paperwm-like flow, configuration is very fiddly and I would be hard-pressed to recommend it to other people. It simply needs better integration into plasma to make it worthwhile for most users.
Thx.
I have no idea what either of those are, lol.
they make it so that each new window you open pushes the current one to the “left” so you can navigate between windows right to left, like carousel views on websites
I’m a big fan of GNOME for the opposite reason, I like the default workflow and use it completely vanilla. If you’re going to tweak it you may as well use KDE, but the vanilla GNOME workflow is actually pretty great if you embrace it fully as it is.
Does it have taskbar icons yet?
For me, GNOME for trackpad/touchscreen and KDE for mouse/keyboard. Just updated to 50 on my FW13 (Fedora), it works well but prolly should’ve waited because I use a few extensions. In time, I want to configure Niri, but uni comes first 🥲
The copium is strong in this one.
Until gnome fixed the issue where their logon screen runs as a separate user that can’t verify Thunderbolt devices, I couldn’t use Gnome if I wanted to.
And Gnome looks very nice, but I don’t think I could develop apps for GTK4, they need to get their asses on finishing it and making it actually work.
I tried it out. I ran into constant framework side errors and gaps.
And Gnome looks very nice
gnome looks like an ipad alternate UI made for kids.
That’s why I like it) Simple, accessible, big buttons, high-quality icons. Personally I use KDE when on GNU/Linux, but I definitely see what in GNOME would appeal to people sharing a computer with grandparents or children, or people who value design aesthetics more than extra functionality.
I am 100% supportive of Gnome users and devs, and its right to exist. My opinion is that it looks the way it does and I wanted to share it. Some people prefer it for various reasons, and I think the reasons why I dislike it is why people like it.
I’ll say one thing as a positive; at least it’s doing something different, which is nice. I just don’t like the different that it’s doing.
Blg fan of fedora atomic Cosmic been my daily for awhile but ran into a show stopper bug (for me) with release 44
So as wait on that resolve thought I’d try KDE again, and it just felt so busy & cluttered lol
Back to Silverblue with few tweaks and it feels just like home. Simple, beautiful, elegant & snappy
Gnome is fantastic indeed, no hurry to leave
We each have our personal zen, options are good
thought I’d try KDE again, and it just felt so busy & cluttered lol
But KDE is highly customizable … every single bit of that ‘clutter’ could easily be turned off and removed if you tried. If you want to, you can make KDE show you an absolutely blank screen with nothing on it at all.
But have you heard of Niri?
an application with an odd name, designed entirely to easily install and update the Firefox GNOME Theme, which transforms Firefox (or LibreWolf, in my case) into something that much more closely resembles a GNOME/libadwaita application
When I used to be around in reddit once read a post or a comment from someone who claimed to be a gnome dev calling for a direct port of firefox to wayland to solve all of those gui kit issues once and for all.
Someone else said such thing was not possible - you can port gui apps’ kits to gui kits, not to desktop rendering engines - but a few days ago I also read something about developing an app directly on wayland and that it would be really difficult.
At this point I don’t know what to believe but if this can be done it would be awesome. It’s kind of funny that the linux version of firefox, written in gtk, needs extra stuff to look good and integrated even in freaking gnome
developing an app directly on wayland and that it would be really difficult.
yes it would - you’d just end up reimplementing work from projects like SDL and gtk, this is why we invented libraries.
firefox and gtk
firefox is gtk3 based, which is substantially different from gtk4, and moreso adwaita. there’s some discussion about porting to gtk4, but for large projects like these shit is slow moving - just look at how long steam is taking to port their client to wayland.
I like GNOME apps. I don’t like the DE that much.
Funny, for me it’s the exact opposite. The design language of most of the apps is stupid. I’m on a PC. I have a mouse and a widescreen monitor. Why does the app have a single column smartphone app layout where everything is gigantic and the right mouse button is never used for anything?
Try out the PaperWM extension. It transforms Gnome into a linear window manager like niri.
Welcome to the losing side, I guess. At least an ancient egyptian would enjoy the fact that we’ve regressed to using hieroglyphs instead of proper written words in our menu systems.
“Press the hamburger menu in the upper corner” “the what now?” “Press the three horizontal lines in the upper corner and then look for the cogwheel” compared to “Press “File” in the upper corner and then choose “Settings””.
If making design and aesthetics easier in multiple languages means regressing to hieroglyphs that change meaning depending on context, then I rather have a menu that grows a bit unseemly when using a language with longer words than English.
I can’t use apps with hamburger menus. They’re trash.
What a lazy fucking design. We used to have menu bars, abd I still feel macos is the only OS that uses them correctly.
They only exist because websites can’t change the menu bar, and phone apps are lazily implemented.
the right mouse button is never used for anything?
I’m curious, what exactly would you want RMB to do? And the reasons why it’s not used much is twofold, lack of discoverability and touch based device compatibility (which isn’t just phones btw).
Open context menus.
I know the reasons. I do not agree with the reasons.
Most GNOME apps do use context menus though, there’s nothing about adwaita or gtk that blocks this.
The blockers are in Gnome’s design guidelines, which many Gnome-related apps tend to follow.
The quintessential app I am thinking of here is Bottles, which has one of the worst UIs I’ve had the displeasure of using in recent memory.
The blockers are in Gnome’s design guidelines
And yet most gnome apps use context menus… They’re just not a priority given that any functionality in a context menu needs to be duplicated elsewhere so that people can find it. This isn’t just a gnome thing btw, it’s the way UI everywhere is going: Hamburger menus all the way down.
bottles
I like it, i use lutris though because i don’t care for the sandboxing.










