linuxmemes

My problem with Gnome is the foundation itself.

They act like they know best, and rarely listen to user feedback.

They act like Apple, and that is very bad.

Not only that, but they also act like they are the default and only desktop on Linux, and rarely if ever cooperate with other desktop groups to make things work smoothly.

They are dragged kicking and screaming into following standards, and were the biggest source of NACKs (effectively a "veto") on the Wayland protocol and a huge reason why Wayland still isn't complete after over a decade of design.

The gnome desktop is pretty, but it is not functional. You can make it functional by installing gobs of extensions, but those extensions don't follow a cohesive workflow concept, and often break with updates. It's like trying to mod Skyrim or Minecraft.

To contrast that, KDE:

• Explicitly listens to its users and has scheduled times for specifically taking in user feedback (within the scope of broad goals)

• Actively works to be interoperable with other environments

• Follows standards and pushes them forward

• Has all the functionality out of the box, and can be made pretty with extensions/assets (the inverse of Gnome).

• Functionality mostly doesnt break on updates unless it's major (like switching to Wayland as the primary development target).

I don't say much about it because it's stupid to argue, but I've used a LOT of different desktop interfaces over the past 45+ years (yeah, really!), and GNOME...well, GNOME sucks. When Gnome3 was first released we all had high hopes for it improving on Gnome2 (which for those of us on Unix systems was a huge improvement over CDE), and instead it was buggy, clunky, awkward, and an enormous resource hog. Oh yeah, and it was massively unconfigurable. AND it continued to not improve for many many years, until most people I know switched to KDE or one of the other environments (MATE, Cinnamon, and xfce were very popular).

Gnome 4x added a touchscreen paradigm, whether you had a touchscreen or not, and made the experience worse in the process.

If you like it, great! Use it and love it all you want! I'll play with it once every year or so just to see if someone has finally designed something that doesn't suck so badly, but for a functional desktop, no thanks.

I think the fact that most of the 'fringe' desktops are well-known in the community because of people trying to escape GNOME is pretty telling.

If you used Gnome back in the day you know there was a lot of that configurability built in. Then one day the developer decided to start taking it away. Slowly but surely all the ability to configure Gnome was removed. If you experienced this arc like I did you were left scratching your head.

Yes KDE was always more configurable, but removing what configurability Gnome did have made it less useful. For power users this is a big deal. It is like a company taking away all your features and thinking you are going to like it.

I think the gnome haters are just the loudest. I've had all of the same issues with KDE and gnome has just always worked for me. Sure it's not as customizable, but it gets the job done without annoying issues.

The system tray thing irks me to no end. Some apps still use one to control things and you have to use hacky plugins to get them to show. Other than that there's a lot I do like about gnome. Plasma suits my needs more though. So much more you can do with it.

well if you're sick in bed this will be an easy fight...

I elbow slam your face, your turn

"Fight me if you want, I'm sick in bed and have time."

I'm also sick and in bed, and this is such an appealing offer of a sparring match, but alas, I've never used Gnome

https://developer.gnome.org/hig/

Just the left foot only

In my experience, KDE Plasma is surprisingly actually better than Gnome for tablet use. You would think that Gnome's more minimal and chunky UI would make it a better fit, but Plasma just has a lot more little usability QOL features.

That you need an extension to disable the overview at startup still boggles my mind and the arrogance of the developers in the thread that started it didn't lessen my antipathy for Gnome at all.