It’s hard to believe that KDE used to be considered one of the worst DEs around and now it’s like Gnome is getting worse while KDE is getting better and better.
What is happening to GNOME is truly one of the biggest fumbles in OSS. They could have just continued improving things, but instead choose the path of most resistance, refused to commit to any logical strategies for further improvement, and are now stuck in a loop of nothing getting done
Seems to be an organizational thing, at least some who try to work with- or are part of the Gnome Foundation mentioned this. Apparently KDE e.V. got a way more flexible structure with work groups, easier ways to propose changes etc. while Gnome gets awfully stuck with their panel/council structure (not sure which one is the right word in english).
When mentioning the problems with extensions (rather furiously since I just lost some work again and installed KDE) I was told both: Go on an create a PR, but also that “this was discussed and a panel decided against changing anything”. Obviously no one will waste dozens, if not hundreds of hours of their time even just creating a Proof-of-Concept for sth. like an extension API if some authority already decided that nothing is supposed to be done about it.
As long as your Gnome environment can’t gracefully crash without taking absolutely everything with it (like with KDE or other DEs) there’s no way in hell anyone should use Gnome on computers where actual work is being done, let alone something critical.
I always try KDE and after a while all the quirks and odd behaviors make me go back to GNOME. GNOME may not be easily themeable but it is predictable
That’s the good part. There’s plenty of choice, and it’s easy to swap
Exactly this. It always surprises me when people get bent out of shape because there is an option that they don’t like. Even worse when someone makes a choice they don’t like. “Who the fuck cares. Let them do their thing. be grateful you have a choice.”
Exactly. Its the best part of Linux. I like what Zorin did, they customized backend of GNOME to give you 4 choices of DE style.
Can I ask what quirks/off behavior you see (genuinely asking)?
Sometimes its a slight hang of a dialog box, like delay. Sometimes its a dialog getting stuck on top of other dialogs and it becomes unresponsive. Like it is above all other apps on screen.
And hard to describe minor stuff that just feels a bit off. Where as when I go back to GNOME it is smooth like a fully finished environment.
Maybe most people don’t notice stuff like that, but I’m the type of guy that friends call when they want to buy a used car. 500ft and I’m like nope, bad bearing on right side, transmission shudder at start off, worn bushing in steering…and others are like it drives great
Yup!
At least we have MATE: fork of Gnome 2.
Tried that last week.
God it feels so outdated.
Yes, it’s what I started on, but there are good reasons we don’t use it much anymore.Use Xfce if you want something traditional.
This.
I remember, when Unity first came out and Gnome was considering mockups for Gnome 3, so many people complaining and me thinking that, yeah, maybe these weren’t perfect but they so clearly contained improvements over Gnome 2.
It was an exciting time to be joining Linux because there seemed to be real desire to experiment with new work flows and UI ideas that improved the standard computing experience.
I feel like time’s kind of borne out my feelings, there.
I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of hate for KDE back in the day was because Qt started out with a non-Free Software license, not because it was bad in terms of quality.
I personally hated KDE because it was a buggy, unstable mess for a long time.
Are you referring to the fact that a lot of distributions shipped KDE 4 pre release code?
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That was it for me. I was actually a KDE user way back in the KDE 2 and 3 days. I found KDE 4 unusable. KDE 5 never won me over. But I have been using Plasma 6 on Wayland and am perfectly happy with it.
Yep, that’s what brought me over to XFCE for several years. Back at KDE again, though
Yep. the Qt wars were real. And one needed to be careful about reveling your KDE use because you would get flamed with hatred.
Umm, KDE/Plasma shell is a fucking absolute disaster of a UX. It makes Windows look good. Gnome has major flaws in its software that make performance go to shit, but overall the architecture and design guidelines are superior and at least have a semblance of direction. Just open the preferences/settings on KDE and you see nothing but pure chaos.
Gnome is made by designers, kde is made by devs.
Just open the preferences/settings on KDE and you see nothing but pure chaos.
It looks fine to me. Everything is categorized nicely and you know where to find something you look for. I am not sure about GNOME Settings, because I have never used GNOME more than 30 minutes (because of annoyingly shitty UX), but it’s at least much better than what Windows does.
I don’t know… Friday I installed Linux on my dad’s “new” Thinkpad T495.
I tried to go with Gnome. It’s supposed to be the user friendly one, right?
First thing I want to do is change the charging limit of the battery to 80%. It’s not impossible to replace the battery, but it would be nice to not blow it too fast.
After 20m of trying and failing I switched to KDE, where the whole thing was 3 clicks.
And even if I didn’t know how to do it, the systemsettings window has a search function that will get you the right option in a split second.
a single setting like that being a dealbreaker for a whole DE
seems a bit like an overreactionIt is definitely an overreaction.
The rational part was that I have to mantain his installation anyway. I have a lot of experience with KDE, and having seen trouble with GNOME from the get go, I ran back to the safe choice.
His example is applicable to a lot of other things in gnome. Nautilus is laughable when you compare to dolphin
Cool, a setting that’ll have zero practical real world effects.
Of course I love other people telling me what I am or am not supposed to want out of my tech. That’s why I exclusively use Apple products. Oh wait, I actually don’t.
…
And BTW, this is in fact a shitty joke, because even iPhones and Pixels and Teslas actually let you set a charging limit.
They all do, but grab an iPhone and let that shit work, count the cycles and battery life remaining after 180 cycles. Every single iPhone I encounter with that turned on gas excessive battery life decreases. Meanwhile my shit shows 100%. Wait til you find out I build the Telematics Control Unit and Battery Control systems for a large manufacturer.
Just came across this issue today. I need to install a font. The dir is not accessible through gnome Files. Actually, nothing but mmom ounted drives and my Home dir is. So if I to work in dirs outside my Home, I HAVE to use the terminal. Just to copy a font to a dir outside my Home.
Doesn’t gnome have a GUI available to install fonts? Pretty sure you just open a font file and you get the option to install, same as on KDE actually.
Still annoying that you can’t access the folder. Though, if it does show mounted drives, surely it also shows your root drive? From where you should be able to navigate anywhere you have access to.
Yeah I found out but the first three guides I found all use the c/p to font dir. However, you are correct - gnome and kde both have GUI apps to view and install fonts. But wasn’t aware since the guides I found didn’t talk about these apps.
So, ignorance on my part 😬
Nah, I think it’s simply a design choice made for gnome files. Been playing around with other file explorers that checks my requirements. The joy of freedom.
XDG
What?
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/fontconfig/fontconfig-user.html
Use a fucking search engine.
Or just explain instead of bringing that language. Why even bother answering?Classic Linux nerd comment. You always just “search!”. You just dump a random short. How Then you expect to read through pages of documentation to install a font? Yes, yes you do because you are probably a Linux god who enjoys reading through technical stuff that makes NO SENSE to non-technical people.
Maybe just not come with advice if you are going to be a dick as soon as one asks a follow up question.
LoL you are pathetic dude. Why spreading hate? Clearly you never felt the delicate touch of a woman
theregister reader detected. Maybe even one of the editors!
What is it?
The same sentence one of “The Register” writers uses to shit on KDE.
Gotcha, thanks!
Always fun that posts that shit on gnome get upvoted to the moon and ones that shit on KDE get downvoted to hell.
This should tell a lot about real user experience
LoL you are kidding 😂
I mostly neutral on KDE vs Gnome thing, but after I got into theming my computer more I started to hate how Gnome handle its theming capability (confusing, messy, if I fix one thing something else break) while on KDE it has menus dedicated to colors scheme and general looks and feel
Yeah DE is very much a personal flavor preference, which is kind of the point of OSS. I prefer KDE too but that’s because I was a windows kid forever and never liked the feel of Mac-style approach.
I use Gnome with Dash to Panel snd WinTile extensions. I sometimes wonder if I just made it like KDE.
Well, you might be half ways there. And one should never halfass something, always whole ass it.
UX wise, GNOME is oversimplified and Plasma is overcomplicated.
Gnome: We lock down everything since youre too wtupid to handle womputers Also gnome: “oh you want right click-create file? We can’t think of a more streamlined solution than navigating to the folder you already have open in nautilus using terminal, making an empty file with a terminal text editor and googling the command to save and exit empty file. Intuitive is our MO”
I love gnome workflow and simplicity but it is too locked down in nonsensical ways and it is too broken too often.
Gnome has always been like this. They started on this trend at the very beginning.
I dropped it when they released 1.0 or 1.1 as they had released another of idiotic changes that were half because “we know better” and because “fuck you, user peons”. Never looked back as it’s been managed the same way ever since.I was searching for this a few days ago and was stunned that you aren’t able to just create an empty file in the gnome file manager.
In the terminal you can use
touch file.txtto create an empty file, but it should be possible to do this in the file manager.Oh i know i can painstakingly navigate to the correct folder with ls and cd, then google what that one command I never use is and then use man to stop the whole process and read how to use it.
It’s nice to have that option for those who want to have fun with it, but it is a joke this is the intended option in gnome of all places.
That’s because they want to be user friendly for non tech people 🤦🏻
What is user friendly about right click-new file replaced with terminal?
Absolutely nothing! I was sarcastic, in fact I agree with you.
Sorry, my faith in techkind was low as I had someone legit claim im bad with computers for installing linux as all the windows stuff can be disabled with a single tick in control panel. Furthermore only tech distant people use regedit or cti.
You can just put a blank file in the Templates directory then it shows up in the right click menu. At least it does that on PopOS
Or, and now hear me out, you could add a New > File/Directory to the context menu.
Yes that is what you have to do. It is ridiculous that this is what you have to do.
Why asking for up arrow in Nautilus when you can always press alt+f8
LoL and old nautilus already had it. I just installed Nemo, nautilus is pathetic
What’s the point in being able to create an empty file from the file manager? You pretty much never want to actually have an empty file.
Open whatever program that can edit the document type you want (you would have it open later anyway to edit the document), make a new document, put something in it and save it. You have to do that anyway with any document type where an empty file isn’t valid data.
- making a readme
- making notes
- making task lists
- prewriting messeges for proof reading
- writing down passwords, keys or hashes and hiding them
- writing down links -archiving general information -not writing anything in the file and using the filename to make notes or organize -making todos -making text files you intend to fill out later as you get more info
All done conveniently by right click and double click in the folder you’re in already. No need to open another program, rummage through the menus to find “save as” or “export as” then navigate to the same location you are already in AGAIN.
Ive used txt files in windows constantly and I do not program. My archidect gf uses them constantly as well. It is very useful in a myriad of ways. Its a post it note since the other solutions for making notes, task in specific folders do not exist or suck.
For all of those you need to open an editor anyway.
Open your editor, start typing, press ctrl+s, drag the folder from the file manager to the save dialog to navigate there.
If anything, there should be a “Create new document with…” menu entry with a submenu that lets you select an editor, and when you save, the save dialog has the correct folder open. Anything, but have the editor create the document because it knows best what data to write when you do save.
A menu entry to create new empty file is a bad solution to this. It’s not general enough, and people don’t actually want an empty file as you just demonstrated with your list.
None of those are solutions and make a widely used feature more annoying to use.
Well duh, I just came up with it on the fly instead of actually spending time thinking about what the right design would be for this. I don’t know why you expect otherwise.
I expect right click-new file.
Can you give an instance of plasma being overcomplicated?
Launch System preferences, go to Internet and WiFi. Then you’ll get a UI divided into three panels. The first one lists WiFi and networks, Firewall, Proxy and Other preferences; the second panel will list your connections, including Ethernet, WiFi 2.4 GHz, WiFi 5 GHz, WiFi 6GHz, Bluetooth, VPN and Loopback, your current connection will be auto selected; from the current selected connection you’ll see in the third panel SSID, Mode, BSSID, Restrict devices, Cloned MAC, MTU and Visibility, and this is only one in 5 tabs of options.
I’m sure I skipped some other components in the same windows, but you see my point?
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I don’t agree that this is overcomplicated, how would you improve it? The simple settings are in the middle and the advanced settings are also easily accessible
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if you wanted something simple and not the advanced network settings wouldn’t you just use the panel applet anyway?
We don’t agree, but I still think it is. I just described the first window that found overcomplicated, of course there may be options of UX which may have different arrangements. In any case, in my opinion, even the system applet is overcomplicated (for a system applet).
In this window, for example, what’s the use of the first panel if you wanted to edit something in some WiFi connection? I’d replace the whole first panel with a “back” button and let the window breathe.
If you want it simple you can resize the window, make it smaller horizontally.
Exactly. Overcomplicated.
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Truly excellent GNOME slander. Who made this?
ShoutingIsFun seems to be the artist
I have no idea. I saved it ages ago and just post it whenever GNOME is mentioned.
ShoutingIsFun seems to be the artist
somone needs to replace gnome with windows 11 in that meme lmao.
Edit: it has been done:
“i have painted myself as the chad and you as the virgin”
I’ve found GNOME a pleasure to use. From my experience many folks that use Linux like to tinker with their computers. Even those new to Linux see a world of possibilities. GNOME doesn’t really embrace this tinkerer philosophy. They have an opinion on what at desktop manager should be and they’re constantly working towards that vision.
When I introduce GNOME to new people I explain to them some the project goals, design elements and how it’s intended to be used. Then I tell them that GNOME is opinionated on how things should behave and look, and if you try to force GNOME to be something it’s not you’ll probably end up using poorly documented or unsupported third-party extensions that break things. Generally the advice is, GNOME is great, but not for everyone, take the time to learn the GNOME way of doing things and if you don’t like it you’re better off switching to another desktop environment than trying to change GNOME.
I ran gnome for about a decade. I really didn’t like how a lot of bits and pieces of it worked so I went and found all of the plugins and religiously installed and updated them. Updates what happened, crab would break, I’d just have to deal.
At some point I tried KDE. And it literally did everything that I was doing to gnome through plugins out of the box.
I’m all about configurability but I’m also a pretty big fan of not having to fuck with it because it already does what I want out of the box.
I have no problem with using Gnome. It stays out of my way and Things Just Work for the most part as 99% of what I do is in a browser or a terminal anyway.
I hate Gnome because it doesn’t give you taskbar boxes to show all the open windows. There is a extension for this but it’s almost always out of date. How the fuck is anyone expected to get any work done like that? Pressing the “windows” key to show that tile view is a thing but I want to see what all is open without pressing a button first. It’s fine for watching youtube or playing games. And the ui looks really cool if you’re high off your ass, but that’s it.
You know that sounds an awful lot like how windows GUI behaves. I only recently started daily driving and the amount of gui elements you can change is mind blowing.
Windows 11 copied some KDE and Gnome features but they did a half ass job so the desktop is just broken.
Gnome extensions are nice since they can do lots of useful things. They can cause issues but if you need extensions to use gnome you probably should move to something like Cinnamon.
If you can get used to the workflow it is very nice.
If it’s not for everyone it should not be the default for many distributions, and other DEs should be recommended for beginners then.
I think the design philosophy of “you have to adapt to the software” is harmful. Software should adapt to you and disappear out of your way for common tasks. Something Gnome leadership fails to understand.I’ve been teaching Linux to a lot of high-school age kids this year. I picked Fedora Workstation for us to experiment with. It of course, uses GNOME. Like I mentioned in the above post I talked to them for 5-10 minutes about GNOME design and how it’s supposed to be used. One thing that surprised me is how much the younger generation found GNOME intuitive as soon as they learned to use the Super key. Many have spent more time on iOS than they have Windows. So some of the common pain points for us older folks, like not having a task bar, preferring each “App” to be full a screen and switching between them felt very natural for the kids. Very iOS like.
You can of course have your different opinion on if this is good or bad or if GNOME shouldn’t be the default on most distro.
Perhaps GNOME is a good default for distro because it’s similar to the interfaces young people are growing up with.
I like gome but it needs extensions for basic runctionality and you need to use terminal for basic functionality. I have it visually basically unmodified, no dock to dash or desktop but damn i need to go extra mile to add right click new file and functional window tiling.
I think you would be better off on a different desktop. The desktop works in a very specific way.
I like gnome but i will be replacing it with kde. But mostly cause gnome breaks ftp and vscode for some reason, not for the painful setup of gnome
I have one PC on gnome and another on kde. I like them both for what they are. I lean towards gnome though. Looks nice, feels nice. I don’t find myself needing more functionality than what is there. I tried mimicing gnome in kde, for fun. Didn’t quite get there. I appreciate simplicity where possible.
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It’s called a blackbox and it’s considered a good API design.
Is this ironic?
Same as you but I lean towards KDE since it doesn’t break as often when programming things across sftp and also VR and HOTAS systems work better on it for some reason.
Also cause right click -> open terminal in location and right click -> new file must be part of any desktop environment as a default.
KDE is objectively the better DE from a technical standpoint (in my objective opinion) but sometimes GNOME just feels right in the moment. I have both installed and switch between them all the time
I liked gnome for its minimalistic UI. I then realized i3 does that better :D
You don’t know what ‘objective’ means.
You don’t know what a joke is. Lmfao
Whenever I try KDE there are a many minor bugs that are super annoying. Last time it just switched main and secondary monitor so my main one was a weird mix of both. I really wanna like KDE but since I switched to Wayland it always feels like something weird is going on.
iirc that was fixed in 5.27 or so, kde’s been really smooth since for me
5.27 is great, perfectly stable on wayland with amd
Even in plasma 6?
Do you have an nvidia GPU?
No.
You really need to be on Plasma 6 if you use Wayland.
Exactly my experience too.
I just realized that this desktop environment debate has slowed down a lot these last few years. I reckon it’s about time we heat it back up. I’ll get the popcorn!
Sounds like something a goddamn GNOME user would say 😠
KDE Plasma user I am
We’ll have to see if System 76’s Cosmic DE can stir up some tribalism again!
I know the hyprland Dev had some stuff to say that caused a mild shit storm. Nothing lasting though.
Are they still people giving a thing about that guys opinion? Hey is hating everything and evwrybody by no good reasons but pure gas lighting hatred
Honestly as a newvomer to linux using both, they’re both fine. Both have their annoyances and stupidity but both are better than windows.
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It is easy to go fast if you have no features.
Hmm, Dolphin takes about 0.5 seconds on my laptop. Might be that worth debugging on your system, even if it is some bug that your specific system triggers.
Dolphin sometimes takes 2-5 seconds to open on my gaming PC, whereas Nautilus (Gnome Files) is usually done before I’ve even let go of the click.
You might need to look into this more.
It opens instantly on my gaming desktop, Microsoft Surface 7 Pro, and ASUS ROG Strix
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Do you have a lot of files it might try to preview? I remember encountering similar loading times in my photos folder because it ties to load previews for every file.
Dolphin is the worst file manager, mostly because of how it doesn’t give you a file copy window but also because it’s just a shittier version of Nemo. Nemo is superior except that most of the time you can’t drag and drop files from a zip folder window into Nemo but only if you’re using KDE. Cinnamon is pretty much the only other DE I can stand and Nemo lets you drag and from from zip files all the time on Cinnamon but it’s otherwise worse than KDE.
I would love to give Nemo a try on my Surface running GNOME, but it unusable for touchscreen users
I have never understood how there was any competition.
KDE has always been a better DE than anything on any platform, while gnome has been one of the worst and it just keeps going downhill.
KDE gathered a lot of initial hate because the Qt widget library it relied on used to not be proper Free Software. (That was fixed about two decades ago, though.)
Unfortunately, GTK is much prettier than QT.
I disagree completely, GTK looks like they took windows 3.11 and covered all the widgets in dried shit.
Ummm but gtk is pretty bad in ux for me. It has some weird way of contents in title bar. And you can’t click close button by clicking at top right corner of screen for fullscreen apps because its floating or rounded
This can sometimes come at the cost of intuitiveness however. As an example that just happened to me the other day, I was using Pinta which uses libadwaita and had opened an image to make some modifications to it.
All was going well until I wanted to save a new copy of it (and not override the original). The toolbar has all of these functions on it, open, save, undo/redo, etc… but not Save As.
Apparently there’s a tiny little overflow button on the far right side, click it and you get a whole bunch of functions - one of them being the holy “Save As” option I was looking for. I almost went down the route of making a copy of the image outside Pinta and then just overwriting the original.
Apparently the idea of making a copy of an image is blasphemy. Even Microsoft Word when they had first moved to the Ribbon UI made the save button have a little dropdown right under the save option to reveal Save As.
Don’t get me wrong, I love how some libadwaita apps look. Mission Center for example? Chef’s Kiss - but it’s a very simple application that all I need to do is open it to have a quick look at the very pretty looking graphs. Although the latest update seems to have gotten rid of being able to have the sidebar open persistently (now taking an extra click to change between performance graphs)… But I still need to double check to see if that’s intended vs being a bug before I judge that too harshly.
It doesn’t matter if it’s prettier, when I need to spend twice the time to do some basic stuff because I need to move my mouse cursor half way through the fucking screen, at least in GNOME apps.
How is that toleratable is beyond me.
Maybe I’m biased because gnome is stock fedora but it runs so smoothly and I love how the windows button and search feature works out of the box. I know that can be setup in KDE though. I love how it feels unique unlike KDE and most other DE that just feel like bad windows. I love that it doesn’t have dumbass names like KDE adding k to everything. Also feel it just works.
Every time I’ve added KDE there’s also a bunch of stupid minor things that just down make sense. Why do so many applications lose the ability to use the right click menu like in jdownloader? Why do windowed games get pushed so vertical low? Why does search recommend things I clearly didn’t ask for? Moving windows with the arrow keys is icky and not smooth. Blowing them up with windows W like gnome’s windows key just looks bad. I want to love it but it just feels like a FOSS windows.
Same here. I really tried using KDE as Fedora and Nobara were pushing for it with HDR, fractional scaling and variable refresh rates available. But there are so many useless options that seem to over-complicate everything.
I always go back to Gnome especially now that the missing technologies were added with 47 and 48. I just need my 2 extensions (DashtoDock, Just Perfection) setup via Nix and Home-manager.
also: Libadwaita > QT in terms of looks and usability.
Thanks for sharing! I’ll have to check those out. Have you ever tried Hyperland?
It’s wild what an impact organizational politics can have on a codebase
Not wild to me. Code is written by people, people who engage in organizational politics. No “base” created by people, digital or otherwise, will be free of such influences.
If you don’t know:
No love for GNOME these days smh
I mean can you really blame people? The developers have kind of gone out of their way to try and piss off literally everyone. And any attempt at criticism is called bullying and shut down
GNOME has been going downhill since version 3. I used to be a diehard GNOME fan, but nowadays KDE is simply better in so many ways.
Agree. I used to love GNOME, but after GNOME 3.0 everything went to the shitter.
I simply migrated to KDE and I just like it.
