“What if we like took everything about GNOME 2 that made it great, remove it, and then sprinkle in the design philosophy of Apple’s Mac and Google’s ChromeOS?”
“Hmmm, that’s a good start, but it also need to be just as marketable”
“We call it GNOME 40 instead of 4 because its 40 times better than 3”
“Perfect”
– GNOME devs probably
I don’t know anything about the devs, but gnome sucks. I tried it recently on the steam deck thinking maybe it would be easier to use with the touch screen. It’s awful. All this time I had assumed it was designed to be used with touch, but it’s hands down the worst touch experience I’ve had to date. Postmarketos with sway on a phone would compete for better touch interface and you use goddamn volume buttons to control the menus.
Kinda sad that Gnome more or less is the first thing that pops up in most people’s heads when they think about Linux as a OS, because Ubuntu, Debian and other popular distributions use it by default.
GNOME devs are basically living in a bubble of their own. Recently they had announced that they want to deprecate X11 despite Wayland not being anywhere ready to use. Now you may wonder, what’s not ready on Wayland? The biggest blockade at the moment is Wine and gaming, which whether you like it or not is a huge part of computer usability but because games are in most scenarios not FOSS, that is not a concern for the FSF fanatics that run GNOME. Basically, if you play video games on their DE, it’s your problem, not theirs. Obviously whatever they do will be reverted by the distros so you won’t be affected by it until the next GNOME release. But why should every distro maintain a GNOME fork to keep it usable
Cinnamon is just what Gnome should be. It’s like a modernized version of classic Gnome. Even uses many of the same dependencies. It’s much, much more usable. KDE is good too but many distros have either a good cinnamon package and a shitty barely working KDE package or vice versa.
Cinnamon is borked to the point of being unusable in Arch but KDE is extremely good. It would take an entire lifetime of research for an end user to fix all the cinnamon issues in Arch it’s so bad. Cinnamon is great in Ubuntu but KDE is hot trash to the point where the Windows ui even is superior.
In my experience it just comes down to which of those 2 are the most properly set up on whichever distro I’m using.
Idk it works really well on my laptop with touchscreen, especially the three finger swipe gestures
Gnome is fucking awful. They copied Mac’s poor usability, but it’s somehow even less configurable. I really don’t understand how anyone uses gnome over kde. Kde is amazing and it can be configured to look exactly like gnome if you like your desktop to look like a toy
It’s fine with some tweaks
Pop shell has a bunch of lovely gnome tweaks and a keyboard focussed tiling manager and workspace navigator. It’s an absolute joy to use. Looking forward to the new cosmic DE they are working on. It’s based on rust and iced so should be both performant and extensible.
There are barely any tweaks to be done. You can change some css, oh fun
Ugh, what did they do this time
Make a design not everyone likes
For reasons notanybody understands.
The greatest of sins
It does seem like gnome is neurotic.
I will never use Gnome. I installed Kubuntu just because Plasma isn’t Gnome.
