Gnome is still the best Linux desktop environment
opensource.com
opensource.com
At some point I thought I must be stupid for overlooking it and turned to google. Among the very first hits, google showed me a posting on google+, written by Linus Torvalds himself. In there he was ranting about exactly my problem: not being able to change the font size in Gnome 3. That was kind of a relief: at least I wasn't being too stupid to find it.
In the end I found out that Gnome 3 indeed doesn't have that setting! To change it, you had to install a thing called Gnome Tweak Tool (IIRC). By default, this was seemingly deemed a too advanced feature for normal users.
I then quickly decided that Gnome 3 wasn't for me. (Admittedly, I don't know if this has changed since then in newer version.)
I'm all for usability and not providing a million settings (hello KDE), but changing the system font seems so very basic to me... I still can't fathom why they'd remove it.
I stopped using GNOME after they decided that a toolbar was too distracting during the gedit rewrite, necessitating clicking a button first in order to see any useful buttons: https://blogs.gnome.org/nacho/2014/01/15/gedit-has-a-new-fac...
It seemed to be simplifying for the sake of simplification, but that could have been just me.
I still use Gnome on my personal laptop, but at work I find KDE more usable.
Disclosure: I use Openbox and Xfce. There are a few rough edges, but nothing that's a a deal breaker for me.
Gnome is getting better and better all the time, I still hope for the year of the Linux Desktop, but I'm eternally optimistic.
More to the point, my comment was a criticism of the article rather than Gnome. Most of these "6 reasons" can be easily applied to any actively developed environment.
At least with KDE you have freedom to change things at your discretion.
Also, Gnome 3 more stable ?? WTF ? I saw more broken desktops and WTFs with Gnome that with KDE. Even I saw KDE working with a buggy X11 driver when Gnome simply fails on a miserable way.
It wants to be Mac. It wants to be Windows. In the end it's like all of the worst parts of both, made in to a mutant of dis-congeniality. They want the familiarity and user experience of both, and in the end capture neither.
Damn it, i have seen a comment from a prominent Gnome developer basically stating that users are idiots. This based on some usability testing that was done back in the day, apparently.
So expect more and more out of Gnome, and by extension Freedesktop, to be about putting users in padded cells...
I actually quite like some of the ideas in Deepin though
But in all honesty, I use KDE Plasma with a healthy mix of Gnome apps, because I can't stand Kmail and others.
Edit: try the dev stable.
I was really liking Cinnamon, but I don't know. Something just felt incomplete, and I was having odd issues that seemed to be exclusive to running Cinnamon. I switched to Plasma, and have really liked it, very much, a lot so far.
or even if you have 4 or 2. Plasma itself uses roughly 300 megabytes of RAM.
And to "SmellyGeekBoy"s point: that's the thing that makes Linux so Linux-y. I can choose that. Or not. Or a raw command line only. Or have Plasma, Neon, Gnome, Cinnamon, LXDE, Lubuntu Next, and XFCE all installed AT THE SAME TIME. It's what you want. It's what you like. It's YOUR machine. Your desktop environment. You choose and tweak the one that suits you. No one should be able to hate or discriminate against that, it's not their desktop. So fuck'em.
Every time I've tried KDE recently, the starting RAM usage is closer to 800-900mb and it anecdotally felt laggier than Unity. (I tried KDE Neon)
it's a clone of NeXT's UI in the 1990's.
I can't believe the list of top GTK3 Themes [1] are so much influenced by macOS ( second "greatest" one basically replicates even the icons ).
macOS is beautiful, indeed, but as Ralph Waldo Emerson's quoted :
"... Imitation is Suicide."
I bet if the effort is put towards themes that can distinguish GTK from anything else, there will be another reason of Gnome being the best LDE.
1 : https://www.opendesktop.org/s/Gnome/browse/cat/135/ord/top/
The desktop metaphor and floating windows might make sense for casual computer users (mostly because they're used to it) but for programmers and power users it's just not a very good setup.
fwiw. I have used awesome, dwm and now bspwm.
Talking about the differences between “traditional” desktop environments seems mindless to me, while introducing newcomers to tiling WMs is refreshing and fun.
And to some degree Windows 10 has gone back to tiling.
You can drag windows top corners and the left and right edges to have the take up a fixed part of the screen. Sadly only when using the left/right split will Windows try to auto-resize the opposite window in response to you actions.
I totally agree with all the points in the post - the only problem Gnome has is the extension ecosystem. The idea of extensions is nice and few are awesome - but in practice most of them are low quality.
I really miss Gnome, and still use it for my secondary laptop, which I don't get to use that often.
Inside bspwm I use xfce bar with the menu extension and I feel like I don't waste as much vertical space. (it looks like macOS or Unity, except I don't have title bars)
From the article:
1) G3 is stable: "stable" like these weird crash notifications I regularly got on 3 different laptop models (that did not in fact provide any info on what app/service actually crashed...) whenever I resumed from sleep, or "stable" like the Gnome dev indicating they will break GTK3 backward compatibilty whenever they feel like it? So much stable, we're going to be tired of stabling.
2) "Stays out of the way": like not even having a minimize button by default? So when you have your windows lined up, and switch to another one just to check something, now you just... ho wait you don't get to "just" because there is no minimize action to get rid of it. I like this example because on one hand they claim it is not needed[1] even when a most basic example can prove them wrong, but on the other hand they have published a first-party plugin/extension to add this and a number of other "fixes". So double the failure. TFA author also claims G3's chrome takes less space: like having a damn clock take 80% of the top bar? Seriously. And also, "MATE uses two panels so it takes more space" ...you mean exactly like G3 once you enable the taskbar? Plus in other DE you can easily fuse / insert the taskbar into another panel, not sure you can in G3. In short G3 is ignoring basic UI rules we have known to be true since the 1980s.
3) "Display switching actually works" ...hu, just like in XFCE? Never had a problem in XFCE. In G3 though I occasionally had it not detect when I unplugged an external screen, which means I was left with a blank desktop background where all of my inputs would only take effect on a now 'ghost' screen.
4) Many extensions: probably. I only know that some of them exist solely to fix basic shortcomings of the default UI. I also know you have to use a browser+plugin to download these, and this feels...wrong?
5) Dynamic workspace: this is the only thing that G3 does right, i.e. not just properly, but also better than the competition. I really wish other DE would implement something vaguely as intuitive. If they did, for many users G3 would have no competitive advantage left.
6) Plenty of themes: Huh. OK. I guess.
I also need to add that the G3 Bluetooth devices app/panel is really aggravating. BT sucks in Linux to begin with, but the G3 UI is really making it worse. At first I thought it was only a OS-level thing, but then I discovered XFCE doesn't have this problem.
[1] It always get me when a OS or DE dev claims you "don't need" a basic feature: you're not building an app, you're building a platform, you do not know how it's going to be used, that's the point of a platform.