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Comment by analogic | Hacker News Reader

After using a mac for ~6 months now, I finally understand what happened to gnome3/unity, clearly designed by mac users.

I mean it's perfectly usable once I got the basic gestures down and installed the app that let me independently set the track pad and mouse wheel scroll directions, but will go so far as to say that both xfce and MATE are objectively better at window management.

Partly I think their hands were tied by the too late to change decision for the always there contextual top menu bar. Or this is just 25 years of using win95 clones talking and I'm set in my ways.

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I wouldnt say Gnome is by or for mac users. In fact in many ways it is way more similiar to Metro than to OSX. Gnome 3 just broke the common Windows 95 workflow, however many others did before.

ya tbh i never tried using it for more than 10 minutes

Personally i love it but it took me way more than 10 minutes to realize why :) IMO it is highly underestimated, mostly because you need to change your workflow which takes time, but when you did it feels super productive.

You wouldnt judge i3 or other completely different approaches after only a few minutes.

I feel absolutely the same about Gnome 3. One of the biggest things, I think, is that it puts workspaces absolutely in your face, so using them is a much more natural part of the workflow than in Gnome 2. It's also more keyboard-friendly than Gnome 2 (though it still could use some work in this area). Despite being rather large (gnome-shell on Wayland is typically the second-biggest RAM user on my laptop), it feels minimalistic, and is almost always fast, and stays out of the way of whatever I'm working on.

> it feels minimalistic, and is almost always fast, and stays out of the way of whatever I'm working on.

absolutely :)

What i like the most is you are just a super key tab away from basically everything so focus on a single thing feels natural and right. There is no way to lose anything either, its all there. Always.

I'm going to have to give it another go then, though I do love my MATE desktop.

The last time I tried it, I got frustrated when working with a lot of pdf sources - hitting the super key just presented me with a myriad of white rectangles where open windows would frequently rearrange requiring a slow manual search to find the file I was looking for. This can be less of a problem with a taskbar, as the filename is the main identifier, and being 1 dimensional it is easier to scan and preserves its position better.

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