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You terribly exagerate. Actually Gnome3 is currently the only desktop environment which gets Wayland somewhat right. I fear they got where they are by doing some false turns like a global lock in the compositor and client side decorations.

Your systemd utterings completely lack any architectural or technological reasoning

I'm not concerned with architectural concerns but usability. The end user, me included doesn't really care if it's Wayland or X underneath, as long as it works properly and is productive. Really anything behind the toolkit is of no concern to me.

I'm not going to turn this into a debate on systemd but they managed to win the "Lamest vendor response" prize at the 2017 Pwnies. And clearly you've never been with a system down and got greeted with "Failed to get D-Bus connection: Operation not permitted" and no log entries at all. Yes adding complexity to a risky process was a fantastic idea.

The user will care when gnome-shell crashes and takes out their entire session, or when their cursor is lagging/skipping.

Gnome-shell wayland session still needs a lot of work imo.

> which gets Wayland somewhat right

Wayland has been in development for 10 year, let's hope they fix it in the next 10.

> Actually Gnome3 is currently the only desktop environment which gets Wayland somewhat right.

Maybe true, but Ubuntu 18.04 has reverted to Xorg as standard?

> I crawl back to xubuntu and XFCE in the end every time as it does the service of getting out of my way.

I started using xcfe when KDE replaced 3.5 (which was nice) with KDE 4 and onwards. I've tried GNOME and Unity but didn't like them much. Xcfe works the way I like it and most importantly it does feel a need to remake itself few years to pursue whatever is the latest fashion in UI design.

I don't hate it, but KDE Plasma is so good, that I can't use anything else anymore.

I recommend others to try. Also, shout out to OpenSuse if you want a good KDE distro.

KDE Neon is decent too :-)

I will have a look at this. Thank you for the suggestion. Last KDE I used was 1.1 a very long time ago :)

Made a fresh reinstall of Kubuntu 18.04 (previously I had Kubuntu 16.04 on my primary desktop). Everyting works, drivers were detected (including nvidia). Multiscreen setup works, no DPI problems, fonts are clear, performance is better. Default plasma setting are way better than 16.04. Experience is very smooth. Disclaimer: I'm not using sleep/hibernate, so no comment there.

BTW: it seems that most of binaries are being build as PIE, which also becomes the default mode for gcc (-pie/-no-pie).

Just to balance this out: I suspect for every passionate Gnome-3-hater there are 10 users who think it's fine.

I bet with systemd it is even higher, 100:1 or 1000:1, but the few haters are extremely noisy.

> I bet with systemd it is even higher, 100:1 or 1000:1, but the few haters are extremely noisy.

People who have positive things to say about systemd have learned long ago to stay away from most discussions about it on places like Hacker News, because they'll just get drive-by-downvoted.

They're still around, and they still like (or at least appreciate) systemd; you just won't see them commenting much on those sorts of threads.

There are a lot of valid reasons to praise systemd.

There are a lot of valid reasons to criticise systemd.

However, actually discussing those requires a level of nuance and consideration of the trade-offs involved, especially around forward progress versus reliability, that seems in this case to invariably get utterly derailed by screaming assholery from the far ends of the spectrum.

(signed, somebody who has more negative than positive things to say about systemd, but has also given up trying to engage about such things on here)

I think the proportion is more realistically 2 haters who moved to xfce/mate, 1 who likes it and 5 people who shook their head in shame and went straight back to Windows or OSX.

Edit: just to back my point up; most of the people who I have seen who have tried to move to Linux have done a relatively sharpish 180 when the UI pokes them in the eye (gnome or unity)

That's all anecdotal evidence. Most people that I know use GNOME 3 which is then followed by Cinnamon and Xfce. I know only one KDE 4 user.

If GNOME 3 didn't exist, I wouldn't be using Linux on the desktop.

Have you read the Gnome usability testing documents? That's a collection of anecdotes and assumptions far larger than mine.

Not just fine, it's the best desktop environment I've ever used. KDE (and most of its apps) is too "busy", too many options to tweak and configure, too many buttons and widgets all over the place. I don't care about the DE, I don't want to see the task bar, I don't want widgets and active areas on my desktop background, I want to open my IDE/browser/terminal/whatever and get to work. Gnome does this, let me launch stuff and stay out of the way.

Most of the annoyances mentioned on the review can be altered using the Tweak tool or have extensions that change the behavior anyway.

To each his own, though. I don't understand why people like the OP find it impossible to imagine that other people are fine with, or even actually love, Gnome 3.

UI is simply terribly hard. And the open source “bazaar” model also happens to be at its worst in UI work. You kinda need a dictator with taste to get UIs right, and the Linux community has neither dictators nor taste.

A counterexample to that is the many other DEs done right: Xfce, Cinnamon, etc.

Why do you think they are less popular? Maybe it's a matter of taste?

It's not like there isn't decades of prior art out there on what works well...

A decade ago I was quite happy with the Gnome2 desktop. Since then, I either go with Xubuntu and XFCE or Mint, which was Cinnamon last time I checked.

Maybe this is different nowadays, but my initial experiences with Cinnamon a few years back (right when I first switched to Mint in light of Ubuntu's Amazon Lens debacle) were very strongly negative. It was ugly, unstable, slow, difficult to customize, and in general just as shitty as GNOME 3 was at the time.

MATE, on the other hand, was/is fantastic. GNOME 2 already was just about perfect for me, and though I was willing to give Unity a try, I was disappointed that it was so different from GNOME. MATE filled that void in my heart like no other DE could.

Xfce is also excellent, and is what I'm using at work right now (though I'm looking into switching back to a tiling WM, since I feel like I'm more productive with it).

> MATE, on the other hand, was/is fantastic. GNOME 2 already was just about perfect for me, and though I was willing to give Unity a try, I was disappointed that it was so different from GNOME. MATE filled that void in my heart like no other DE could.

I'm a MATE user presently, and I have to agree with this. It does what I need with minimal BS. Unity, in particular, felt to me like a Linux DE trying to be OS X, but not really succeeding at it. (I'm not particular fond of OS X, either; I don't really don't care for the single-menu-at-the-top paradigm and the icon dock on the side never seemed to really work right.)

But hey, it's Linux. IDK about Ubuntu these days, but in Gentoo (what I use presently), you can pretty much run whatever DE you want. If people want OS X-ish, that's their choice.

Cinnamon has matured quit a lot in the last years. You should give it another go.

I agree that Xfce is excellent. It's my go-to choice for any older/underpowered machines.

you can make tiled managers look pretty tasteful... https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/

gnome community seems very much to have strong leadership.. where they want to lead on the other hand..

I think that's overcomplicating the problem. The problem is that there are established UI paradigms that work for power users, which to be honest is most of the userbase. But those paradigms are static and boring compared to the possibilities, so people invest time in playing with the possibilities instead of delivering what the end user needs.

The main problem I see with Linux is the barrier for contributors. Somebody who works as UI designer or web / app developer wouldn't want to to go back to arcane ways of coding UIs, but would want to learn and build upon the skills he needs for his profession. This chasm between how the real world works, and how it works in the Linux ecosystem has to be closed first.

Something like React Native for Linux could help, or maybe a distro that is focused on full stack web/app development, and sets the standards for the rest of the Linux ecosystem in this regard.

You're absolutely correct... I am making this post from a PowerBook G4 running MacOS 9. The entirety of the OS including the window manager etc. is currently using 80MB. How much RAM are the various Gnome 3 daemons and window manager taking up?

Even accounting for some bloating because of X11's more chatty protocol and network independence, does it make sense to take up 3x of MacOS9 with Finder interface RAM usage?

> terrible QC of systemd

I haven't had any problems with systemd. YMMV?

systemd really is fine until you have a hosed system or it does something wrong or a scary bug is deemed a feature by the totalitarian maintainer and then it's like fighting your way through a dungeons and dragons adventure book written by someone who has been on the crystal meth.

Could you try to make that point again but without the hyperbole and with some specifics? It's possible you're trying to engage in a real discussion here but it reads like you're just venting.

I believe it deserves as much respect as the systemd maintainers treat their users with.

1. Hosed system down. All systemctl commands fail with "Failed to get D-Bus connection: Operation not permitted". Only option was to reinstall it from scratch, like a Windows machine

2. Does something wrong. So many random weird bugs like "failed to start reboot.service" ffs. Answer is always "upgrade systemd" which is a problem when you're running CentOS.

3. Totalitarian maintainer. Pwnies award for lamest vendor response 2017 covers my complaints there.

Edit: just a point I wish to add. The idea that systemd embodies is the right direction, but the architecture and implementation sucks as do the maintainers.

> 3. Totalitarian maintainer. Pwnies award for lamest vendor response 2017 covers my complaints there.

It really doesn't. One of the pull requests they link to as the "lamest vendor response" literally has only three comments from Poettering, one which says "Looks great otherwise", one which says "excellent! thanks a ton for fixing this!", and one which answers a question about why a local variable is named MTU.

Seriously, this is the thread itself: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/6214

There's another linked thread where he admits that they misjudged a commit as irrelevant, but explains that they can't rewrite git history, which is unfortunate but hard to take serious issue with. And a third where he says that systemd will defer to validating input according to POSIX and other common cross-distribution requirements, instead of enforcing its own, stricter set of requirements that would actually break other systems.

It's not even hard to find places where Poettering has said something that makes him look less sympathetic than this stuff. But referring to these as the "lamest vendor response" really just makes it look like they're searching for anything to take issue with for Poettering himself, regardless of the topic at hand.

Just to have some context, the very same Pwnie "lamest vendor response" award was given to the OpenBSD project in 2007.

> It's not even hard to find places where Poettering has said something that makes him look less sympathetic than this stuff.

Right, like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skPOeOPGpwM

That is a CCC talk where Poettering takes the presenter's invitation for a single response as a cue to interrupt the rest of his presentation slides. Responses like, "Do you hate handicapped people?" give you a taste of the general decorum with which Poettering handled himself.

That's not to say that Poettering isn't entitled to some response, nor that all his responses in that video are unfounded. But interrupting a presenter's presentation is extremely aggressive behavior. Even the CCC presenter who trashed Perl 5 two years in a row in a fairly distasteful fashion was met with polite responses from the audience.

What's amazing is that Poettering consequently wrote a piece blaming Linus Torvalds for the sorry state of communication in open source[1]. I'm certainly not a fan of Linus' outbursts. But an audience member making a hostile takeover of a tech presentation is the stuff of nightmares. Anyone capable of doing that has no business opining on the health of open source communication.

[1] https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...

^^^ This needed to be said. I feel lucky that 95+% of everything I need can be done in terminator and/or firefox. For that time where the window manager is needed just something basic and familiar like XFCE or a plain old windows start menu. Success is measured by the quickness of getting the job done and staying out of the users way and reinventing the UI wheel repeatedly works against that

> munged up shitty titlebar/toolbar hybrid

I agree on this one, mostly disagree on the rest. I use Pantheon, which solves the above mentioned problem.

Checking in as someone who likes the lean nature GNOME Shell quite a bit, yes, it's different, but not bad. XFCE is just too clunky, not with it, (i.e. Wayland),old-school feeling for me and pretty ugly without serious work. Plasma is in the best position here, as you can make of it what you want, but GNOME is great for a quick setup and isn't too hard to learn. Complainers will of course be heard the loudest, but by GNOME usage numbers, I'd say many think it's at least ok, since it's fairly easy to swap desktops in Linux land and I still see many people on GNOME.

Totally disagree. I was a mac user for 10 years before finally making the switch this year to Arch, and Gnome is definitely the most polished DE option I found. All software has warts, but I haven't come across anything in Gnome other than the memory leak (which is already fixed and awaiting release) - even that doesn't bother me too much.