XFCE is still in the process of upgrading to GTK3 when GTK4 is already out and they still have made no progress on migrating to wayland so its not a usable DE for a modern desktop experience.
Gnome just works and it just works very well. After using xcfe for a year I would go to report multiple bugs only to find they have already been reported years ago while on gnome I have only opened feature requests.
While I'm here, another vote for Gnome3. Love it.
XFCE is still in the process of upgrading to GTK3 when GTK4 is already out and they still have made no progress on migrating to wayland so its not a usable DE for a modern desktop experience.
What's wrong with GTK3? And "modern desktop experience" just reads like meaningless marketing fluff.
Now I don't want to shit on the work of the xfce team because they work on this on their free time and provide us alternative options and ask nothing in return, but its a data point showing why one would preference Gnome over XFCE. The Gnome team has a lot of resources behind it to just get things done and push new technology out faster than the rest.
Take a look at [1] for more.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/c8itj2/enabling_wa...
(Same question for Electron apps, particularly VS Code.)
This is how it works on Windows as well; if the application reports it correctly supports scaling, Windows will let the application handle scaling (otherwise Windows will do it for the application, with the usual caveats).
In contrast, unless I am severely mistaken, MacOS has the application render the window normally, then applies a scaling algorithm to the output when the user has set a scaling factor (which on a Mac is set usually through System Preferences > Display) that is not an integer. (I.e., has set fractional scaling.)
I much prefer how Windows and Wayland do it. (When I use Windows, I have the luxury of free choice in the apps I use: I spend .99 of my time in VS Code, Google Chrome and a few recently-written Microsoft-provided apps like Settings. A Windows user who needs old apps or apps written by less sophisticated developers might have a much worse experience.)
In fact, I am leaving MacOS after 11 years largely because of its relatively bad implementation of fractional scaling. I find it too blurry. (If my lifestyle required the use of a laptop, I might have stuck with Apple.) But I am unusual in ways that probably make a good implementation of fractional scaling much more valuable to me that it would be to the average user.
It's pretty clear that GTK2 has been left out to bit rot at this point and it's going to completely collapse at some point. Only option is to update your old apps.
It's still possible to run 20+ years old Win32 Apps that way.
https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,51016.0...
I have not seen it, but it would affect all my programs, it sounds very annoying
I've also used a couple of DEs. Unity aside, GNOME is bold enough to stick out and do something different. The GTK human interface guidelines result in apps that are something different (also usable!) and the activities view is a genuinely awesome approach to alt+tab.
KDE is just windows and a bunch of panels. It's expertly put together, but there's really nothing more to it than that. Rainmeter can do much the same that it can on Windows.
From my personal perspective as someone who uses both KDE and Gnome daily, both are just windows and a bunch of panels. What gives KDE an edge is that it doesn't try to force its weird conventions on me.
Only in the default config... To be nice to Windows expats.
> It's expertly put together, but there's really nothing more to it than that.
It's ultimately configurable! So it can be anything you want. (Plasma can "simulate" any DE with the right config).
Additionally modern KDE/Plasma is more lightweight than "anything GTK". (This may sound strange to the older people but things changed over the last years).
I agree with the rationale about not having a visible dock, the extra space and lack of distraction is great. But Dash to Dock doesn't harm that goal whatsoever IMO.
Gnome just works? Gnome just breaks other things.
Sure, XFCE doesn't work as well as Gnome 2. But you can't use Gnome 2 anymore. XFCE is way better than Gnome 3! (At least, as of the time Gnome put out version 3.)
And yeah, this indicates a very serious problem on the part of Gnome.
Want to print something? Hamburger menu and find the Print Symbol. Want to open a recently opened file? No submenu under „files“, you need to open a new window to find a selection. So much stuff one needs to learn ...
> So much stuff one needs to learn ...
like installing Atril instead which works as I want it to. https://github.com/mate-desktop/atril
On Linux you have to dig to find these things and then have to remember a different keybinding for every app, if there is one
For me, GNOME made three mistakes and made them back to back:
- No 3D graphics, no desktop for you (wrong timing).
- All advanced settings is embedded in a registry-like structure (too much OS X influence, sent the wrong message, made a lot of things hard).
- Extreme paradigm shift without communication (GNOME 3 became something different, almost OS X like, also Canonical's influence did this IMHO).
For the second: not just moved, many options were flat out removed; I dropped Gnome because of this.
For the last one: and broke many apps in the process.
They eventually decided to side-step developers and remove system tray support from GTK entirely.
Edit: changed "demanded" to "requested" to be more neutral. See comment bellow.
Reading further down, it's hard for me to see a demand there, I see a heads-up about an upcoming deprecation and a suggestion of what to do about it. The reason the system tray support was deprecated and removed eventually was because nobody was keeping it up-to-date.
> I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I'm sorry that this is the case but it wasn't GNOME's fault that Ubuntu has started this fork. And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry.
This is the point where I realized that person was not commenting in good faith. It simply isn't plausible that a GNOME developer was earnestly unaware of XFCE's existence.
It's certainly possible, even likely, but such an admission would be a gross condemnation of the knowledge of the developer regarding their necessary domain knowledge.
I personally always try to use some alternatives at the same time (XFCE, KDE, macOS / C++, Python, Go, etc.) to see what others are doing.
This allowed me to think both out of the box and carry good ideas between systems. Some examples:
- Implement just works approach in a set of python utilities developed for a project. Extended development time a little but, removed setup from so many nodes so it compensated itself and allowed me to sleep well at night.
- Copying GNOME2's desktop layout to KDE with some macOS influences allows me to become extremely efficient in my Desktop systems. Since it contains something from everything, everything other DE is familiar and I'm also more efficient in them ("This is UNIX, I know how to use it!" effect).
That's great, I do the same thing so I can relate to you, but I hope you understand that the bar for contributions to an open source project is generally more like "did you write code that the maintainer wants to merge" and not "you must familiarize yourself with all alternatives." How you achieve that varies and not everybody has the time to spend searching around on distro forums and Github. Some people might only ever familiarize themselves with one or two open source projects that they use and contribute to. And it's hard for me to see something wrong with that, that's their prerogative.
You mean KDE Plasma, right?
Ten years of pushing touch UI design on us, and it's... Still five to ten years undercooked.
According to /r/unixporn... i3-gaps? :-P
(honestly, people in that subreddit seem to manage to make any window manager look totally unexpected visually, e.g. see this[0] for a DWM customization - someone from Suckless must be digging their grave so they can roll in it :-P).
Still, there's only so long I want to wrestle for..
Huh? Canonical switched away from Gnome with the dreaded version 3 and created their own Unity instead.
I may remember wrong though. I don't follow GNOME, Unity and Ubuntu very closely.
I think you hit the nail on the head. KDE gave you the full DE experience, but there was that pesky Qt license. GNOME was full GPL/LGPL and it felt like it was built to attract power users. Skins were at the height of their popularity (remember Winamp?), and GNOME gave users an easy way to customize everything without having to muck with some arcane config file format. Every release felt closer to some platonic ideal of a fully customizable yet easy-to-use DE.
Then came the iPhone, and suddenly the world went hyper-modern and hyper-minimal. Restaurants names like "The Heavenly Chicken" are now old-fashioned; today the same restaurant is simply "chicken". GNOME was also affected by this cultural shift, and as you point out, ended up abandoning its core qualities.
I believe that hyper-modernism, like other movements, is just a fad, and in a few years we will "rediscover" modding. Everything will be customizable, from the color of your keyboard to the genes that control your eye color. Who knows, we might even shake the dust off the blink tag.
These years also were problematic for Linux on laptops. Power management, wireless and overall experience was very bad. MacBook had a considerable mind and market share among Linux developers. I remember a slide saying "Linux on desktop cannot move forward because of MacOS's advantages and features on mobile", which was very true for that day.
With the rise of Ubuntu, iPhone and MacOS, GNOME wanted to be the MacOS of Linux. Straightforward, minimal and somewhat capable. However, leaning heavily on GConf, burial of features, dumbing down of UI marked their downfall.
I've moved to KDE before that time and was spoiled by kio, integrated DE features and other stuff. 4.0 was rough but, I endured and KDE became something different. A class by itself. The so-called Qt Agreement and dual-licensing also saved them.
I also believe that customization will return. I wish GNOME best of luck and give me some reason to try them, at least in a VM. I won't change my primary DE, but I'll play with others at least. GTK has some nice qualities but, GNOME3 is not treating its foundations and features as it should IMHO.
I can still dig my .kde folder and look what are the settings and how things configured though. GNOME, while being the flagship DE of GNU movement, feels closed, bloated and devoid of any GNU/Linux spirit. Maybe that's the aim for mass market adoption. I don't know.
---
Addendum:
I want to add that initial GNOME3 and GTK3 documentation was horrible. They moved everything to JS based introspection stuff and generated documentation automatically with no explanation whatsoever. We've tried to develop a gigantic project with GNOME3 and the best way to develop software was via trial'n'error in their new and shiny developer console. It was like being insulted continuously while walking in the dark in a room full of Lego bricks on the floor and sharp corners at head level.
To add insult to injury, their touch implementation was buggy. I dug the WM implementation for two weeks and found a comment basically saying that "We hacked this together. It's not X protocol compliant & needs to be re-implemented from ground up. Since you've found here, maybe you can do that, thanks." Grr...
However, the WM code was very clean and readable. I'll give them that.
And I am saying all this with regret, as a long time user; I consider it the best desktop environment I have used.
I almost wish they had forked Gtk2 instead of porting to Gtk3 (or even more crazily, ported Gtk2 to Gdk3 to take advantage of ‘plumbing’ improvements in the latter, like Wayland support), but I do realise they just don’t have the manpower.
Did you give Plasma a try recently? It's featureful, configurable, maintained, and lightweight (even more than the newest XFCE to the surprise of many).
I've been running KDE since I set up my computer to work from home back in February. I don't have the latest hardware, since I mostly built it from parts I had lying around, but it's not bottom of the barrel. 8-core AMD FX-8350, 20GB of DDR3, GeForce GT 720.
One problem I've had with KDE is that after running it for a few hours, it would get really really slow. It was so slow that I could actually watch the title bar redraw when I would switch windows. Turns out that a 1GB graphics card isn't enough to do compositing at 4K when you have more than a few windows on the screen. Fair enough.
So I turn off hardware compositing in firefox, chrome, and plasma. I boot the computer, and check memory usage in nvidia-settings. With just plasma running and a few docked widgets, I've already used 342/978MB. Perhaps the widgets are at fault, but I'm pretty I was able to run fvwm and gkrellm on my S3 Virge back in the day, and it had far less than 1GB of video memory.
I also notice that sometimes I lock my computer for the night, then I come back in the morning to login, and the hard disk churns for minutes before I can type my password. I never had this problem with xscreensaver. There's plenty of RAM available. I know my 5400rpm RAID 1 setup isn't the fastest, but this is absurd.
Then there's the K gear menu. Why is it so slow? I click the icon, go to Applications, then go to Utilities. Then I wait a few seconds. Eventually they all show up. Then I go back to All Applications. The menu stalls for a few seconds. What is it doing? I don't know. The fluxbox menu never stalled like this.
The default picture viewer seems to be gwenview. I've imported a bunch of pictures from my phone and they are stored on my HDD. I double-click on an image, and then I want. And I wait. And I wait. No indication that it's doing anything; maybe my double-click didn't register. So I double-click again. I wait some more, and suddenly I see two gwenview windows. After a few seconds neither one has fully initialized the UI or loaded the image. I close one of them, wait some more, and eventually the image shows up. Why is it so slow? I don't remember images loading this slow in xv or eog. Should I be using digikam? I just used the default.
The apps in the system tray are terribly slow. Let's say I want to change my volume while a video is playing. That should be simple enough. So I click on the volume control. I wait for it to show up. Then I drag the volume slider. It is slow enough to respond that I overshoot. Oops, too low. Bring it back up again. Overshoot again. I really need to set up some volume up/down key bindings so I don't have to mess with that thing. Oh, and my headphone volume always starts out muted after I boot the computer. No idea why. The slider doesn't show up in KDE, but I can adjust it just fine in alsamixer. I blame pulseaudio. If I were young and without kids I might have time to figure out how to go back to OSS. I remember when sound was as simple as running sndconfig and then listening to that wonderful voice say, "Hello, my name is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux, 'Linux'". The good old days. Life was simple.
My problem with GNOME developers is that they consistently deny that they cater to the least technically savvy base and use euphemisms such as “normal people”. They are not “normal” they are technically far less literate than the normal man, and they too of course should be able to own and operate a computer.
GNOME in fact seems to think it's own users to be even less savvy than I do, but they continue to deny this.
The other problem is that everything that Red Hat has it's tendrils in overflows with meaningless marketing language such as that, in general.
The fact that your assessment doesn't stand up to is that "normal man" seems misplaced. The average person I know cannot figure out how to install Linux much less troubleshoot issues along the way. I don't think this makes them imbeciles or anything of the like. Even GNOMEs definition of a normal person is probably off kilter because the bar for their basic user is so high.
There used to be Linux distributions that installed to one's C: drive and booted as a windows launch option; I haven't heard of that being a thing in years.
I think that, whatever definition of "normal" GP was using, it's automatically excluding anywhere from 45% to 95%+ of the population.
And by selecting upon adults, the numbers are already driven up. The young tend to be more skilled with new technology than the old.
While young adults might be better able to e.g. use Gmail, I'd be willing to bet most of them can't configure and recompile DWM, modify the gtk3 settings.ini by hand, or make changes to their xorg.conf.
Prior to that I'd had a few different linux systems (I started with Gentoo... that was an odyssey and a half) and at the time the mainstream-ness of Debian and Ubuntu pushed me into what I perceived to be more hipster RPM distros like Fedora. Well of course Fedora being what it is, they had Gnome 3 and I used it as a daily driver on my Thinkpad X220 doing web dev/devops (we called it "sysadmin" back then) for an indie marketing firm.
Well, Gnome 3 was neat at first, but they made what I felt were several boneheaded decisons such as removing options from menus, removing menus entirely in some cases, gconf, and of course the early 2010s were peak "copy whatever the fuck the Freedesktop people are doing without critical thinking" so of course systemd featured prominently.
Those couple of years of tweaking and fixing systemd problems and finding menu options being removed seemingly every fucking week really killed any enjoyment I had and it's part of the reason I own a mac today. I have better things to do with my time than find workarounds for whatever way Poettering's latest fetish is broken. I'm sick of awful battery life, awful track pads, awful suspend-resume, awful external display support, and awful wifi.
I'm convinced the only people who have good things to say about using linux (or BSD for that matter, been there done that, no thanks) on a laptop are the kind of people who keep their "laptops" on the same desk, plugged in to ethernet, and are effectively using a desktop with poor thermals, and I think a large part of the reason why the desktop linux ecosystem is in such a poor state today is because of the choices made by some Freedesktop.org people and aped by the rest of the community back in the late 2000's and early 2010s.
Good for you for making your own decisions, but don't be a condecending arschloch. Personally I prefer linux because it works fine and consider Apple is overpriced piece of spyware and many their users smug idiot hipsters.
Happy holidays!
> many their users smug idiot hipsters
Maybe take your own advice?
Don't think of it as a desktop with poor thermals. Think of it as a desktop that can easily travel with you.
It works as a converged desktop too. Windows can't do that, OSX is only just getting there. It is impressive that an open source project is so ready for it, really.
But with the narrative being "this is the future", they were more or less pressured into it. The designers as well as programmers are volunteers and I would imagine designers want to work on the "cutting edge" even if that cutting edge is a complete disaster for users (just Microsoft's redesigned UI was).
What changed is that display and battery technology got better. I went from carrying around a tiny PC with an undersized keyboard (remember the Eee PC?) to one that weighs less, has a full size keyboard, and sports a display larger than the one the came with my first desktop computer. On this hardware, a traditional desktop environment feels cozy, while Gnome Shell feels foreign.
I personally preferred Gnome 2 when Gnome 3 came out, but I've gotten pretty used to the top-left corner flick after a couple weeks. I sometimes do it on Windows and get disappointed when nothing happens :) This sounds somewhat perverse, but I kind of like the fact that it takes a little extra effort to switch applications. I'd say it keeps me maybe 5-10% more productive!
Ideally, UI's should be tailored for the device they get installed on, but I'm happy Gnome was able to accept a few design compromises in order to keep moving the project forward.
Undoubtedly - at about the same time, they introduced a swipe-to-unlock screen which is crucial on a tablet or smartphone, but useless on a desktop or laptop.
The thing is, Gnome don't seem to have achieved any success in the smartphone/tablet market. So with the benefit of hindsight, trading off mouse and keyboard power user UX to improve touchscreen UX doesn't seem to have paid dividends.
IMHO, Firefox with desktop UI (and addons!) on a phone is _vastly_ superior to Firefox Android. It's shocking how much better I find it to be.
For example you can have the addressbar at the bottom (even it's not officially supported) with a few lines of CSS.
I know that this is probably me being old and resisting change, but: I switched to Mate (which is essentially Gnome 2) and I haven't looked back. For me, a Desktop Manager's job is getting out of my way, which is exactly what Gnome 2 achieved. Gnome 3, OTOH, often got in my way.
I'm using KDE since 3.5.x including 4.0 release train. Its infinitely better. Stable, fast, extensible and infinitely useful (esp. Dolphin's services).
I'm not using too many widgets and/or activities, but it's better than anything I use (incl. macOS, albeit they're close).
On the other hand, XFCE is much more approachable and usable for a newcomer. It's not intimidating. It's not infinite. It's more resource friendly and straightforward. For a newcomer I recommend GNOME or XFCE. When they're seasoned enough, they automatically gravitate towards KDE most of the time.
I like to use different things. Keeps my mind open.
Not any more since the switch to GTK3. Plasma is more lightweight since than.
Desktop effects are not gimmicky but useful (e.g: dim inactive windows). Power management makes sense and is reliable.
KDE can behave like anything you like and doesn't bury power-user related features somewhere. It's all visible. Multi-speaker & multi sound card management is also better, more obvious.
For those still burning plastics I would add K3b to the list.
I am using Gnome since 2018 btw.
I wanna throw in KDE connect too, honestly, the best and easiest way to work with an android device from a PC hands down.
KDE is rock stable in my experience. Runs for weeks or sometimes even month (between kernel update reboots) without any crash or this like.
I'm running Debian Testing. So it's usually not the newest release of the desktop. I guess this makes it so rock solid for me.
Anecdotical story regarding stability of a DE: I had to use Windows 10 lately. I think the compositor crashes quite often if one has to may open windows. :-D
So C camp went with GNOME, and C++ camp with KDE.
Naturally then GNOME got bindings for C++ (actually quite good), however it is a big difference being the main language or one that always needs someone to write bindings.
The project has a point of view: that software freedom should be accessible and usable for everyone.
If that doesn't excite you, cool. But it has improved the entire FLOSS / Linux stack over the last couple of decades, whether you use GNOME or not.
https://elementary.io/ (you can either donate, or choose to donate $0 and get it for free).
Now with regards to:
> Gnome 3 is where the project shifted from 'user friendly' to 'assume the user is an imbecile.'
I don't think that is what they had in mind. If I recall correctly one of the design motivations for Gnome 3 was removing the excessive distractions found in the numerous graphical elements of most desktop environments and make things a bit more minismalistic.
I have been using KDE since pre 1.0. Back in the days my internet was so slow I went to the university and copied KDE down on 5? floppy disks.
I used KDE through all iterations and looked at Gnome in dismayal.
Two years ago I tried Gnome. I was fed up with KDE screwing up with Wayland. And should I tell you? I love Gnome!
I was productive from day two. Ok, its opinionated and there is much less to configure than in KDE. But otoh it keeps me focused on work instead of fiddling with the DE. Imho a DE should just do two things: Make frequent steps easy to do but otherwise go out of the way. Gnome does that for me.
I couldn't stand gnome shell and moved to plasma as it was starting. Didn't really experience option overload.
However its use of JavaScript for any customization, broken use of UNIX workspaces and overall slowness pushed me into XFCE as well.
In spite of not bing a C fan, I am even less fan from polluting the GNOME experience with JavaScript everywhere, instead of pushing Vala forward.
I don't particularly love Gnome, but it's still what I use, as I don't really like any of the others more. Gnome Shell has a lot of javascript, which must go down in history as one of the worst 'modern computing' ideas ever.