Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop
dedoimedo.com
dedoimedo.com
What is wrong with a more traditionally designed desktop metaphor such as how it's implemented in XFCE4 or LXDE?
As a baseline for comparison I've used very nearly every linux or BSD based GUI desktop (on top of xfree86 or xorg) that has existed in the past 20 years, since the earliest days of KDE2 and Gnome. And I'm presently using a fairly normal XFCE4 setup.
By 4.10 or so KDE 4 had matured to KDE 3 level and this hasn't changed with Plasma 5.
The problem with newer versions of GNOME is, you get what they give you and you better like it cause that's all she wrote.
We get it, you want the classic desktop paradigm. Nothing wrong with that, but that ship has sailed years ago with regards to GNOME.
And why shouldn't people implementing GNOME for free have fun and experiment. Nobody wants to implement windows 95 for fun.
But every other group of people with a new GUI idea that thinks "Nope, we're gonna reinvent the wheel and make a new weird GUI just because". Linux on desktop is already what, 1% to a max of 2% of desktop market share world wide? And then you have people building weird stuff on top of xorg or wayland that is used by one percent of that one percent just for the sake of being different.
If it's intended and promoted for technically sophisticated users to play around with? Sure, great idea I suppose, the more the merrier. But so many of these concepts are pushed as a "better, easier to use, more user friendly for noobs" GUI, when in fact all it does is split the market and confuse the end user. In particular I'm thinking of the various efforts that have been made to clone the MacOS user interface, including the Dock.
I should note that my opinion above also applies to Windows 8/8.1, which was clearly a misstep, as evidenced by Microsoft returning to a much more classic desktop environment design for Windows 10. At least they acknowledged what went wrong and backed away from it.
Sort of like a GUI version of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsFzc0wAtFs
That might be the tragedy of IT: unlike, say, traditional japanese joinery, traditional computing is not (yet?) a thing, and it really should be.
It's interesting to compare with a default XFCE4. You have a quick launcher which is pointlessly distinct from the taskbar, taskbar is at top wasting vertical space, and also maximized windows have their title and menu bar wasting even more.
Also what you mean with _traditionally designed desktop_? Unity takes inspiration from Mac OS (dock, global menu) which had a desktop-oriented metaphor and predates any popular desktop environment.
It was the application of better concepts from both OSX and Windows. That was it strength. Top menu (better mouse usability), HUD (better keyboard usability), grid virtual desktops (better visual muscle memory), and so on. Nothing there was new or unique. But it was more ergonomic than the alternatives now.
I still miss the HUD, and the reason I use Gnome is support for autorotation, and other hardware features. And the fact that Unity now is a dead end.
It seems you did not use Unity, and you were part of the group of people who caused its demise by endlessly complaining.
But of course, Gnome is the default in many Linuxes so I understand how easy it is to just flow with it.
You think title bars waste too much space? Well sometimes I do too, but placing controls on them is a solution that creates new problems; just make them thinner, but please stop breaking decades of functional UI design with this nonsense.
So if I full screen a file picker dialog, the action buttons get hidden too.
The buttons should only placed in the headers for other dialogs that require more explicit actions before the dialog can be dismissed, such as the file selection dialog.
> Gnome doesn't show you the overview of your open apps or any application shortcuts on its desktop. You need to open Activities - an extra mouse click - before they are shown
It does, that is like the core feature of gnome. Maybe his/her version was buggy, but it did work even in the Fedora beta version I tried.
> Worse, as I outlined a dozen times over in multiple Fedora reviews, Firefox cannot be minimized, at all, with or without the titlebar
Wanting to minimize windows is great and all, but Gnome is a very opinionated software. Where on earth would a minimized window go? It has no tray by default. Minimized windows reappear in overview, so they clutter the screen just as much. Gnome is different is hardly a valid criticism. Feel free to use something else where minimized windows is part of the workflow. I doubt many would bring up lack of minimized windows on a tiling wm for example.
> The fonts still use the Grayscale hinting rather than subpixel (LCD); the latter offers far better results.
It can be set in Tweaks (I do agree that more settings should be exposed, but that’s another problem), which the author must be aware of as it was used for other things. Also, grayscale is the safe fallback, as not every screen would benefit from subpixel.
> Desktop scaling
Gnome Tweaks. Maybe looking around before writing an article would have been great.. It does work well under Wayland but is not enabled by default due to XServer apps becoming blurry on fractional scaling (since X has no such concept, it gets rendered at 2X and is then downscaled).
This article was written 5-days after Gnome 40s official release.
> Gnome doesn't show you the overview of your open apps or any application shortcuts on its desktop. You need to open Activities - an extra mouse click - before they are shown
>>It does, that is like the core feature of gnome. Maybe his/her version was buggy, but it did work even in the Fedora beta version I tried.
It absolutely does not, and this authors complaint is mirrored in every other review of Gnome 40. The aforementioned functionality was either removed or the extensions that provided said functionality are broken.
The common denominator and undeniable truth with every iteration of Gnome over the last x-years is inherent functionality is neutered and burdened by extension devs.
We are either talking about something different, or I don’t know. If you press Super or swipe 3 fingers up you get the preview of every app on every desktop. On the picture in the article, the author has no window open (as apparent from the dock not having any “open” icons)
Would you like a screenshot of it, because that is what I see precisely in front of me?
And why would I want to waste vertical space for that, when I can do a really short movement to see them all, in a better digestible form, because humans are better at remembering the position of something
Or a dock, the one GNOME already implements in its Activities screen.
> and has been the case since Gnome 3 (without extensions), so I don’t see how is it relevant under gnome 40.
The author never said otherwise, their whole point was to explain, that moving the dock from the left, which is in close range to the hot corner and button to activate the Activities screen, to the bottom, means that you now have to move the mouse a much larger distance if you want to access the dock with the mouse. And since GNOME doesn't support an auto-hiding dock at the bottom, there's no way around that when you use the mouse.
I mean I'm just rephrasing what the author already wrote, because I think they made their point pretty clear to begin with.
> And why would I want to waste vertical space for that, when I can do a really short movement to see them all, in a better digestible form, because humans are better at remembering the position of something
Every other modern and popular desktop on this planet supports auto-hiding docks/panels and nobody asks GNOME to force an always visible dock on you.
Well ... I switched to KDE, so not really bugged by it any more.
What he wrote is factually correct (about extra click/gesture/keypress/...), and complaint of many people.
Responsive design and Tablet were the rage and going to replace every other computer. Fast-forward, has was predictable, it did not. Gnome needs to go back to the drawing board and revise assumptions made 10 years ago. And, no, keyboard shortcut do not compensate bad design.
If Gnome is niche on the desktop, it is non-existent on touch devices. The project needs to get over that and start to cater to it's actual user base.
See, user too can be very opinionated ;-)
Some years ago, I was myself a "really opinionated user" and well ... Linux doesn't lack of mature opinionated DE : you can do barely anything you want with XFCE, MATE and KDE.
Also, I really don't understand this "touchscreen oriented Gnome". There is nothing in Gnome that is meant to be used in touch mode. Gnome ergonomics are totally built around the Super key (and now, touchpad gestures) once you get this, you understand all the gnome _desktop_ paradigm.
It's really inspired by OSX where every workflow action can be done with touchpad gestures and keyboard (without moving the pointer, which is only useful inside applications). Once you get this paradigm, there is no way to go back.
I really think also that Gnome was betting for better touchpad support on linux years and years ago, but it looks like we had to wait for Wayland to have something decent.
I don't minimise Windows, I love the launcher, the keyboard shortcuts make so much more sense than osx, and it's not the sluggish monster everyone seems to think it is.
« They owe you nothing » totally apply in this context. Even if you were a donator (which there are few probability you are).
It is true that some defaults are annoying and lots of configuration options are missing in GUI programs but it is still possible to configure basically everything using gsettings or gnome extensions (which I prefer over KDE style config).
I do not like some gnome apps (i.e. nautilus or gedit) but there are alternatives so no big problem there.
You missed the point. They meant there's no always-on-display taskbar.
>It can be set in Tweaks
>Gnome Tweaks
Probably, but should you "need a SEPARATE application" (as they say) to set something that should be default? That you can configure those things using third-party software doesn't take away from the point the author is making, and if anything enhances it since some should've been the default.
I wish Linux -developers would see the way of unifying their powers finally, but no, desktop year of Linux 2025 still probably means not having basic UI stuff figured out, while macOS and Windows troddle on to have at least a working and figured out base environment which to build actual features upon.
Also, the naming .. Gnome, Gimp. Who likes to use software with these names ? :P
Of course it won’t be everyone’s thing, feel free to use the thousand other wm’s out there, that can minimize for you...
People develop and use gnome because it works well and they like it.
Works fine for me on GNOME 40. Couldnt say why it didnt work for the blog author.
Did I like Gnome 40? Hell, yeah! Is it suck? Hell, yeah!
It sucks because, again, it disrupts my workflow, a little less than Gnome 3, but yet is a redesign with no good reason except the taste of Gnome devs.
Of course they can do whatever they want, but it is disrespectful with users that invested their time not only using but promoting Gnome and its ecosystem.
I have a keyboard-centric workflow and yet it is really annoying how much clicks I need when I use the mouse because despite having keyboard shortcuts there are a lot of stuff in Gnome hidden in menus, buttons and dialogs with no shortcuts at all.
People say the criticism is from people that don't use or don't like Gnome, but it is not true. Gnome users have a lot of criticism but Gnome devs don't care about it. Even developers that build apps using GTK and Gnome have criticism but, again, Gnome devs don't care.
I think Gnome 40 is a good time for both Gnome devs and Gnome users learn how to receive these criticism, from both people inside and outside Gnome community.
For sway it's much easier, you can have DPI scaling per monitor, but XWayland apps are blurry, so I'm waiting for all my apps to be updated to Wayland. There's experimental sway/wlroots branch with proper XWayland scaling, but I don't have easy way to install it.
I've since tried to move away from all of this starting with Gnome back in 2000/2001 (think I first went to xfce before switching to tiling WMs)
Gnome may not be perfect, but as a DE it provides enough features, flexibility, simplicity and visual appearance. In the end, it's not the DE you're working with, you just need it for setting up your system, running your apps, window management, etc. Best is when you just forget about having it and Gnome is okay with that regards.
So far (from articles like yours):
- Dash to dock broken
- Extension management (FLATPACK?) broken
Now even manually editing XML ui files by hand is considered a best practice in GNOME, with Glade being considered not welcomed. Great ideas we have there.
Luckily there are so many alternatives, so I don't see why Gnome being bad is a motivation to drop Linux altogether?
Why not give KDE a go? The KDE Neon distribution is extremely solid (it's the latest Ubuntu LTS with the KDE repository perfectly integrated).
Another solid choice of distro with KDE as the default[1] DE is openSUSE, which I consider the most sensible and well-designed distro out there.
I've heard good things about OpenMandriva as well, which also has KDE as the default DE.
[1] Officially there is no default, but SUSE and its derivatives are traditionally KDE distros.
Arch Linux now compiles Qt from KDEs fork[1]
The only ray of sunshine here is that, with Qt 5.15 being the last 5.x release, we may eventually see all distros shipping it instead of the horrible version fragmentation you see now (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and CentOS Stream are still on 5.12, Debian 10 is on 5.11, RHEL 7 is on 5.9).
The rift being created between Qt 5 and Qt 6, and the lack of any stability for FOSS with respect to upstream support for Qt 6, means we will likely see lots more fragmentation on the KDE/Qt side in years to come.
Qt 5 will eventually end up like Qt 4, which has been dropped from Archs main repos[2], despite having over 500 packages in AUR depending on it[3].
Of course, depending on a single fork likely won't work either. The KDE fork is going to be naturally Linux focused, and probably won't care to tend to any Windows or macOS that arise.
GTK+ on other platforms sucks, but at least on FOSS platforms it's not a mess.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/05/qt_lts_goes_commercia...
[1] https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages...
[2] https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2019-A...
Too many people expect to be paid for their work, while not giving anything to upstream only entitlement of what should be provided as free beer.
For those there is GPL license for Qt.
If you develop a QML app and want it to compile and run properly on all distros out there you need to code use a very low common denominator version of Qt and the associated QML components (versioning for which is only checked at runtime).
Have been using desktop Linux for almost 2 decades, My last 2 workplaces have been Linux desktop centric. Helped deploy quite a few Linux workstations.
I don't know many people that use Gnome.
Most use either KDE or some tiling WM (or some custom fork of Gnome2/3 that looks nothing like default gnome).
When Ubuntu dropped unity, some people went to gnome, some stayed but at least in my circles most bounced off.
On the cloud deployments it doesn't matter as they are accessible via ssh and cloud shells, and X Windows servers can be mapped to single windows.
Most of the people that I know that use Linux desktop are developers, and they generally don't use Gnome.
On servers sure its RedHat or CentOs or Ubuntu/Debian
But desktops are Ubuntu variants, then Fedora. Don't know anyone that uses RH or CenOS desktops.
There is a replacement for GTK4 being developed, it turns out starting from scratch for the new builder format is easier than trying to refactor everything in Glade.
Gnome has long been my favorite desktop, but they never managed to trim Gnome for usability and efficiency. Instead their followed a weird concept of minimalism and a pointless touch oriented (as if anyone would use it on a smart phone!) UI.
As much as I like the idea of Linux as my primary desktop OS, I've given up.
In the future I see Windows macOS and ChromeOS but no Linux on classical computers (not smartphones and tablets).
Same confusion years ago with the login screen. No, you don't have to swype. You can or you can press any key, just like on any PC ever.
And I know that this is Hacker News and there will be thousands of people screaming "but it works on my machine"... It doesn't work for the vast majority of other peoples' machines. So much that having a cheap smartphone often provides a more functional environment for the average user.