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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

I don't get why "Linux on desktop" people feel the need to continually reinvent the concept of what a desktop GUI is, just to be novel or different. This goes back to things like KDE3/KDE4 and Canonical's Unity.

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.

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Not sure why you're throwing KDE into this. I've been using it for almost a decade now. It's stayed fairly consistent, offers the familiar desktop, panel and launcher style interface, is fully customizable in just about every way. Doesn't hide anything from you, doesn't make things obtuse or opaque. Never tried to force some mobile interface on you. It's pretty much the opposite of GNOME in every way.

Did you see or use KDE4 when it was new? KDE4 was a radical departure from the earlier design, which looked like a mimicry of Windows Vista for "reasons".

Compared to Gnome 3/40 or Windows 8 or even Windows 10, Windows Vista was positively sensible. Its problem was hardware requirements that were hard to meet at the time.

By 4.10 or so KDE 4 had matured to KDE 3 level and this hasn't changed with Plasma 5.

And how most drivers needed to be rewritten

Yeah i did. That 'look' makes not much of a difference when you can customize every single aspect of the desktop environment. My desktop looks and functions identically now to the way it looked and functioned in KDE3 and KDE4, apart from some small improvements and changes I've made over the years.

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.

I don't get why classic desktop people feel the need to continually complain the GNOME does not implement the classic desktop paradigm.

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.

I'm not even so much complaining about GNOME, which these days has actually reverted to something much closer to a classical desktop metaphor that is equally suitable for technical users and noobs...

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

My mum, sister and dad represent my noob test group. All of them had no issues when i converted them to gnome 3. In my opinion it actually is a more user friendly desktop and it worked for them. Only my dad is used to windows at all, so the other two dont weight every desktop against win95

> Nobody wants to implement windows 95 for fun.

That might be the tragedy of IT: unlike, say, traditional japanese joinery, traditional computing is not (yet?) a thing, and it really should be.

Of course anyone here is welcome to dedicate their life to crafting the perfect windows 9x style desktop experience. I would wager that there's actually less interest in such an experience than GNOME complaints would have us believe.

Unity made a better utilization of widescreen displays by having taskbar (dock; called launcher) moved to left but retaining notification indicators in a top panel which also functioned as integrated menu and title bar for maximized applications. (Meaning no vertical space was wasted.) The dash was also arguably more useful than the start menu. You had one single utility which looked for both programs to run and files. Also closely related to Dash, Unity offered HUD which was a way to search through menus and change system options. (HUD was similar to Humanized Enso.)

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.

Personally i am done with the win95 approach of desktop. What i want is a desktop that does not get into my way but is able to present me with whatever i want a few keystrokes away. Gnome 3 did a really great job in that.

Canonical's Unity was no reinvention of anything.

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.

I personally would like to thank everyone who caused the demise of Unity!

I disagree so much, but your candidness deserves an upvote!

heh well I guess in unity's defense, it didn't get in the way as long as I could find the terminal button.

There's nothing wrong with XFCE or LXDE, if that's what you like then use them. But I don't understand why such users always feel the need to criticize gnome, not for it's actual issues but because they don't like its paradigm. I for one couldn't be happier that they decided to "reinvent the concept of what a desktop GUI is". I find its paradigm intuitive and efficient.

i3 has been quite stable for several years and doesn't seem to be changing. Perhaps the problem is that you're trying to follow the latest UX fads instead of staying with something stable, not to mention clearly superior.

But of course, Gnome is the default in many Linuxes so I understand how easy it is to just flow with it.

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