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Comment by prvc | Hacker News Reader

>KDE is my desktop environment of choice. KDE5 is rock-solid, configurable in any way possible and works great. It treats you like a responsible adult instead of a child like GNOME does these days, and after XFCE switched to GTK3, the RAM usage is on-par, more often than not a bare KDE install (Debian or Arch) uses around 300MB ram. This is with Baloo (search indexer) and Akonadi (PIM database backend) disabled.

The GNOME Foundation's supposed rationale for removing basic functionality from its desktop is to help inexperienced users, and international users. However, those are precisely the same users who are more likely to have a shortage of computing resources. GTK's bloat is really indefensible.

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If you are reasonably experienced and constrained by resources, a great option is to use a window manager without a desktop environment.

That's my setup because it has fewer moving parts and lower latency, as there are only a handful of processes running and no compositor.

That's why I now run i3 for my daily driver with emacs.

> and international users

I might be mistaken here, but it seems to me that the international users who want a simple experience are already well served by smartphones (android or otherwise).

The international users who are going to install linux on a laptop are the tinkerers and fiddlers and the self motivated learners who aren't going to be motivated by a dumbed down, inaccessible interface.

It's important to remember that GNOME is primarily funded/developed by Red Hat, who are owned by IBM. Red Hat's goal isn't to make something for the kind of person who would install Linux on a laptop themselves -- they're trying to make a clone of macOS they can sell in bulk to enterprise customers. The intended user population is very different.

I'm not sure where you heard any of that, but I have never heard any Red Hat employees say anything to that effect, ever. Fedora still exists, and to me that seems perfectly fine to install on a random laptop.

It may surprise you to learn that Red Hat's primary revenue stream is not Fedora, but a separate distribution called "Red Hat Enterprise Linux".

Sure, but that shouldn't really matter to an ordinary Fedora user, at least not to the ones I've heard from.

If Fedora (or GNOME, for that matter) fits your needs, you should feel free to use it! But if you're wondering, like the grandparent comments, why projects like GNOME seem to be moving away from fitting your needs, the answer is that they're being designed for Red Hat's enterprise customers first and any use you get out of them is a happy afterthought.

Again I'm not sure where you got that, I have not heard any Red Hat or Fedora developers say that's the focus. In fact if you follow GNOME development, there are various other directions that people are pulling in. It might be the case coincidentally for some things, but that could be yet another one of those happy afterthoughts.

Not necessarily with that line of thought, Red-Hat has already acknowledged many years ago that there is no money to be made on the GNU/Linux desktop (Mandrake, SuSE and Canonical also found out years later).

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2536558/red-hat-sees-n...

https://lwn.net/Articles/56947/

you are mistaken.

smartphones have small screens, and terrible keyboards.

almost no one will creatw anything except simple photography and tweets on a phone.

my phone can't even provide capital letters reliably.

self motivated learners aren't stopped by a simple UI; they can use terminal and web apps.

its kind of ironic if you think about it, youd think removing features and simplification should allow for more optimization not less...

Except GNOME rewrote GNOME Shell in JavaScript. I don't think GTK3 requires GJS, so I'm not sure why it uses more RAM than GTK2, maybe due to CSS? I know it's still Cairo-based, not GPU-accelerated or DOM-like.

I can't say for sure what the deal is with GTK3, but GTK4 apps are GPU accelerated and should be faster. Though it may come at a cost of using more GPU memory, depending on the app.

Yeah but if you don't like it, you can just leave it alone and it's perfectly functional. That said I use Pop_OS! which is gnome based and fine. I like the defaults just fine. I have used all sorts of DE over the years, in the end I decided I didn't really care :) . KDE is fine, Gnome is fine, xmonad is fine.

I've been adopting this mindset myself. I've used almost every prominent DE and WM there is, and they're all fine. Varying levels of ugly or beautiful perhaps, but I just want to get past them and onto my actual work.

The idea that the GNOME DE or GTK3/4 are resource intensive is a meme with little basis in reality.

https://www.google.com/search?q=gnome+3+memory+leak

https://www.google.com/search?q=gnome+3+cpu+use

sure...

https://www.google.com/search?q=a+google+search+doesnt%27t+p...

This site asks for 1.5 Go of ram https://ubuntugnome.org/, Ubuntu 20.04 asks for 4 Go of ram. Compared to the 30 Mo for IceWM in the article (apple to oranges, I know, but still 3 orders of magnitude), or the 300 Mo for KDE. The author also notes that since XFCE switched to GTK3 they use more resources. That seems to be plenty of basis in reality. Perhaps you mean something else by "resource intensive"?

Keep in mind that the 1.5 GB number is the total amount of RAM you need to have a good time using the operating system, not the amount consumed by the window manager alone. Even OP consumes just about a gigabyte of RAM with all the programs on their Raspberry Pi.

That's not to say GNOME _isn't_ resource intensive -- it is, especially when compared to desktop environments that were either written to be lightweight or written 30 years ago -- that just isn't the best way to measure it.

> Keep in mind that the 1.5 GB number is the total amount of RAM you need to have a good time using the operating system, not the amount consumed by the window manager alone.

That's why I said apples to oranges initially, but you're right, I could have clarified that part.

What's Go and Mo?

Gigaoctet and Megaoctet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octet_(computing)

o = "octet" (byte), so Go = gigabyte, Mo = megabyte.

GTK3/4 alone not really, as my Linux netbook is doing just fine with XFCE.

Now having GNOME with its Javascript based shell and extensions, making every click take a couple of seconds longer and me wondering what it is doing, no thanks.

The javascript is used mostly to drive the shell GUI, it shouldn't be taking seconds off all your mouse clicks. If there is really bad slowness, you should consider reporting that as a bug, it may not be the javascript that's at fault. The performance shouldn't be any worse than a typical lightweight web app running in firefox. That is of course if you ever end up using GNOME again for whatever reason.

I don't understand why you have to wonder what it's doing, the javascript is all self-contained and hosted locally. It's not using npm or anything like that. And the extensions are pretty much the same as any other app you use that supports plugins.

"Memory leak in gnome-shell JavaScript bindings"

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/3410651

"GNOME Shell Performance Improvements in Ubuntu 20.04"

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/gnome-shell-performance-impro...

"Boosting the Real Time Performance of Gnome Shell 3.34 in Ubuntu 19.10"

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/boosting-the-real-time-perfor...

When I complain about GNOME performance, I am not making it up, learn that and bye.

I don't understand what the issue here is or what you want me to learn, those seem to all be bugs that were already fixed. If there are additional unfixed problems that others aren't aware of, and you're not making it up, then please mention those, and maybe I can help you get them reported.

The issue here is that those bugs should never have made it to 'prod'. For absolute die hard fans who say "Gnome or bust", you encounter a bug, you report it, track it, get it fixed, and things are better, until next time the same high level symptom - UI slowness - is introduced, through a different mechanism making it a "different" bug.

Thing is, not everyone is a die hard fan. Developers on Gnome, by definition, are, but outside of that, customers are going to go with what works. And that's not Gnome. Customer's don't care that the UI slowness in version 1 was caused by X, and UI slowness in version 2 was caused by Y. There was UI slowness, which made it unusable, and, well, now they're using XFCE or OS X or Windows. It doesn't matter that there was a bug and it was fixed a year ago. The problem is that there was a bug a year ago, and that particular customer is gone and can't be recaptured - they've got a solution that works and they're not looking to switch to a different one. Especially one that has a history of problems.

I find it pretty disappointing that these type of articles and the resulting comments like yours often can't seem to praise something like IceWM or AwesomeWM without also bashing GNOME or XFCE or something else because of "bloat." Who cares? Do you even care? I don't think you do, you'll just delete that desktop and move on and use whatever you want, and that's the whole point.

Also, your characterization of GNOME's rationale is totally wrong. The goal was never to make a desktop with no features, it was more to make a desktop that is streamlined towards certain functionality. If that's not for you, then use a desktop that's more streamlined towards what you want. There's plenty to choose from. What is the real problem?

Edit: I also want to address another common misconception that I see -- the GNOME Foundation does not direct development in a top down fashion and does not impose any rationale on the project. If some feature was removed, it was probably because an individual volunteer working on it decided that it wasn't worth spending time on that anymore, possibly because the need was better filled by a different project.

> “Who cares? Do you even care? I don't think you do“

> “ The goal was never to make a desktop with no features”

Wow, your first paragraph you accuse people of lying at worst, or capriciously taking a position that doesn’t matter to them at best. It gets better in paragraph number two where you misquote GP and go boxing with that strawman.

So to address your first paragraph, I’d say people here care a lot, and the bashing they do is not out of a place of tribalism, but out of a place of constructive criticism. Most of us here would LOVE to see improvement in $ArchEnemySoftware, and the failures strike deep because this stuff means so much to us. A mixture of disappointment with the status quo, and/or poor judgement calls with design or execution, rather than knocking a bit of tech that doesn’t appeal to us.

As for the second paragraph, GP didn’t say “no features” in reference to GNOME, but decried the basic features that were removed, thereby rendering the software less useful to them.

I’d take a brighter outlook on discussions like these, if the points land on the right ears, perhaps positive change might happen in GNOME. We can hope anyway.

I'm not accusing anyone of that and I'm not misquoting, please stop with this hostility. In my experience, people are happy to switch when it suits them. By "no features" I was referring to those basic features. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

I also didn't see any constructive criticism, if you have any specific suggestions for positive change you'd like to make, then please make them. I'm all ears. But for the record, if you'd like to get involved in development, places like HN and reddit are generally not a good place to do it. The people who are most likely to listen to requests don't visit here.

So let me get this straight. According to you, I should not criticize software that does not meet my needs lest it be interpreted as bashing and ruin the party for those who do use the software in question? That’s my take, please correct me if I’m not understanding your point properly.

Also, no hostility here. I find these discussions illuminating.

As for Reddit and HN, these places are excellent places for such commentary. Often times the maintainers of different packages heed complaints leveled here and change their ways. That’s a win for everyone if the change is a positive one.

>According to you, I should not criticize software that does not meet my needs

I have not said that, I just asked you for your specific criticisms.

I don’t know what GP deemed as basic functionality that was removed from GNOME. I use MacOS on the desktop.

Well there you go, you switched to a Mac :)

So GPs opinion isn’t valid because I switched to the Mac, got it

No, not at all. If you do ever use this and you develop an opinion on it, feel free to share.

I find it really weird how you seem to think you’re the arbiter of how much people care, when they can share their opinions, and what opinions are valid.

Perhaps you should keep those ideas to yourself and only concern yourself with your own level of contribution to the topic at hand. I don’t need you to mind my comments.

I don't think that at all, I'm just another person giving my opinion, like you. Also, I don't understand why you said that, but then asked me to keep my opinions to myself.

> Also, I don't understand

You’ve made that abundantly clear in this thread.

If you have something you want me to understand, please explain. I'm happy to listen to what you have to say. Like everyone else, I'm not perfect, sometimes I don't understand things and I need some help from people like you.

You have not argued in good faith. You have continually claimed one thing and then declared the opposite a comment later.

>You have not argued in good faith.

That's not correct, as a show of good faith I've explicitly asked for specific details on what the complaint is. I can't help you if you don't provide those details. If it seems I haven't done that, I apologize, that was not my intention. I'll try to be clearer next time. Let me know if there's anything specific you want me to clear up.

> “ I find it pretty disappointing” - Then you go into the praise vs bashing.

What do you find disappointing? I guess that’s what I’m driving at. When somebody knocks MacOS, and it’s a valid point, I hope somebody from Apple is reading! Then maybe it gets fixed. So why would that arrangement disappoint you?

For me personally I find the endless "Linux desktop wars" to be disappointing. It doesn't matter, this stuff is open source, if you really want it to be fixed then just go write a patch. But in my experience most people will just take a few minutes to switch to one of the many alternatives.

I'm just relaying what other people have told me, these type of forums are full of uninformed comments, and are not a good place to solicit feedback. You could hope that maybe an Apple engineer would read it but they probably won't. You would have better luck sending them feedback through their official channels, where you know they will read it. If you're giving feedback to a YC startup then this would be a good place, but otherwise not so much.

“ these type of forums are full of uninformed comments”

Hacker News has solid representation from Big Tech, FOSS projects, and Academia. What data do you have to back up that this is a bad place to air grievances with software?

Whenever anyone mentions Amazon, my ears perk up. If it is within my power to correct, I take action. So what data do you have to support the assertion that HN comments are uninformed, and that this is only a good forum for YC startups?

That's just my personal observation, I haven't seen many unfocused airings of grievances that ended in positive change. Sure there are knowledgeable people here, but they may not always be speaking within their area of expertise; it helps to direct it at someone who is within that area of expertise, in the case of HN, that area is startups.

I've seen plenty of complaints about Amazon here go unanswered. Amazon is a pretty big company, I'm guessing you don't know everything about it and may not be the right person to ask about many things. If I had a question, I'd definitely ask you if it was something you were an expert in, but I don't know what that is because you didn't say.

Have you even seen an Amazon issue reported here that you had power to correct?

Yes

Thank you for doing that, it's really fortunate that you are, but please understand that not all of your coworkers do the same thing. I think it would be nice if they did, but currently they do not.

Yeah you’re right. But I care about this stuff a lot. I love tech, I love the life it has afforded me, and I want people to have a good experience, even if it is something as simple as billing software!

Obviously Amazon has some huge issues to overcome, both culturally and policy wise. If you keep bringing issues up, I’ll do my best to get them in front of the right folks.

>Do you even care? I don't think you do, you'll just delete that desktop and move on and use whatever you want, and that's the whole point.

For the record: I care.

Can you elaborate? Is there something particular that you need that doesn't work on an RPi? If it turns out to be a small fix, then ultimately you may end up caring a lot less than you think.

Also, telling an individual user to "just use another DE" does not solve the problem, whose effects are widespread, on a whole ecosystem of software, its users, and developers.

Could you please explain specifically what one or more of these effects is? I may be able to offer suggestions on how to mitigate it. When I was talking about using something else I was specifically referring to the article, which is talking about using a different window manager, and makes a good case for switching, and may even be able to help you deal with some of those effects. I assume you agree with the article, if not then I don't understand because it seems odd to me to single out this one passing mention in a paragraph that otherwise goes against what was just said, so please elaborate if you can.

I'm not sure what the other user was thinking about, but I think that GNOME's push towards client-side window decoration is annoying and imposing. Depending on your WM, some applications become "useless", they waste space on small screens and just reinforce a sense of fragmentation. I get that it looks better on GNOME, and I appriciate it when using GNOME, but as there seems to be no system to remove the CSD on traditional systems, I still think it is an overall bad move.

Others may find that pushing towards server-side window decoration is annoying and imposing, so this is unfortunately an area where not everyone can be happy. In any case you may be interested to try a patch: https://github.com/lah7/gtk3-classic

The people that characterize GNOME this way are desperate to identify themselves with a certain sub group of Linux users that prides themselves in doing things the hardest possible way (such as recompiling your terminal every time you want to change the font size) because it makes them feel 1337. Don't sweat it too much, it's just a little bit of garden variety internet tribalism.

Not leet. Gnome is unusable in any machine older than 2015. Also, CWM flies on my 2007 netbook.

I completely disagree, I'm using GNOME on a laptop from 2008 now. It's working fine for me. I did tweak it a little bit however.

Nope. I will continue to bash GNOME because it's something like "the opposing political party." I want Free Software, and by extension, Linux, to gain ground on desktops, and I genuinely believe that GNOME's "philosophy" is not a good one and is detrimental to this cause.

Roughly, I'd characterize it like the following: I believe that the best way for Linux to gain ground is to be a serious, perhaps even a little boring, but definitely "grown-up" desktop. Simplicity is very important, but tt should lean toward configurability and techniness.

What it should NOT do is what GNOME is trying to do, which is trying to streamline and appeal to everyone. This approach is like trying to beat Apple at their own game, which is dumb -- given that beating Microsoft at their own game is well within our reach. Heck, look at Windows 11, we're like a third of the way there already.

I'm afraid I don't understand what you're saying or what the point of your bashing is. GNOME and KDE and XFCE and whatnot are not political parties and are not opposed to each other. They're not really even close to being that, they're open source projects that collaborate on a sizable amount of things. If you believe there is a better way to do something then just contribute to another desktop. The existence of GNOME doesn't prevent you from doing that and isn't detrimental to it, especially when you consider that the cost of switching to another open source desktop is a big fat $0. Please don't unnecessarily politicize things, one of the benefits here is that you explicitly don't have to do that.

To put it another way: maybe some specific mode of "Linux gaining ground on desktops" with "configurability and techniness" is your goal, but people working on any given desktop (including GNOME) may not share that goal in the same way you do, and it doesn't make any sense to expect them to.

> I'm afraid I don't understand what you're saying or what the point of your bashing is. GNOME and KDE and XFCE and whatnot are not political parties and are not opposed to each other.

They surely where born that way, GNOME only exists due to the original Qt license.

Then Gtk+ was always the go to framework for C devs, while KDE was embraced by C++ community on GNU/Linux.

Murray did a very good job for the C++ refugees on GNOME/Gtk, but that has always been a minority versus being on KDE land.

I honestly haven't seen any real license drama about that for like 10 years now. Qt and GTK are (mostly) the same license.

Also I really wouldn't say that C and C++ are equivalent to political parties, that's like saying the same thing about coke and pepsi.

Everything that implies taking sides is politics, no matter what.

You haven't seen any drama, really?

https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/05/qt_lts_goes_commercia...

C vs C++ flame wars have been a thing since C++ was born at AT&T.

Since you aren't following up the news,

"CppCon 2015: Kate Gregory “Stop Teaching C"

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

"We stopped teaching C"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZUTJ2UNXxI

You can find similar stuff from C side, specially if you back in time to GNOME mailing lists, Usenet archives from comp.lang,languagex

I figured you would post that. I have heard no actual KDE developers saying that's a problem. They don't use Qt LTS. The "drama" there seems to be mostly confined to unrelated internet forums.

As for your posts about C, I can give a personal anecdote: I would agree with those sentiments, C has a lot of really bad problems as a language. But yet, I still write it a lot more often than C++. So It's not as simple as you're making it out to be. Also I checked some of those slides and I wouldn't describe anything there as a "flame war."

>Everything that implies taking sides is politics, no matter what.

If you really want to look at things that way, you could, but this seems to not be strictly true. Just because there is taking sides does not mean there has to be fighting or politics.

Obviously, I can't expect them to. I'm not paying them. But I can absolutely encourage and discourage different ways of thinking and doing, and I'm absolutely free to express that. And yes, I would like to discourage "the GNOME way."

To elaborate a bit about why I'm saying this; For quite some time, onboarding people to Linux was pretty easy. "Just use Ubuntu" was a really good answer. And then Unity came along, with a) bloat and b) this new paradigm that was ostensibly as simple as a Mac, but different enough that people wouldn't recognize it. And this was a terrible direction for Ubuntu to go, especially since XP was on its way out.

And now, when people ask me, hey, how do I get started with Linux, and they've heard of Ubuntu, I can't just say "Yeah, go for it." I have to launch into a thing and name 2 or 3 different distros, primarily due to the weirdness of GNOME. I appreciate freedom and choice, but I'm also quite free to say, I believe the following: I really wish the GNOME people would more-or-less give up, because they have mindshare not off of the quality of their current interface, but because of the momentum of their old one plus Ubuntu. I believe that (much like Windows, frankly) if they actually had to compete in this space on the merits, they'd lose out.

KDE (and LXDE and others) are doing a better job of making a predictable useful interface.

I don't understand what you're trying to discourage, what you're saying doesn't follow. That has nothing to do with "the GNOME way" and is mostly related to the decisions made by Canonical, who decided to make their own desktop, and then dropped it in favor of GNOME. Asking the GNOME people to give up isn't going to make it viable for Ubuntu to develop their own desktop again that is more to your liking. Your issue is with them, not with GNOME. And according to them, you seem to have it exactly backwards: it was Unity that was not able to compete on merits, so it was dropped in favor of GNOME.

But anyway it sounds like you just fixed that by using a different distro, you can even just suggest the KDE or LXDE spins of Ubuntu. Those still exist, and it's not hard to use them. If you're already using them then it's very hard for me to see what your actual complaint is or what you're trying to discourage. It's true you're free to express what you want, but please consider that what you're expressing may not be something that was done with having the full information. I've noticed there is a lot of confusion about what GNOME is and a lot of people seem to mix it up and equate it with Ubuntu or Red Hat or something, which is understandable, but it's not true. I'm only here to explain why.

And just to make it painfully clear: it is already hard enough to maintain open source and fix all the issues and improve the quality of the current interfaces, without people constantly demanding that open source maintainers give up and stop fixing bugs. If you want to get things fixed, you really don't need to do this.

It's not all that complicated. I'm presuming there are people and companies out there working to make these interfaces, to some extent, for other people to use. Maybe it's business, maybe it's love.

Thus, I'm commenting as a fan/user/potential customer, who might find this useful in some way. Or not. Sports fans can talk about their team or the state of the game or what they like and don't like. That's what I'm doing. I'm not "demanding," and if anything, I'm arguing for less work. By the GNOME people, because their thing is a waste of time. Go work on the better things :)

>their thing is a waste of time

This is incorrect. GNOME users would not consider it a waste of time, just like KDE users would not consider it a waste of time for someone to do work on KDE, or Mac users would not consider it a waste of time to work on macOS, etc. Please consider that your suggestion can be considered rude, you are simply not the target audience.

In general, open source doesn't work like this. These are volunteers, nobody can really tell them to go work on something else, because they work on what they feel like, which may or may not be seeking the approval of people like you. If you want to find another project that seeks your approval, that's great, go do that, let us know about it later and maybe I'll even try it out. If your goal is to harass open source developers until they quit open source, then please stop doing that, that would be making it worse for everyone.

Sooo, I think this is an overly simplistic view, and this is probably the conversation we should all be having, what's driving a LOT of this isn't "what developers choose to spend their time on as something like a hobby." And perhaps it's not the developers who we should be talking about anyway, I'll grant that.

There are "moneyed" business interests who have a lot at stake at their team winning mindshare and profits. Now, I have no problem with businesses being businesses generally. But part of their "product" is these interfaces. And so again, what I would suggest is that pushing GNOME type interfaces is, long term, a bad strategy that is likely to continue the trend of "Linux" being a second class citizen, by wasting energy toward the impossible goal of beating MacOS at their own game.

Conversely, pushing more configurable and slightly more techy KDE-like interfaces I think has stronger likelihood of making "on the tech margin" people more excited and interested in Linux, and ends up helping more people overall.

Now, I could be wrong about this -- but, while I definitely agree with "no one should to demand what open source developers do, especially if they're not being compensated" -- it's equally as bad (if not worse) to suggest "let's not offer big-picture criticism of trends in open source software that affects a lot of people."

Aslo I absolutely accept that what I'm saying is rude. It 100% is.

I adhere to the idea that you should never be rude unless you feel there is something at stake that makes being rude worth it, and I think "trying to gain ground on the Linux Desktop" a thing that affects LOTS of people outside of the developers, is.

Gnome feels like what you’d get if someone read a lot about macOS and wanted to emulate it, but had never actually used it. Gnome makes it very easy for new users to get started and very hard for experienced users to adjust it. Mac makes it easy for new users, but still gives power users room to grow.

Specially in the what concerns the developer experience of macOS, regarding frameworks, IDE and languages.

On GNOME the documentation seems to have stagnated, then we had Anjuta, now GNOME Builder (which tries to be XCode like), a UI design tool that is being re-written from scratch, the various frameworks don't seem to compose, and then each binding does their own stuff, only adapts a couple of Gtk tutorial samples to their own language.

Naturally being GNU/Linux, everything that falls out of the UI only has POSIX or GNU/Linux specific C APIs to refer back to, yet another experience completely devoid of how things work on macOS (there is no Foundation, Accelerate, Core...).

Gstreamer, Cairo...

Depends on the year, if you haven't been paying attention they are on their way out, and then we have again the issue of documentation, tooling, language bindings,...

Even Linus Torvalds and Debian stopped resisting GNOME 3 and agreed that it's manageable for an experienced user to configure it or their needs.

> Gnome feels like what you’d get if someone read a lot about macOS and wanted to emulate it, but had never actually used it.

I find this statement humorous because I've said much the same thing about Linux Desktop GUIs in general. "It's like they were made by someone who's only ever had a GUI described to them in an email". Compared to a system like the original Macintosh or RiscOS that thought hard about how to abstract things for a graphical display and a mouse, or even Windows that just copied as much of that as they could get away with, it's really quite terrible.

Sorry to disappoint you but GNU/Linux is definitely not a third of the way to compete with a Windows 11 desktop, and the best it will ever manage is to run on top of Hyper-V.

> I will continue to bash GNOME because it's something like "the opposing political party."

This is a vice, not a justification.

All I can say is that GNOME 3 seems to take Havoc Pennington's famous essay about as far as it can go, considering configurability a bug. I don't know exactly when it started, but it definitely came to my attention bigtime with the infamous gnome-screensaver.

Useful links: 1. https://ometer.com/preferences.html, the subset of Mr. P's original essay that the original contains a link to. 2. https://www.derstandard.at/story/1313024283546/gnome-designe..., an interview with Jon McCann.

Yes, I would agree that a lot of GNOME developers still view that as a design goal. But not all do, and even so, having less configurability doesn't mean less features. If you ask me, practically speaking, what it has meant is that there is a larger collection of smaller apps to choose from. So if the app you want lacks a configuration option, you might be better served by trying to find a different app that just works the way you want the first time.

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