Comment by cjauvin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cjauvin | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I recently watched a DistroTube episode [1] where he explains the many problems (cultural and technical) with the current Linux desktop environments, and he is very critical of Gnome, in particular. As an Ubuntu user with a very Emacs-centric workflow, it was slightly surprising to me, as I am quite happy with my Gnome setup, and I was not particularly aware of this "war" waging in the GUI dev world. However reading your comment I realize that I'm not alone in appreciating the extreme simplicity of Gnome, especially when it's almost entirely keyboard driven (I do everything I need by invoking the Super key). Caffeine is also the only extension I use, and my happiness would be truly complete with a keyboard shortcut for it, I think.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTY620NUdPk

There's definitely a war, but it's mostly a war of attrition at this point. You're with one or the other, though the recent release of GNOME 40 has come with a lot more literature than previous releases, for better or worse. The GNOME team has been pushing for more dramatic breaking changes this time around, and it's gotten to the point where I, as a developer, can't really feel comfortable contributing to GNOME projects these days. If you're happy as a user though, more power to ya: open source software is highly subjective, so I totally get the appeal of a set-and-forget distro with a nice simple desktop. Going forwards though, it's going to be really interesting to see how KDE handles their increasingly massive technology stack, and how GNOME manages to expand on a relatively barren desktop. There are quite a few ideologies at play here, but only time will tell which ones are pervasive.

"There's definitely a war, but it's mostly a war of attrition at this point. You're with one or the other"

I really can't agree with this, I think both are great with their own unique strengths. Both projects can and do co-exist and don't really compete for resources.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com