Gnome Linux – A Complete Disaster? | Hacker News Reader

Gnome Linux – A Complete Disaster?

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20 pointsfulalas14 comments

I know this will be an unpopular idea but I like the direction gnome is following. I think it is becoming a solid and reliable OS, it has much fewer bugs than KDE, it's getting faster update after update and I like libadwaita to have consistent windows styles. It was frustrating to have ten different windows style, in particular on a 4k monitor. Gnome has a solid core system and we can download or develop extensions if something other is missing. What's wrong with it?

I like most of GNOME as well.

I love how they spread out the UI and using whitespace, makes things a lot clearer and it's easier to focus your attention on the right thing.

I love not having minimize, there really is no need for it.

However I do feel that some apps should have more features (tree style navigation & double/multiple panes in files/nautilus, evince actually should have proper annotating tools). Stuff that KDE manages much better, albeit in a sea of completely flat and borderless buttons with cramped intefaces in a quest of maximizing information shown.

edit: I think that really the thing to manage in an interface is how & how much info should be shown & how to make it (kind of) intuitive/discoverable. I honestly don't think that the second part has been well addressed by any UI (not MacOS, not Windows, not Linux DEs), for the first part I think GNOME is a lot closer to how it should be, than say KDE or Windows (I don't really use MacOS, don't know).

> “GNOME’s […] excuse for not doing something is not it’s too complicated to do, but it would confuse users. The whole we know best thing is a disease.” — Linus Torvalds

Yep. Sadly a more and more pervasive idea among software developers and especially interface designers though.

Recently I've been testing the waters of Linux Desktop more than usual because I can foresee a day in the near future where Microsoft has fucked up Windows to the point that it is the lesser piece-of-shit. So far, I'm finding Fedora Silverblue to be pretty good at giving me the kind of system I want, but it of course uses GNOME. It feels like it desperately wants to be a running on a phone and I have to install extensions just to make it bearable. And don't get me started on how useless GNOME Software is.

I tried Kinoite first, of course, because KDE doesn't despise its own userbase, but sadly it had too many problems. I suppose I could just install KDE on top of Silverblue though.

Edit: Apparently there was a miscommunication. I am not looking for DE or distro suggestions.

I don't think that Linus is right here, exactly. "We know best" isn't a problem, as long as you (A) focus on a narrow set of users and (B) actually _DO_ know what's best for those users.

GNOME fails on both of those points.

I don't know if it's possible, but if you want a windows experience you might want to try cinnamon. If you're feeling lucky and don't mind a bit of customization, XFCE can do it too.

Seconding this. Cinnamon and XFCE are both enjoyable and have a lot of similarities to the classic Windows desktop UI.

XFCE is pure awesomeness.

I generally like Gnome but I do find the lack of consideration for extensions when making updates more than a little frustrating.

For context, I use Arch so whenever I do a system upgrade which includes a gnome package, it often results in me having an unpleasant experience the next time I have to reboot and suddenly all my customizations are missing till the extensions get updated to have compatibility with the new gnome version.

I generally like the UI paradigm that Gnome has (including the lack of desktop icons) but certain things are a nuisance such as the lack of system trays without extensions. I fail to see exactly what I'm gaining from their absence especially in the context of apps not built specifically for Gnome - such as steam and many torrent clients.

> It is common to hear in the Linux community that GNOME is currently the best you can get if you want the so-called modern desktop environment.

That's debatable, to put it politely...

Such a weird article. Gnome is an awesome desktop, and I can only assume the article author is used to Windows.

No desktop icons? Yeah we don't use that anymore, it's not 1990. We type one or two chars in the program name and press enter. If you want icons, you can have it through extensions, but it's a very old paradigm and you really should stop clicking icons to start programs. There is no need.

Gnome has a single button for Do Not Disturb, and now you have no notifications from any programs bothering you while working. How cool is that? Being able to actually focus.

I could go on but I don't actually care enough to do so. Someone being wrong on the Internet is OK. :)

> you really should stop clicking icons to start programs

Yeah… That’s the whole problem with Linux UX… Answering users’ legitimate feedback with « you should stop doing this way because it’s bad » lol.

And then Linux champions get surprised that everyone uses MacOS or even Windows… That thing has been going on for 20years now, nothing changed.

I assume you didn't read whole the article. By the end it says the author (who happens to be me) is a Linux developer who work in Porteus distro. It doesn't matter anyway. What matters is that basically all desktop environments and also Windows, Android, MacOS and iOS have native support to desktop icons. And it's not a surprise that many major distros ship GNOME with desktop icons extension installed/enabled by default.

I tried to be clear about this 'paradigm' thing but it seems I failed. There's nothing wrong with changing the paradigm. The problem is that GNOME did that in a less efficient way, although claiming the contrary.

Sorry, but this article is bad. What exactly are they comparing GNOME to? It sounds like they want GNOME to be like Windows, such that "lack of desktop icons" and "there are no minimize and maximize buttons" is an automatic con and not, say, a simple reality of how it works; it is a desktop environment that doesn't do desktop icons. Instead, your equivalent to the "desktop" is the dash, your files are in the Files app, the background is just what you see behind your windows, and there is a reason the window menu replaces "minimize" with "hide". It's fine if it doesn't work for you or you think it's the wrong direction, but if you're going to pretend computers are a solved problem and everything should be frozen in time or it's wrong (a "disaster", at that!), I am going to find it very difficult to care about your opinion.

> For instance, requiring a full browser engine (i.e. WebkitGTK) to use a desktop environment is anything but minimalist.

That right there is absurd. Name one complete desktop application platform from the last ten years that doesn't come with an equivalent to WebKitWebView. If GNOME isn't hosting this, somebody else has to. If what you really want is a way to organize all of your xterm windows, that's fine, go and do that, but don't tell people they're wrong for existing in this century.

> In many file managers F4 key launches the terminal, but not in Files

I know this will be very upsetting for people who use "many file managers" and switch between Linux desktop environments like they change clothes, but for the vast majority of users, that type of concern is completely irrelevant. For what it's worth, you can always right click on a blank space, or click the current folder in the breadcrumbs bar, and choose "Open in Terminal".

> Just to build WebkitGTK can take one hour and more than 16 GB of RAM, while Xfce on the same machine can be fully built in 5 minutes, requiring less than 500 MB of RAM.

One hour? That's luxury. Have you tried to build Chromium lately? And I'm sure XFCE can be built in five minutes if you just grab a prebuilt libgtk, but you should probably be asking, where did that library come from?

> [Scary screenshot] Building GNOME Display Manager can be a nightmare

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta

You're welcome?

Anyway, choose a less inflammatory title next time.

> What exactly are they comparing GNOME to? To everything else that is not GNOME. I gave many examples along the article.

It's not a matter of being 'frozen in time'. Changing just for the sake of change doesn't add much. As I said, new UI paradigm is welcome but it has to be at least more efficient, which is not the case.

> Name one complete desktop application platform from the last ten years that doesn't come with an equivalent to WebKitWebView.

This 'last ten years' may be misleading. GNOME was created more than 20 years ago. Does it count? If you mean, desktop environments that are still being developed, which includes GNOME, then I have some examples that don't depend on any browser engine: LXDE, LXQt and Xfce.

> you can always right click on a blank space, or click the current folder in the breadcrumbs bar, and choose "Open in Terminal".

It works, sure. But it is less efficient for no good reason, and that's my point.

> And I'm sure XFCE can be built in five minutes if you just grab a prebuilt libgtk, but you should probably be asking, where did that library come from?

GNOME also depends on GTK. Actually, it's worse than that: it depends on both GTK3 and GTK4. But anyway, GTK3 compiles in less than 15 minutes on my machine. :)

> You're welcome?

Thanks, but you didn't get my point.

> Anyway, choose a less inflammatory title next time.

Thanks again. You have a point here, indeed.

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