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Comment by zvmaz | Hacker News Reader

I have used all possible DEs and Window Managers, and finally settled on Gnome.

I feel that I am very efficient using it, more so than when I was using tilling window managers (wmii, i3, dwm, etc.).

Gnome is just an incredible piece of software that works out of the box. Try it.

> I feel that I am very efficient using it, more so than when I was using tilling window managers (wmii, i3, dwm, etc.).

Gnome/GTK is the only software I can think of, which slowly but surely reduced the end-user efficiency.

One starts working one day, and finds out that mnemonics (menu shortcuts) have been disabled. Another day, the file manager side-by-side panel has been removed. Another day, a convenient filemanager shortcut (new folder) has been forgotten in the transition to a new version (and nobody cares). Another day, and the file search has been replaced with an incredibly slow, and buggy search. Another day, and one finds that tiling capabilities of the terminal are severely limited because the devs are hostile to APIs that would allow such functionality (see Tilix debate). Files sorting in the file manager? Overrated¹. And let's not get into the Gnome branding debate².

In the FOSS land, I find Gnome/GTK to be the most user-hostile approach to design I've ever experienced. The statement "I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry" says pretty much everything about the project(s) attitude².

¹: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=355152

²: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti...

Please see my above comment for why it is wildly incorrect to describe the removal of features as "user-hostile": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32205125

In general, going to developers with a list of demands for patches to revert is not going to be helpful, it is much more likely that behavior is seen as hostile, coming from a user. It would be more useful to ask them why they have removed those features, figure out what their goal is, and then discuss it so you can reach consensus.

>because the devs are hostile to APIs that would allow such functionality

This one is blatantly incorrect, see this twitter thread from a GNOME developer: https://twitter.com/tobias_bernard/status/145743855381055898...

> It would be more useful to ask them why they have removed those features, figure out what their goal is, and then discuss it so you can reach consensus.

That's not a productive approach; it would make the GNOME devs slaves of popularity contests.

These are not my words. They're the words of a GNOME member¹

  > as a question was there any kind of community review
  No, maintainers are not meant to become slaves of popularity contests.

Discussions with GNOME devs seems not to lead anywhere. Here³'s the opionion of a Pop!_OS maintainer:

  Something @GNOME NEEDS to realize is that Pop!_OS, Ubuntu, and others are NOT
  going to stop theming. What we will do instead is replace GNOME components
  entirely if it becomes too costly to apply our style to them. Come up with a
  way forward for custom styles, or lose users.

The theming problem has been very much discussed - if with "discussing", you mean lots of users (devs) talking to a wall. It's worse actually; the GNOME team actively prevented devs from developing theming, and advocated against it.

I actually had a link where a GNOME dev was urging Debian (or Ubuntu, can't remember) to revert a patch that restored terminal transparency (or something like that). Could you help me finding it?

Here's an interesting reply from Christian Persch²:

  > 1. Open gnome terminal
  > 2. Go to Edit -> Profile Preferences
  > Actual result: Background configuration tab is missing.
  > It was present in 3.6 version, please return it back.
  No.

The above was actually discussed on HN⁴.

Regarding this:

  This one is blatantly incorrect, see this twitter thread from a GNOME developer: https://twitter.com/tobias_bernard/status/145743855381055898...

The "*lot* of work" has never been discussed with users (I've checked the multiple requests in the bug trackers). Given the amount of egomania in GNOME's background, and lack of strong (actually, any) technical grounds in the twit, the twit has exactly zero validity.

¹: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=695371#c35

²: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=698544

⁴: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5690689

³: https://web.archive.org/web/20210901171117/https://twitter.c...

The Twitter thread you linked to is irrelevant - it's talking about completely different thing than what GP mentioned.

Apologies, this has been an incorrect definition on my side (but correctly understood by the GP).

What I referred to with "tiling capabilities" in:

> tiling capabilities of the terminal are severely limited because the devs are hostile to APIs that would allow such functionality (see Tilix debate)

is actually the keyboard navigation/selection support in the terminal.

There has been debate between the terminal maintaner(s) and the GNOME VTE maintainer, and lead to nothing.

Without providing any technical information, the twit means nothing, and IMO, in the context of the GNOME devs culture, it's just another, typical, "F* you".

The is a reference to the debate [in the Tilix bug tracker](https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix/issues/1305), but regarding the debate itself, I don't have it handy.

Unfortunately, I share the impression, even the most basic "office work" use cases are not covered, like switching audio devices or UX decisions that make no sense, like auto-ditching notifications (like what the heck, the UI knows better what notifications are important and which aren't). The GTK API is like the wierdiest pseudo-objective UI API ever, and the number of modern GTK applications and their complexity can atest that. Gnome's stability makes it the best Linux native DE right now, but the gap between Mac OS and Windows is wider and wider every year. No wonder why people choose WSL as their everyday driver, they have Linux and work environment at the same time.

That is also me. I used i3, dwm, awesomewm etc. I spent just too much time maintaning these frankenstein configurations. By setting just a few shortcuts in gnome I get 90% there. My graphical shell is anyway just used for launching emacs, terminals and a browser.

> I spent just too much time maintaning these frankenstein configurations. By setting just a few shortcuts in gnome I get 90% there.

Curious what you mean by "maintaining these frankenstein configurations", and what you were trying to do. Was the WM under heavy development with user breaking changes or something?

I can't argue with your experience, but I've only touched my StumpWM config a handful of times in the last 10 years or so, usually to add a new defcommand or keyboard shortcut.

This is my experience as well. I use i3 and change a couple of lines every now and then. The other components like dbus, portals, pipewire, just work. But I am not doubting the parent's experience either, since people can have wildly varying setups and issues across distros and hardware.

Once I had my WM running I had to clobber together lots of different pieces together (with scripts and whatnot) to get the remaining desktop functionality. For example:

1. Laptop screen brightness 2. Wifi setup 3. Application launcher 4. External monitor/projector configurations for presentations

etc.

Some people might argue this part of the unix principle to have separate tools that do one job well but frankly I don't care about the unix principle as long-time emacs user (the anti-thesis of unix). The end result was a frankenstein thing: random tools glued together to emulate a basic desktop experience.

Really? Most of that is pretty simple to do in i3 / sway at least.

Every one of those things worked out of the box for me the last time I installed (which, admittedly, was via Manjaro, so a fair amount of config came from them). Even prior to that when I rolled an i3 setup by hand, external displays was the only troublesome bit.

It's definitely possible that some distros improved WM based setups. Last time I as down the WM rabbit hole was over 4 years ago. I spent quite a bit of time to get something usable (and it was fun!).

What always did, going through awesomewm, stumpwm and xmonad to now sway, was to used whatever of those services were available from the OS. Some I had to launch by hand, but that was a one time change always (some of them across WMs). Nowadays it is even easier, since most of what I needed to launch manually are now user-level service from systemd.

In the end, I am running most of the normal services a GNOME desktop would be running, but without using the GNOME shell, and that has worked very well.

The time required to set up any environment with robust options for configuring and modifying the way the environment works and multiple different components for any given job is less related to the minimum or reasonable time to achieve a functional environment than it is to how long it takes to explore the many different better ways one could achieve.

Shall install vim and be happy or shall we explore the entire environment of plugins and pick the 50 we like best after trying 150 then install Emacs then find our 50 favorite addons there.

When someone says "that works out of the box" what I hear is "I don't want to spend time customizing things to work better for me", which is fine, but surprising coming from someone who claims to have used tiling window managers.

To me it means: I don't have to spend a whole week tweaking stuff so the DE won't get break my workflow with annoying things.

Which then translates to bugs here and there, inconsistency and may other problems.

And while Gnome is a pain in the *s sometimes because they remove features, it's still better than the alternatives to me.

Why would you spend whole week, if you can copy the configs from older machines?

Because some tweaks can't just be saved and restored later.

which is one of Gnome's problems. I don't want to install extensions only to realize they won't work on the new Gnome version.

But installing the 3 or 4 extensions that I need takes no more than 2 minutes. I don't have to tweak anything else.

It means: "I don't want to spend time customizing things that may not even work better for me."

I acknowledge that some people like crafting their own computing environment[1], and it can be really interesting and rewarding , but some people like to work on other things, or simply lose interest in fiddling indefinitely with config files and all (like I have).

For the latter, there's Gnome.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/SystemCrafters

I also "claim" to have used tiling WMs (in fact I'm using one right now) and Gnome is my favorite DE as well. I've tried pretty much everything and in the end it doesn't matter what you use as long as you can define useful keybindings.

And imho dynamic tiling is the wrong approach. Automatic rearrangement of windows never works well in real situations that just don't fit a small selection of fixed layouts. Not sure why static tilers are so rare, but Gnome offers static tiling and is very polished, so I guess that's why I like it.

Not to be pedantic, but doesn't Gnome also tile?

> Not sure why static tilers are so rare, but Gnome offers static tiling and is very polished, so I guess that's why I like it.

A tiling window manager is one which by default automatically assigns each newly created non-dialogue windows to a non-overlapping share of the screen according to a set of rules.

A lot of environments have a function to relocate the focused window to a predefined portion of the screen. For example left and right half. This makes it a stacking environment with limited tiling features.

> "I don't want to spend time customizing things to work better for me"

That's me.

I have tried every major DE, and something or the other is not right with all of them!

I used to use gnome with a lot of customizations.

Over the past couple of years I decided to adapt my workflow and muscle memory to what's provided by default. Works well for me now, even though it was a little awkward at first.

I'm currently using gnome with no customizations.

I'm not claiming gnome is the best DE or anything.

I also really like XFCE btw.

> but surprising coming from someone who claims to have used tiling window managers.

Why are you using the verb "claim" if not to throw doubt over op's word ?

> When someone says "that works out of the box" what I hear is "I don't want to spend time customizing things to work better for me",

I call that putting words in people's mouth.

I used Awesome WM for years but now use GNOME exclusively. It looks great, works intuitively, isn't resource heavy and with Wayland is super smooth.

I used to tile terminal windows but now do everything in tmux. I spend 95% of my day in either browser or terminal.

Is there a workflow based around a main container and fixed layouts in tmux ?

Sorry I missed this reply. I tend to usually have full window panes for most tasks and then introduce others ad hoc when necessary, usually running scripts or testing code I'm working on in a repl. I don't do anything too fancy.

The core discussion here is: "how much should the computer adapt to the user vs how much should the user adapt to the computer".

On the one hand, the benefit of customizing a system for yourself should be obvious.

On the other hand, adapting yourself to a system also means adapting to other people. This allows improving the shared understanding of how computers should be used:

- Designs can push users to more efficient workflows.

- New features, use-cases and apps can be developed based on shared assumptions.

- Other developers can integrate with or expand on the existing designs. eg: MacOS launchers [1] build on various system features.

In IntelliJ, I regularly discover new functionality that I wouldn't even know existed had I used a text editor with extensions.

Customise your system too much, and you cut yourself off from this "conversation". Perhaps this is why some users still live in heavily customised terminal environments, despite massive improvements to GUIs [2].

[1] Raycast, Alfred, Launchbar [2] https://capiche.com/e/consumer-dev-tools-command-palette

I think it's more like "I don't want to be overwhelmed with lots of decisions right at the start, but I want an ability to change things incrementally to serve my needs as I go". Which is why I like Plasma too for its out-of-box readiness and configurability.

I have used all possible DEs and Window Managers, and finally settled on Xfce.

It's tried and true desktop paradigm which gets the job done. Vanilla GNOME is very inefficient and extensions are just lipstick on a pig.

I used Xfce for years after Gnome 3 happened, but eventually found KDE to be better in every respect. I like that Chrome reopens windows in the correct virtual desktop, for example — something that never worked in Xfce.

KDE is great, would like to use it full time, unfortunately I find it kind of buggy and not polished for my use case. Two blockers I stumbled upon last time I used it.

I use the app that is not showing proper app icon but instead generic icon, found some bug/discussion somewhere, basically KDE developers won't workaround when app has bad metadata despite every other DE doing it.

Sometimes notifications don't pop up when app receiving notifications is opened, only when it's minimized in system tray, also works fine in every other DE I used.

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