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KDE, MATE, and Cinnamon seem like great desktop environments and potentially better implementations of the "Windows-style" (i.e. Windows 95 through Windows 7) desktop environment than Windows these days. I'm glad they exist even if I don't personally use them.

But I'm also glad that the GNOME folks have decided to chart a different path even when that results in the occasional (or not-so-occasional) design misstep. Trying new approaches and making mistakes is the only way to create something new. And in a world where KDE, MATE, and Cinnamon exist, turning GNOME into yet another Windows-style desktop environment for Linux seems like a colossal waste of effort.

Having said that, it is puzzling to me why so many Linux distributions have chosen GNOME as their default shell instead of one of the more conservative desktop environments. Possibly Red Hat's influence?

Red Hat only pays people to work on GTK4, which GNOME's desktop has switched too. All the other DEs still use GTK3, which they broke (2014-2015) and froze broken, never to be fixed.

GNOME by far the most supported and mature desktop environment for Linux. KDE et al might look and feel better, but you have annoyances like bad multi monitor support, bad dock support, etc... So while I agree with many feeling others have expressed, I'm happy to use a distro that ships a DE that just works.

It can be. Then again, if you're using an Nvidia machine you'll be treated to random segfaults on GNOME regardless of which driver you use. The reason for this is simply because they never wrote a proper Mutter backend for Nvidia, which doesn't really confer "just works" to me.

That's unfortunate, we could use healthy competition between desktop environments.

With respect to distros picking a conservative default, it does look like Red Hat Enterprise Linux ships with GNOME Classic by default, so perhaps that's one way to address that point.

> But I'm also glad that the GNOME folks have decided to chart a different path even when that results in the occasional (or not-so-occasional) design misstep

I would agree with this if GNOME also didn't treat their own technologies as an all-or-nothing scenario. One of the biggest problems I have is that GNOME is genuinely incapable of admitting when they're wrong; to a lesser extent with stuff like implementing EGLStream in GBM, and to a larger extent things like ignoring tickets because they don't fit their personal agenda. I'd argue that GNOME's development philosophy is what's holding back technologies like Wayland, Flatpak and even PipeWire. Their refusal to make modest concessions in the name of usability end up whittling down their desktop environment to little more than an iPad. They're welcome to design whatever they want, but forcing everyone else to jump through their hoops and threatening downstream vendors is simply not a good look.

Is there an example you have in mind where they were objectively wrong and did not admit it?

In the examples I've seen their decisions generally seem reasonable and well-considered, even in cases where I disagreed with the outcome. The most I can say is that it might benefit some contributors to consider tone and messaging a little.

With respect to closing tickets, unless someone is paying for the work I generally close feature requests that aren't compatible with a project's vision. Focusing is about saying "no" and building every feature every user requests eventually results in a bloated, unmaintainable project.

Finally, with respect to downstream vendors and projects that incorporate pieces of the GNOME shell into their own software the GNOME team has made it pretty clear that (for better or worse) their focus is their own desktop environment. Asking contributors if they're willing to do additional work to support outside projects is reasonable, but demanding that they do so is not a good look.

I can think of one specific case. At some point, it all of a sudden wasn't possibly to disable cursor blinking in gnome-terminal anymore.

It's fixed now, but it took years and absolutely no admission that perhaps they didn't handle it very well.

The entire story is outlined here. https://geoff.greer.fm/2016/08/26/gnome-terminal-cursor-blin...

> I eventually figured out that I had to swipe up a little arrow at the bottom of the screen, but using a mouse. Why?

Forced swipes are one of the most disgusting feature ever; they are always configured with some kind of inertial threshold so that you need to do the exact movement the designer expected.

On touchscreen they are even worse as sometimes if you are holding the device in an unusual way or have a cover that slightly blocks the side of the screen the "correct" movement can be impossible.

Apparently Windows 10 briefly experimented with forcing them for the login (click, enter, and any other key would do nothing), but it has not happened in a while.

Lockscreen clicks are also incredibly annoying. I'm left handed and often use my mouse left handed with the clicks swapped. If you do this in software on something like Windows/MacOS then it uses the "default" click setup even if you're logged in and the only user on the system. So I will sit there and right click while it's looking for a left click because that's the "default". It's incredibly dumb. Most Linux DEs/login managers are like this too although you have more control over the software so it's possible to swap at boot at a lower level. I've given up swapping clicks in software and now buy more expensive mice that have the option in hardware.

There is never* a good reason not to have Enter do the reasonable thing when there is only one possible action

* hyperbolic but I cannot think of one beside "let's force our user to discover this new nifty flow they would never use otherwise"

Why is GNOME like GNOME?

https://ometer.com/free-software-ui.html

I recommend to read this! You will understand a lot about GNOME. They learned a lesson to keep things simple for the user. But the reason for five clocks is probably, that neither provides the important preferences for a lot users.

Ubuntu

Please don't think that Ubuntu is using GNOME. It is a massively patched and themed version of GNOME, mixing package versions of current and older versions. And more important, for many years Ubuntu used Unity as UI and and own Login-Manager. Canonical is always doing something alone outside of community.

The good news

    * Canonical helps GNOME since some years again and it has an positive effect,   lots of performance improvements.
    * GNOME is keyboard centric! I select applications windows by typing the application name. Why search if GNOME can find it?
    * Luckliy GNOME removed the entire failed desktop metaphor from Microsoft Windows (arranging and searching icons you never see and never use because a windows is in front of it).
    * And the SystemTray (Microsoft tries to hide it since Windows XP). Either your a silent daemon or an application with an CLI, TUI or GUI.
    * GNOME is incredible friendly to new users which doesn't expect things already in a specific way.
    * They learned a lot and re-added features. Like the awesome file type-and-find in Nautilus.

The bad news

GNOME tends to remove features and options before an appropriate replacement is ready. The often assume what users need based on their personal usage, which is not identical. Known examples are the removal of transparency from the terminal (patches available!) or the hidden setting to avoid suspend on LID-CLOSE. As noted already above, it looks like they learned somewhat and keep improving :)

Without Canonical's improvements GNOME is even more painful to use.

> I think one version of Ubuntu GNOME obscured the login screen. I installed it, saw no login screen, clicked everywhere, but nothing happened. Just stared at a desktop wallpaper. If I recall, I eventually figured out that I had to swipe up a little arrow at the bottom of the screen, but using a mouse. Why?

You can press any key to go past that screen.

Would you believe that it took me 1-2 years to figure that out? I swiped that little arrow awkwardly with my mouse for 1-2 years, before I accidentally hit a key to get that login screen. I think the issue was that I'm sitting in front of a graphical user interface, which to me means using a mouse. It never occurred to me that I had to hit a key on a keyboard to get a login screen on a graphical user interface.

I think that's when I cursed at GNOME, blew it away, and installed MATE.

Now imagine yourself sending anonymous tracking data to Gnome: "wow, this user is so happy with the swipe-up login screen, he didn't use the any-key bypass for two years! This is a 100% cool feature". And with you, 500 users like you.

Meanwhile, the 10-20 users frustrated and asking in their forums to remove the feature are ignored, because anonymous data tells another story.

its not funny because it's true. the mcnamara fallacy is alive and well

What's hard to believe is that you muscled through it for 1-2 years before jumping ship to MATE :) But yes, that painful experience of helplessly clicking everywhere on the login screen for a really long time like a moron is seared into my memory.

I just remember that at around the time 3 dropped, Mint (with default desktops Cinnamon and MATE) took the top of the list on distrowatch, and that's when I made the switch from Ubuntu.

> If I recall, I eventually figured out that I had to swipe up a little arrow at the bottom of the screen, but using a mouse. Why?

I think the answer is that windows 10 does it, so it must be copied.

It's a paradigm which makes a fair amount of sense on a touchscreen: it's an easy motion and it acts as a screen against accidental presses if the screen gets turned on in your bag or pocket. Translating it to a mouse makes no sense, and it probably only works that way because touch events are being turned into pointer events. In practice what should happen is a mouse click (but not a touch event) should move onto the lockscreen, or this screen should be skipped entirely if the device does not have a touchscreen or is a laptop with a touchscreen which is covered when it's in a bag.

> I think there is still no image preview in their file explorer. I don't know, I don't use it anymore.

Not in list view, but it's there (obviously) in icons view. It's always there in the file picker.

I'm a little torn here. I want the file explorer window to be as small as possible and I don't need the preview most of the times. However I'd like to have a preview when exploring a folder of picture, and the list view is always better than the icon view (sort, names, density, etc). I guess that a toolbar button to add the space for the preview on demand could be a nice to have feature.

back in the day gnome files had image previews for the icon in the list view -- it was handy and got me by with the lack of image previews in the filepicker. but they recently took them out :/ iirc one of the devs said they couldnt make out the 16px icons on their screen anyway, and poof.. its easy to rag on gnome for some of this stuff but i really love it for the most part. i love that it's minimal and out of my way. anyway. thanks gnome team. let the haters hate

> The desktop icons and click-and-drag shortcuts got removed a few years ago. This is a GUI workflow that I've been using on Windows, MacOS, Atari OS, Amiga OS, going back to the 1980s. Gone.

Gnome hasn't had desktop icons for 11 years. I think you must've been using a third party plugin.

Desktop icons were removed from Nautilus about 4 years ago: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/merge_requests/46

Well, they were disabled in the first version of GNOME 3 (2011) and you had to jump through hoops to re-enable them. I think from that it's clear they're not intended to be used.

I wonder. What are your thoughts on KDE plasma?

I used KDE back in the 2004-2007 time frame then switched to GNOME. Back then, I think GNOME was similar enough to KDE that I hardly noticed much difference. I haven't used KDE since then, but I take it for a spin every 2 years just to see what's going on:

* Ubuntu KDE (Kubuntu 22.04) is one of the few Ubuntu flavors (I think Lubuntu was the other one) that would not automatically scale the font for my 2560x1440 14" screen. So I literally could not read anything in the Installer. I had to peer through a magnifying glass to make it through the installer. Even after logging in, the fonts were so small, I had to keep using the magnifying glass to find the Display (or Monitors?) control panel to set that 175% or 200% option (or was it the 1600x900 screen size option).

* Some (most?) of the various desktop icons seem to be specified in raw pixels. For example, the task bar at the bottom was set to some pixel size which was impossible to read on my laptop screen.

* The KDE UI paradigm seemed familiar, like Windows XP or Windows 7. But the enormous number of configuration options seemed overwhelming for someone who doesn't use KDE all the time.

I normally spend most of my time in the Terminal window and the Firefox browser. I actually don't do a lot of stuff in the graphical desktop. So I want my desktop to be functional but stay mostly out of my way and not require too much configuring and maintenance. KDE always seemed a bit too high maintenance for me.

Hmm i've had bad experiences with kubuntu too back when I tried it. More so than any other distro commonly utilising kde at least. Configs seemed broken by default or just weird.

I dare say it's not properly maintained.

I'm with you. Over the years Gnome pushed me away with the ambitious but undesired UX.

It reminded me of M$ forcing Windows 8 tiles.

I'm just happy that linux gives me plenty of options for distros and desktops. I've never even considered gnome a problem because I just don't use it.

I have the opposite sentiment.

Gnome enabled me to finally switch to linux on a tablet pc (cant justify owning a desktop, and got tired of laptop ergonomics). It started to come together in the past year or so between gnome 40 and adwaita.

I do think some of the moee familiar desktop paradigm extensions (dash to dock) should be enabled by default though.