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Comment by loudmax | Hacker News Reader

It's unfortunate the GNOME is still the default desktop environment for most Linux distributions. People give Linux a try, then give up because it's unstable and difficult to troubleshoot. Linux itself is stable (given the right hardware drivers), and provides a solid foundation for a well designed desktop environment. It's GNOME that's a mess.

One of the core strengths of Linux is its modularity, with parts being easily swapped so distro managers or end users can customize what they need. GNOME goes against this by taking on hardware management tasks that are well outside the scope of a desktop environment and munging it all into a giant ball of complexity so everything depends on everything else. If the GNOME project had the resources to hire a massive QA team to catch issues like this, it wouldn't be such a problem. But they don't, so GNOME's shortcomings and poor design choices give desktop Linux a bad reputation.

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Could you give examples as to what is messy? I used gnome on a daily basis, as well as Windows 10/11, and occasionally MacOS.

My experience is that gnome is consistent, consolidated and intuitive. While windows is all over the place, with at least two separate UIs with slightly different overlap in functionality.

Nagging update messages which won't disappear after clicking. Random window switch unresponsiveness/delay. Those are in Gnome, I have no such problem in KDE, I have a different set of issues.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4

Try opening top and moving your mouse around a lot. For me, CPU usage goes up to ~30%. This is on Fedora with pretty banal hardware. For extra fun, google "gnome-shell high cpu usage". That's just one example.

Gnome seems generally ok, but kind of old school win98 reliability wise. Well it crashed/BSOD, shrug, reboot and move on.

Pretty much once a week I lose the cursor, focus is generally locked onto one gnome terminal, once I find it, I can exist the shell, which kills the window, which doesn't help, but I exit the next window window, and eventually I get my cursor back.

Sometimes whenever I launch anything that uses OpenGL I just get a GLX failure.

Sometimes I go to open a new window and it just won't map.

Granted I open many terminals in a day, but it's still pretty disappointing.

I get the "this application <FOO> has closed unexpectedly" about once a day.

As someone who hasn't used Gnome or KDE in some time. The issue I run into all the time has nothing to do with the desktop. It's Nvidia. Sometimes Realtek too.

I'm stuck on a specific release of my current distro because the whole system will randomly freeze forcing a hard reset (holding the power button for it to turn off) because of something I guess Nvidia's driver is doing to the kernel. Happens on any other distro or newer release of my current distro I've tried.

I had that as well. I 'solved' it by downgrading kernel version to 5.15. Perhaps it may work to upgrade it as well but that has other issues on my system.

I think I might have to try that in the near future. I'm running into issues compiling projects because my package repositories version of things are just too old.:(

Yeah, that's why I qualified my comment about the hardware drivers. If you can get by on an Intel or AMD GPU, those should be very stable. If you need the power of an Nvidia GPU you're at their mercy, so you will need to track kernel releases and driver versions and so on.

Yeah I originally got it for CUDA but now my card is too old for PyTorch. Plus, I quickly realized why most models are built on servers instead of PCs. So I have no use for it at the moment.

Still, linux hardware compatibility seems to be far from a sure thing even avoiding Nvidia. I'm thinking of getting a Intel mini PC ThinkCenter for my next system. But I have no way of knowing what issues I'll have until I get it.

The bad thing is that it's what people are used to (thanks, Ubuntu. But it's Fedoras default as well)), our KDE systems were met with a lot of resistance and ended up needing to change to GNOME

I tried to install Kubuntu 22.04, the installer crashes every time you set up full-disk encryption. Not doing better with regards to crashes in important settings widgets.

What is a good Freedesktop DE then?

Probably KDE Plasma.

Sway and i3 are excellent, but they're clearly not for everyone and I wouldn't recommend them for people new to Linux, or who just want a normal desktop experience.

For a notion of what GNOME ought to be, I'd point in the direction of lightweight environments like XFCE or LXDE or MATE. None of them are perfect, but in my experience XFCE at least was more stable than GNOME.

Lightweight window managers don't provide things like settings for your wifi card (maybe XFCE does now). The point isn't that desktop Linux users shouldn't have a graphical interface for wifi. The point is that this should be independent of the window manager. Same for power management and mounting filesystems and so on. If GNOME provided a clean framework for these things it would be okay. Instead they've recreated the Windows registry.

GNOME is great out of the box on Fedora. I think a big problem with Linux is users going off the beaten path and using bespoke environments, settings, and software.

GNOME isn't even a fraction of the problem, desktop linux is absolutely unsuitable for day to day use and that's nothing to do with the desktop environments. The foundational design decisions of the way applications are rendered in linux means that every experience is inconsistent, nothing even has the same file picker and it's always a surprise to see which one is thrown in your face in any given situation. This sort of inconsistency is ripe throughout every part of linux, everything works so long as you make it your full time job to work out what the incantation is to enable basic convenience features.

Linux Mint Cinnamon works better than Windows for me, just out of the box.

Yes, I second that.

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