If they did, I’d switch back to Linux so fast—
I actually really like gnome and miss the interface. It’s a dream for people who never want to touch their mice
That hasn't been my experience. In recent times, I've always had one of these two things happen:
1. The game runs just as good or better on Linux than it does on Windows
2. The game can't be played at all on Linux, because of the DRM, anti-cheat, or anti-tamper
As a game producer, the editors and engines might work, but it's missing a lot of polish and it's kind of a frustrating experience.
I think you missed the first "As a game developer" part message of the comment you replied to, they are speaking about developing games, not playing them.
Platform compatibility is a quality, not quantity problem. If the one game someone wants to play most doesn't work, they're not going to switch.
People keep saying this but more and more people are using Linux for gaming and the Steam Deck sells very well + receives a lot of praise. How could that be if what you are saying is true?
I used the word "switch" rather than "use" on purpose. Nobody with a steam deck is using it as their primary computer or gaming device. Nobody is going to at least until the biggest stuff out there runs on it
Gnome is pretty nice...I never understood why KDE was so popular with their childish naming scheme and some of the bloat that came in 4. Awesome was a gamechanger for me though, when I realized how easy it was to have a perfect gui, every little details perfectly to my specificaions.
And I could never understand why GNOME is so popular with its desire to be a tablet interface and complete disdain for the very concept of user customization.
Sure, it sucks at 14" 1376x768 displays, but 14" 1600x900 or fullhd -- you know, what you could find a poweruser using? It's perfect, without having 125% scale or whatever.
That seems obvious. Because GNOME threw away GNOME 2, which people liked, and decided GNOME 3 would be a copy of Unity, which was supposed to be a tablet interface, and which distinguished itself only in being terrible?
Unity was supposed to be netbook interface, not a tablet one. Tablets (as we know them today, not tablet pc, which sucked) were not yet a thing then.
Gnome 3 decided not to be a clone of Unity, but not to be a clone of Windows 95. If you want a Windows 95 clone, you have a wide range of offers. If you do not want that, the choice was much worse. Gnome 3 improved that for those, who didn't want Windows 95 clone.
Incidentally, the only people who think Gnome 3 is terrible are those, who cannot let Windows 95 concepts go. Everything that is different, is going to be terrible, simply by the virtue of being different.
> Unity is a graphical shell for the GNOME desktop environment originally developed by Canonical Ltd. for its Ubuntu operating system. It debuted in 2010 in the netbook edition of Ubuntu 10.10.
> GNOME 3 was released in 2011.
Then later they stopped development and skinned gnome 3 to mimic the look.
All of these are touch-centric concepts and have no reason to exist where keyboard and mouse is the primary input method.
If you take a note, Gnome development trails hardware development, it does not lead it. There is a lot of hardware features it still cannot use and which have much higher staying potential, ergo are much lower risk to implement than a tablet interface: HDR, fractional hidpi scaling, VRR comes to mind.
At the time when Gnome development was conceived, there were no tablets, no mass market for them, with the exception of tablet pcs, which were clunky and expensive and definitely not popular. What Gnome does with massive title bars and buttons is optimizing for a hardware that did exist then: higher-resolution, but not hidpi yet, displays.
Most software at the time was written for 96 dpi, but these displays were slightly higher (14" full hd is 157 dpi; 14" HD+ [1600x900] is 131 dpi, 14" WSXGA [1440x900] is 121 dpi). The kind of sizing Gnome uses optimizes for this kind of hardware, without having to support "proper" fractional hidpi scaling. So yes; it was cheap, minimal way to support popular hardware (and in a way contributed to a late real hidpi support). If you use Gnome on such a display, the sizing is exactly right; unlike Windows, which was tiny at these displays and was a cause why many mainstream users preferred the low resolution 1376x768 ones.
> All of these are touch-centric concepts and have no reason to exist where keyboard and mouse is the primary input method.
They are not touch-centric at all; did you ever use ipad or android tablet? Floating windows are not optimal for touch use. Tiling WM with a gesture support is much more suited for this use.
As a long time Gnome user, you probably learned keyboard shortcuts. What you consider missing there? Gnome is one of most keyboard oriented UIs available.
Are they truly incapable of changing the widget scaling based on resolution and/or input method?
As to the keyboard shortcuts, I am familiar with them, but that's table stakes. Every mainstream DE can be driven more or less comfortably with a keyboard. That doesn't excuse the use of a full-screen, context-destroying application switcher/launcher that even Microsoft realized was a bad idea on the desktop nearly 10 years ago with the launch of 8.1. Said company even realized that touch and mouse are fundamentally different input methods and adjust UI accordingly! If only the Gnome developers were so up to date!
The massive and uncustomizable window titlebars suck though.
KDE and Qt apps (since Qt is so superior to GTK in almost every way) are superior to anything you find in Windows. Compare Windows's Explorer, the file manager, to Dolphin. The next best FM is PCManFM, which switched from GTK to Qt. Nautilus (now GNOME Files), which is still GTK, is a comical toy by comparison.
The GNOME desktop looks very nice and has high polish but is very feature limited. Here's a feature that might interest gamers: KDE lets you disable desktop composition, which makes your desktop (including games) much smoother, but you lose DE animations and transparency effects. Try it and then drag some windows around on a high-refresh screen, on and then off, to sense the difference. In fact, the smoothness you'll feel is how smooth the Windows 10 DE is by default (it pains me to note). This difference is also felt in games. Fullscreen games are supposed to disable composition on most DEs, but whether they actually do this is unknown and I don't think they do at all if you keep your games windowed (which I do since some Proton games, like Fallout 4, work way better in windowed mode, and it's easier to access stuff on neighboring monitors without Alt-tabbing). I don't think you have any control over composition in GNOME, and conversations with GNOME devs on this topic made it seem like they see no reason at all to not have composition in current year and that a DE without composition is broken in their eyes.
I'm not even sure if the toolkit is better but the whole philosophy of giving as many options and choices as needed is a breath of fresh air in this day where opinionated design is so popular due to people copying Apple.
I was able to get several non-steam games from the early 2000's working as well with Proton.
Likely if more games are built against/for dxvk/proton things will get even easier.
My backlog of unplayed (and yet to be bought) AAA games now encompasses most of 5 years at this point.
If they want to make money, they need to develop and test on windows.