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Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

Hope it doesn't hurt the GNOME project. The IBM-Redhat buyout should have been something similar to Apple-NeXT.

I hope it doesn't hurt any open source projects, but if there's there's one project that has bloat to trim it's GNOME. It's good that there's experimentation happening with Linux desktops, but that experimentation should not be happening on an "enterprise" distribution. The default RHEL desktop should be boring and reliable, not flashy and experimental like GNOME.

Look, I soured on GNOME when GNOME 3 was released. But it's unfair to call GNOME "flashy and experimental". Modern GNOME looks contemporary to its peers. GNOME 2, in contrast, would look very dated.

At least GNOME 2 was usable.

I don't think it's fair to call GNOME unusable, even if I prefer it with Dash to Panel extension, or frankly, even though I prefer KDE Plasma.

As is gnome 3

GNOME these days is pretty great. Quick tap of the super key and then type to launch something. Super left, right, or up arrow to snap to the side or maximize. Ctrl-alt left/right to switch workspaces. Doing that while holding shift will move the current selected window to the next workspace.

Plus GNOME 3 introduced the concept of extensions, which are as powerful as the old Firefox extensions were. You can change literally anything about the shell to suit your needs.

It is pretty great and I use it daily, but there are some questionable things... Like how we can't Alt+Space+N to minimize a window anymore. That has been a hotkey on every Windows and Linux OS since forever.

GNOME is maintained (also) by a small number of Redhat employees. That is far from what can be called bloat. The latest 44 version was released just recently and is much more "evolution than revolution". GNOME development is mature, UI changes require designers approval and far from what could be called "flashy and experimental".

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