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Comment by DiabloD3 | Hacker News Reader

As a long time Debian user, I agree with their choice. Their thought process is logical and sound.

Not sure I agree with their continued use of GNOME, though; seems the land of the Linux desktop has abandoned GNOME's years of user-hostile actions and moved to either KDE or to increasingly more obscure build-a-desktop stuff (ie, sway + waybar, or river, or bspwm, or w/e).

Some major distros already do KDE by default, and basically phone in their GNOME support by virtue of "GNOME claims it 'just works', so let it 'just work' and hang themselves on that claim".

But yeah, having a Debian-based atomic image distro seems to be very interesting. Would be more useful in enterprise than in the user desktop, but I guess they can do that in the future.

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> seems the land of the Linux desktop has abandoned GNOME's years of user-hostile actions and moved to either KDE or to increasingly more obscure build-a-desktop stuff (ie, sway + waybar, or river, or bspwm, or w/e).

This is a bizzare take. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, RedHat and its spinoffs all default to GNOME.

Last time I installed Debian it gave me a list of DEs and I could pick as many as I wanted to, no default. Did something change?

which one would be selected if you didn't make a choice. I don't use debian, but I thought the answer was GNOME.

IIRC, if you don't choose one, no DE is installed at all.

If you don't choose a specific DE (which is the default setting), it installs GNOME.

I'm quite sure the last time I installed Debian, a year or two ago, I didn't choose a DE so it installed no DE at all.

Are you people talking about installing from a GNOME-based live image or something? I think most people use the netinstall image, which uses no DE and, I'm about 90% sure, has no graphical environment selected by default.

Perhaps you used the minimal image, I remember both having a DE when installing debian and not having a DE when I installed it again later.

If you choose the desktop environment task then by default it gives you GNOME.

This is correct, but lacking context: If you don't select the desktop task, no desktop is installed; if you select the desktop task, but no specific version of it, it installs GNOME.

There are also KDE, XFCE, LXDE, and maybe others, to also install; but the user has to select those instead of the default desktop task.

Check again. That list of DEs comes with GNOME checked by default.

Yeah. If anything, the exact opposite has happened, and KDE and GNOME work together on almost all new developments through FreeDesktop/XDG and they even have a shared conference now (LAS)

Only base Ubuntu uses GNOME.

Aren't those just the older distributions who are already saddled with their defaults? What are the more recent distributions doing (steamos,popos,..etc)?

Dismissing things as "bizzar takes" is a good way to miss very clear signs.

...????? what? Distros are not saddled with any obligation towards defaults (for DEs at least). Were you not around for the whole Ubuntu + Unity debacle?

Doesn't the unity debacle show how hard it is to switch out the desktop default. Anyway, I think looking at the de defaults of newer distributions, especially those established after the gnome 3 disaster might give a more accurate picture about the popularity of the de.

maybe the issue wasn't switching it, but how canonical implemented it, like many other things they start. and they had even aquihired the compiz creator, if I remember correctly. and compiz was a huge thing, probably the best thing ever to happen to linux desktop

90% of Ubuntu's mistakes are "a little of column A, a little of column B".

As in, they sometimes have good ideas, and then just entirely butcher the implementation: either they do it directly (Unity and Mir's in-house development), or they adopt an external source of bad implementations (Redhat's pulseaudio and systemd initiatives; both good ideas on paper, but then just become a thorn in everyone's side for a decade until better alternatives appear ).

In the case of systemd, I think most of the thorns have been ironed out and I don't see a competitor taking over anytime soon. With pulseaudio you're right though, thank goodness for pipewire.

Systemd basically became its own in-place rewrite. Theres still a lot of thorns in it, but, for example, Debian's build of it just strips it down to only working parts; everything else is either optional or replaceable with pre-systemd parts.

> Aren't those just the older distributions

You mean the most widely used distributions which together account for the overwhelming majority of desktop Linux users?

> saddled with their defaults?

How exactly is having a default a burden? The niche alternatives you listed also have defaults, just different ones.

> Dismissing things as "bizzar takes" is a good way to miss very clear signs.

On the other hand, having bizzare takes is a sign of being misinformed.

GNOME is alright, I really like what they've done with it recently and for me it's almost perfect for daily use. I just wish it had a better file manager. If I were to pick a DE I would use KDE/XFCE or Cinnamon though.

Seriously, they managed to make a good user interaction flow, one that dismisses a lot of Windows idiosyncrasies. If they manage to port everything to GTK4, it will work out great.

The biggest issue lies in going against the norm, and most software is built against that norm. There are plenty of extensions to fix that however. But I do agree that they go overboard sometimes, like the inability to select the terminal that appears on nautilus' right click menu. That's were a lot of it breaks down for me, I should be able to select the tools I want, and not go through hacks to do something that's so simple to implement.

I tried it again recently, and I still find Gnome to be pretty horrible. It's very hard for me to use out of the box, and it very strongly resists being configured.

I get that some people love it -- and more power to them -- but I really don't understand why. I suspect that there's something fundamental about Gnome philosophy that I just don't understand.

You should give modern Gnome a good honest try.

I felt like you before, but ended up using it at work since it was what IT supported. After using it for a month, I switched all my personal machines over. For me, modern Gnome is the most usable, consistent, and smooth desktop experience I've used. And this is from someone who has used KDE, Windows, MacOS, and custom desktop environments with i3 and bspwm.

Can I rearrange visual elements so my desktop is similar to how it has been in gnome 2, mate and xfce for the last 20 years? Can non-blessed apps get into the systray/notification-area/whatever?

Genuine questions, I've not tried Gnome since the early days of gnome 3 when they broke everything and more or less made out you were a luddite and unwanted loser if you weren't up for a massive change in workflow.

There are enough extensions to do whatever you want. My Gnome desktop has no top bar. Activities are totally hidden: I don't have any mouse or keyboard event that shows them. I use 5 virtual desktops and switch between them with hotkeys. I have a bottom bar with status icons, task bar, application menu, a menu of bookmarked directories, a menu of the last notifications, a menu of recent files. Notifications popup from the bottom. I alt tab between windows on the current desktop. Possibly other stuff but that's the most I can remember.

If I remember well I stayed with Gnome Fallback until there were enough of those extensions to rebuild my desktop with Gnome shell. That was about at the time of Ubuntu 20.04.

In my experience, with every update, half the extensions stop working. And then it's unclear if they will ever come back, how supported they actually are, and now and then the whole thing crashes and I don't know if it's because of a rogue extension or something else..

I had no problems with Ubuntu's updates but I'm staying on LTSes.

KDE Plasma is just what you would think of as KDE. Not a different thing.

> Can I rearrange visual elements so my desktop is similar to how it has been in gnome 2, mate and xfce for the last 20 years?

Gnome 3 has been out for over 10 years (12, to be exact). At this point if they change the UI there would be people like you saying "can I get back how it has been for 10 years?".

I don't really understand how we can have a so strong resistance to UI changes among IT professionals. Personally I started using Gnome 1, then moved to KDE3 when Gnome 2 was released, then moved to Unity with Ubuntu and now Gnome 3/40, Ubuntu flavor as well. I also used XFCE for a year or so at some point. I just need a month or so to get used and configure it a way I feel natural, and that's it.

This.

I can obviously only speak for myself, but over the years I've tried a lot of different desktop environments and window managers (http://www.xwinman.org/ was a favorite when I was getting started with Linux back in the mid 90'ies).

Nowadays I use a pretty out of the box gnome (well, with whatever bastardizations Ubuntu has done to vanilla Gnome, with the unity-like sidebar etc.). I just want something that works, not a million papercuts that bleed me dry (e.g. I have a networkmanager applet to configure my VPN, works out of the box, no need to fuzz around with making various scripts or manual editing of config files. Screw that, I have actual work to do as well.), and it seems gnome & ubuntu have been pretty good at delivering. I don't care that my current desktop works differently than my old favorites fvwm or olvwm. I save more time by having my muscle memory get used to current keybindings and my eyes get used to the current look, than desperately trying to make gnome in 2023 look and behave like fvwm in 1995 (or whatever arbitrary snapshot in time one takes as the bestest ever and anything which is different is crap).

> I just want something that works, not a million papercuts that bleed me dry

This is precisely why I install Xfce and just get on with my life.

I would suggest looking into fedora workstation. I switched from Ubuntu around fedora 35 and have not looked back. Stock gnome, integrates into flathub easily. Dnf and apt are similar enough.

I’m not asking anyone to change the Gnome UI. That seems an uncharitable misreading of my question TBH.

I’m asking, honestly and in response to encouragement to give it another try, whether it is now changeable, and can support the way I work relatively simply. If the answer is ‘no’ (or worse “you’re doing it wrong”) then I won’t.

Gnome tries to force their defaults as much as possible but I do have Telegram or Slack sitting in the "tray bar" near the top-right corner of the screen.

And sorry if I misinterpreted you.

That seems like a genuine improvement from way back when, having a visual indicator for slack messages is definitely one of my major needs. Not that slack was on the radar back then, but at the time I was annoyed that Pidgin (which I also needed for work) wasn't allowed to have a tray icon.

I could live without most of the rest of the things that are sitting in my top right right now. Discord and skype are nice-to-haves but not work related so strictly optional.

> Pidgin (which I also needed for work) wasn't allowed to have a tray icon

Telepathy was but -- I still am annoyed about this more than a decade later -- it wasn't allowed to actually indicate whether you had new messages or not, just that you had some notification from some app somewhere, and you had to drill down through your notifications to see it. It was just annoying, like when Gnome decided it would be hilarious to allow a laptop to not sleep when closed but only for 30 seconds.

I have no idea why the Gnome devs chose to die on this hill.

Why ? If I absolutely love the current Gnome UI they will just change shit in next 5 years for no good reason whatsoever

I'm just interested really - I was burned by the changeover from 2-3 and haven't really looked back since. I'm not looking to change either, my needs are met. But I can change my opinion of the state of the thing if it seems like improvements have been made.

By the sounds of it, that's a resounding 'maybe'.

I was like that in GNOME 1.2/2.0 times, tried probably every DM/WM that was packaged for Debian.

Then realized the thing I do is "switch between a bunch of full screen apps (especially when we have terminal emulators with tabs and tiles builtin)" and "move them from one screen to another screen".

So I sit down, tuned i3 to my liking and never looked back. And now first order of retrievability of most apps is caps lock (rebinded to super) + 1-8/F1-F8, and second order is rofi doing search by window name via alt+tab.

Some rules make sure same app always land on same virtual desktop so I just have my stuff in autostart and it lands in right place every time

Then issue is that gnome 2 was actually good. Gnome 3 was not.

For me it was the other way round (Gnome 2 made me switch to KDE3) so... who is right?

> I don't really understand how we can have a so strong resistance to UI changes among IT professionals

There isn't as much resistance when it's a good change

> I don't really understand how we can have a so strong resistance to UI changes among IT professionals.

This is easy to explain.

UI changes always bring pain to established users. There is no way around this. Users will accept the change if the benefits of it exceed the pain it brings.

IT professionals spend a great deal more time interacting with the desktop than most users, so they become "established users" more quickly and rely on UI patterns more strongly. So when the UI changes, it hurts that much more. The benefit of the change has to be that much greater to compensate.

> I don't really understand how we can have a so strong resistance to UI changes among IT professionals.

It's often bad. Poorly-motivated, poorly-conceived, and poorly-executed.

Some of us have watched non-pros suffer through this stuff. It's much, much worse for them. I've come to believe you better have a goddamn great reason to modify UI, these days, and that a complete overhaul or redesign is almost never justifiable.

XFCE didn't look like today's XFCE 20years ago. It looked more like CDE which it was trying to replicate back then. So I think your memory is a bit broken.

I would argue that the gnome2 and mate arrangement with top and bottom panels made sense when screens were in 4:3 form factor but is kind of stupid in 16:9 and 16:10 modern screens as it waste a lot of vertical screen estate.

On my Fedora laptop I still have a "Gnome Classic" option at login but I don't know what it does. Last but not least, extensions allows a lot of flexibility. Sometimes they do get broken upon new release and it takes the maintainer months to update (especially if they are debian users) so key is not running a distro that ship the latest Gnome version. For example on Fedora there are always 2 stable versions maintained at the same time, new one and old one, currently 37 and 38. 37 will be retired and out of support when 39 will be released and you can expect at that time that most extensions have been updated to Gnome 44 and you can switch to 38 easily without hiccups.

It’s not my claim that Xfce was around 20 years ago, but that it lets me continue to use my desktop the same sort of way I have for the last 20 years.

As someone with two 32inch 4k screens, having a top and bottom bar with a height of my choosing on one of the screens is barely noticeable. But each to their own, this is my preference and that’s kinda my point, people have preferences!

It sounds like things are still unstable a decade or so on :/

> It sounds like things are still unstable a decade or so on :/

They are not. Extensions aren't part of the main DE. The main DE is solid. And most people live happily without extensions.

Other people experiences are really irrelevant here.

People use windows after all

> You should give modern Gnome a good honest try

This long time Debian user does not understand why he would choose Gnome over the incredibly satisfying out of the box experience of KDE Plasma combined with its easy customizability. I suspect that I am not Gnome's target segment... What sort of user is Gnome targeting ?

> KDE Plasma

Is this what Zorin uses? They look very similar.

Last I checked out Zorin in a distrohop phase, Zorin used a heavily customized version of GNOME 3.38. While they may have updated their GNOME version since, I don't suspect they've changed to KDE.

To me Gnome feels more tablet like, but still nice with Mouse and Keyboard. I feel that it makes effective use of my screen, it's just full screen, or super-key left/right for a split. Hit Super, start an app, what's not to like? And then there is the menu with things like bleutooth/wifi etc. It's all very minimal, but to me it feels like they made exactly the right choices. What would you change to a default Gnome desktop?

the fokls who do not want to customize :). We just want the UI to mostly stay out of the way.

Last I checked, even Linus uses it.

"ease customizability" means no sane defaults. It means more work after the installation.

> What sort of user is Gnome targeting ?

I guess that would be me. I mostly work in the terminal and I just don't care that much about the window manager. As long as it's simple, works consistent and looks somewhat nice and clean, I'm fine. Gnome fills that role for me.

I moved to XFCE then to I3 with same profile of usage.

Just a bunch of terminals + full screen browser/IDE/whatever else

Took a bit of customizing... years ago and I haven't needed to change much since

Gnome's target demo seems to be people who aren't linux enthusiasts... who are for some reason using linux anyway. So basically, people who are made to use linux on their computer at work, or hapless elder relatives of overzealous linux users who had linux installed on their computer without understanding what it was.

KDE Plasma is too buggy for my liking. It seems to be mostly scaling-related. I do like that it’s more feature-rich than GNOME, but bugs/UX trump that.

That isn't a KDE-related bug, but a Wayland related bug. GNOME using Wayland also has this bug: Wayland apps that do not internally deal with HiDPI scaling don't get scaling.

Both GNOME and KDE's WMs recently supported WM-side scaling now that the protocol for it has been agreed upon.

My understanding was that the KDE distros I was using were still on X11 but I could be mistaken. Fedora 38 with GNOME (on Wayland) has been mostly bug free for me. Certainly better than KDE.

This also could be true.

To be absolutely fair to both sides, we're in a rough transitory period due to intra-project politics. Some people have a better time on X11, some on Wayland, and its down to which distro they're on and how new (or old) it is.

Today, however, Gnome and KDE both have excellent Wayland support, even mostly okay on Nvidia binary drivers (but still, use the FOSS drivers if they work for you, or just stop buying Nvidia hardware until Nvidia stops trying to throw AMD and Intel's excellent FOSS work under the bus).

Modern gnome is a joke. For two years now, scrolling doesn't work in folders with many files. I can't find the issue in their bug tracker right now, but they're just like "well yeah it's not easy to fix". Like, how can you break something that fundamental in a way that makes it too hard to fix? And this isn't just some minor cosmetic issue, it literally is a showstopper if you frequently navigate large directories. Holy crap, but at least it looks pretty!

(found at least a Reddit post from three months ago that seems to be the same bug: https://old.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/1129jro/nautilus_scr...)

How is a reddit link relevant?

FWIW I may not have large enough directories but on the ones I just tested I didn't had this bug. I am not negating such a bug may have existed but a link to the actual gnome bug tracker would be more relevant, it may have already been fixed for all I know.

Also, are you implying that KDE or any other DE do not suffer any bug?

Last but not least, you are not forced to use Nautilus in Gnome. If Nautilus is not your preferred file manager you can perfectly live with a Gnome desktop while using Thunar (from XFCE), Nemo (from Cinnamon), PCManFM or even Dolphin if you don't mind the toolkit difference. I am personnaly using Gnome for most of my laptops but use Kitty as default terminal emulator instead of Gnome Terminal.

> And this isn't just some minor cosmetic issue, it literally is a showstopper if you frequently navigate large directories.

> are you implying that KDE or any other DE do not suffer any bug?

...

> How is a reddit link relevant?

It appears the video in that post shows the bug, so, rather relevant?

The according issue seems to be[1], which has indeed been fixed two months ago, but as OP said was opened two years ago.

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/2971

So that was relevant until two months ago and is not right now.

Software have bugs, some are fixed quickly, other not. Dolphin (KDE file manager) also have bugs, it seems to crash for a number of reasons, also has scrolling issues, or bugs triggered by scrolling.

Do I say KDE is unusable because Dolphin can crash or has sometimes issues with scrolling. Nope that would be stupid. If I run into a bug with one among n components on a DE, I either report, fix it by patching it and supply a patch upstream, find a workaround or use temporarily an alternative component of that DE.

https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=__open__&content...

I had to switch from Arch + i3 to Ubuntu 23.04 and gave Gnome a try with the intention to keep using it. I like the look and feel, and the appindicator and tiling assistant extensions are all I would need.

The first thing I did (on X11) was to set fractional scaling to 125%. Changing this setting reliably renders the settings app unresponsive and it needs to be killed.

The second thing I did was to tile the settings app to the left (without having installed the tiling extension, I am talking about Gnome's tiling feature). The window gets graphically corrupted and after a few seconds I get a notification that "Ubuntu has experienced an internal error".

"Screw it", I said, "time to go Wayland, it's the future anyway". I did a couple totally benign random things and I somehow managed to cause a crash there too...

I just fetched my dotfiles and rebuilt my i3 on Ubuntu Server...

Back in my daily GNU/Linux days, I even wrote magazine articles about Gtkmm.

Nowadays, I rather not use a desktop that requires extensions for basic stuff (written in JavaScript!), no longer supports window shading, and hates files on the desktop.

> seems the land of the Linux desktop has abandoned GNOME

My perception has been the opposite. The distros that I see people using are Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. I use NixOS and Gnome is the recommended DE.

Gnome has sane defaults and in my experience does actually "just work" on a surprisingly wide variety of modern hardware.

FWIW, I really like Gnome, on my Laptop, on my desktop I currently use Plasma, because it has an ultra-wide monitor so the build-in tiling is really great (turn on wobbly windows and watch that jelly window snap into its grid position, it's glorious).

I currently use Gnome 3.22 and really like it, especially the one in Ubuntu. I also have a Debian 11 with Gnome at home on my laptop. Used to be all against it. But then I used MacOS X for a few years and then switched to another box with Linux and Gnome. Such a breath of fresh air compared to the Mac. Now I can switch virtual desktops with simple keybindings, without using the mouse. Most actions are a no brainer. I guess Gnome 4 is even better.

Vanilla's decision to base their distro on Debian is a good one. I am going to install Debian as well when this Ubuntu 18 LTS version reaches EOL.

gnome 4 didn't happen. they abandoned their previous numbering of even/odd for the minor version being release or devel (like 3.22, 3.23) in favor of whole new numbers and patch. The current release is 44.1

Maybe she/he refers to v40, which had some changes in the way multiple dekstops are presented (now more Mac like where it was vertical).

Not true. GNOME is well used and liked. Personally I think it's the best thing that happened to Linux.

XFCE is also quite good, if you like classical UNIX desktops.

It integrates with D-BUS, uses Gtk+, has several extension points, nice set of apps, plugins,

I actually always kind of liked the Gnome look & feel, but I agree they dumb things down way too much. Even to the detriment of the user experience, where you have to go dive into dconf to work around the bugs they introduced.

And anyway, that was only until the new libadwaita crap, with yet another "flat look" they would look to force upon us.

I'm just looking forward to Cosmic DE.

Kde is so choppy! Kde doesn't work properly even with 16gb Ram and useless options. GNOME is far better in smoothness and switching apps even.

This is false.

Sounds like you've accidentally compared Wayland to X11 (which has nothing to do with your choice of DE; GNOME and KDE continue to support both for now, and both are looking to remove X11 support over the next two-three years (=major version cycle)); Wayland may be failing to accelerate compositing on your system due to missing driver stack features.

If you're on an Nvidia GPU and are trying Wayland, either use an up to date distro and stop using the Nvidia binary driver, or stop buying from Linux-hostile companies like Nvidia.

If we could force Nvidia to pull it's collective head of it's ass, we would; the entire Linux community has been trying for ~15 years, and it hasn't budged an inch.

> seems the land of the Linux desktop has abandoned GNOME's years of user-hostile actions and moved to either KDE

Moved from mac to Ubuntu and feel right at home in Gnome. Not sure what you're talking about here, but it seems quite opinionated.

What's the issue with gnome? If you can live with the "desktops" workflow, it seems to me like the most polished DE there is...

I have two main issues with Gnome. The first is that I find it unintuitive and difficult to use. The second is that it's really hard, sometimes impossible, to configure it to remove some of the pain points and add missing functionality.

Does kde still have that bug in its bug reporting tool that makes it unusable

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