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.
(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...)
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.
> are you implying that KDE or any other DE do not suffer any bug?
...
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.
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...
https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=__open__&content...
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...
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 ?
Is this what Zorin uses? They look very similar.
Last I checked, even Linus uses it.
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.
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
Both GNOME and KDE's WMs recently supported WM-side scaling now that the protocol for it has been agreed upon.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
This is precisely why I install Xfce and just get on with my life.
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.
And sorry if I misinterpreted you.
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.
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.
By the sounds of it, that's a resounding 'maybe'.
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
There isn't as much resistance when it's a good change
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.
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.
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.
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 :/
They are not. Extensions aren't part of the main DE. The main DE is solid. And most people live happily without extensions.
People use windows after all
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.