Lobotomizing Gnome (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Lobotomizing Gnome (2018)

eklitzke.org

113 pointssigna11169 comments

I always wonder why Gnome is the default in most distros.

It has no API stability guarantee, so long term software investment is not possible. It actively fights against the choices of its end users. It is severely dumbed down, locking its end users in less efficient workflows. Corporate backing was an upside for providing accessibility, but a recent post here on HN stated things were quickly detoriating.

So it's not the right choice for developers, power users, basic users, users with acccessibility needs. But what's left? At this point, gnome seems optimized for being a demo model. You may look at it and marvel at its glorious platonic art, but do not dare to touch it with your grubby fingers or get any work done.

This is a shame, really. The Windows 11 experience is at an all-time low right now, and leaves end users actively looking for alternatives. A Debian+KDE is great for non-technical end users, who mostly are used to and want win95 on steroids.

> So it's not the right choice for developers, power users, basic users, users with acccessibility needs. But what's left?

Oh come on, most people use it just fine without needing to complain about every last design choice.

There are alternatives but for most people, most of the time, GNOME is more than enough. I'm a developer, I use it all day on desktop and laptop without the need for any extra config.

I use one extension to hide the panel to avoid any risk of burn in on my oled monitor.

Exactly my experience too for 10-ish years.

I will never want more than what Gnome provides and when I want less, I usually go for xfce.

On my personal devices I have to install the system tray extension, because Steam, but apart from that Gnome works far better than anything else including OSX for me.

Until it doesn't. If you need accessibility support it won't work well. If you need multi-head 4k setup with fractional scaling it won't work well.

Multihead 4K works better for me than MacOS.

I can't even change the volume of the external speakers on MacOS.

Does it work for you in Gnome Wayland session? Do you use fractional scaling? Do you use any XWayland applications, like VSCode or Jetbrains products?

Oh, so your problem isn't with Gnome but X applications, having issues with fractional scaling and X itself not supporting different scaling amounts on different monitors?

Per screen fractional scaling has been available for years (even in Electron), if these particular applications don't support it, it's not because they can't but won't.

Although VSCode does claim to support it.

> Do you use fractional scaling?

I don't because I bought an appropriate monitor. As I said, Gnome works great for me.

MacOS doesn't let me change the volume of my external speakers.

MacOS doesn't let me move windows between virtual desktops without having to switch to the touchpad.

MacOS doesn't let me easily snap a window to either the left or right side of the screen or even maximize it with the keyboard.

It's lacking so many really basic features.

Nope, my problem is with Gnome. Plasma has implemented proper fractional scaling for XWayland. I guess if Plasma works but Gnome doesn't - the problem isn't about the apps, it's about the compositor.

I believe the maintainer of the Fedora KDE spin actually commented on this on reddit some months back. Basically KDE unlike GNOME is a packaging nightmare. Too many packages with a few having lots of deps. On top of that the release schedule has zero alignment to any non rolling release (and multiple since all package can be grouped in 3 differents suites with their own schedule) which usually ends up have outdated KDE. Infact the best KDE experience is tumbleweed or arch which are both rolling releases. GNOME has no such issue. I belive KDE is adjusting the release schedule to try to solve this(I think they will switching to a 6 month schedule after plasma 6)

Gnome’s “intended” workflow of using many workspaces and heavy use of key binds is very efficient. I’ve been using it for several years and actually learned how to use it the way the developers intended and it’s way more efficient and polished than every other desktop environment. Frankly, I think people think a desktop should be like windows xp and complain that Gnome is different.

Strange, I found most of those things easier with KDE and Gnome V2.

What do you consider polished and efficient? Minimal chrome?

Gnome on Debian is very different than Gnome on Ubuntu though, if you are referring to Debian, which likely uses Gnome defaults, I agree that it is suboptimal. On Debian Gnome does not have the dock visible unless the application menu is opened. Also there are considerable less settings available in the Settings app.

Two problems with Gnome I have is the Software center getting stuck on the loading screen, this has been going on for a while and is really a shame, since it provides easy access to a vast collection of awesome software. I think KDE's store is better in this regard. Although I use Muon myself. The other problem is that I could not use it with a touchscreen. The build-in onscreen keyboard cannot be disabled and sadly is lacking many basic keys. I had to use KDE on my touchscreen Linux devices for that reason alone. Also the Contacts app has a little shortcoming where it does not handle the business field in contacts as expected. Maybe I should get involved myself rather than complaining about it. It is awesome software though and I use it daily.

> A Debian+KDE is great for non-technical end users

I really want to like KDE but it just feels unstable and janky. I don't do much customization, just dark theme and arrange the bar to remove most plugins and set their positions. These settings are sometimes reset after reboot and I'd have to rearrange the bar.

Probably a me problem, but a non-technical user moving to Linux will blame Linux for this and not KDE. If I suggest Linux to anyone Gnome is my first choice unless I know they want to tweak their DE. I guess the distros have similar reasons. Breakage between versions is better than reboots.

Because being based on C, and the GPL license, meant that in the old days it won the adoption war against KDE.

If you as a user or developer, wanted a full stack experience regarding UNIX desktops, the choice was pretty much either GNOME or KDE, as everything else were plain window managers without any GUI development stack (think desktop frameworks in macOS/NeXT/Windows/MacOS/... sense).

Nowadays the reality is quite different regarding licenses and all of that, and there are lightweight desktops with frameworks like XFCE as well.

However, the path to adoption is a long one, and all major distributions are still GNOME focused and changing to KDE or something else is a major effort than rewriting their distribution specific changes to a newer GNOME version.

Regarding Windows 11, we keep hearing similar remarks since Windows XP, it has hardly changed.

I can think only of deception on purpose. Like, they have a million users without any attention span so distros need something that sells itself as a streamlined package without deviations for UX with pro helpdesk support, so that DEs or whatever else with volunteers in development and support can work without being suffocated by triaging absurd bugs and suggestion of new features never backed by a pull request (and even then, a good FLOSS project should add them to the test harness, change docs, etc). So maybe GNOME/systemd out-of-the-box wouldn't make the luser scream for malfunction at first sight. I don't know.

>Debian+KDE is great for non-technical end users, who mostly are used to and want win95 on steroids.

I'd agree, but Debian is just not packaged in a convenient way. Even I had trouble figuring it out, and I consider myself a Linux enthusiast. For this reason, my recommendation would rather be Zorin, which literally aims to be "windows-like" to ease the transition from it. And frankly, to me, as someone who knows their way around Linux, is also attractive. It's a neat bundle of capable software that's tuned for out of the box experience.

Large FOSS projects are social movements, because they have to attract contributors somehow, and they reflect the wider culture. I read modern GNOME as a symptom of longue duree (historiographical term, meaning something that exists for a long time in the unspoken background) of Jobesian thinking that people caught as users and designers.

There might be all sorts of economic justifications for mainstream proprietary tech doing this, but for a well-funded FOSS project it has to had become a cultural thing.

> less efficient workflows

Lots of people talk about this but I am not sure what does this even mean? I open programs, work inside the program and switch between programs. All of this is allowed by Gnome or any other DE/WM. But somehow people always use the word "workflow" and how a particular DE/WM doesn't support their "workflow".

I mostly agree, but one place where Gnome excels is touch screens. Other DEs simply don't have the features necessary to run on a slate with no keyboard. UI elements are sized appropriately, on-screen keyboard is workable, gestures are there. Little else has made effort in these areas.

But that's only really suited for consumption devices, not productivity.

For me I needed like 5 extensions to mold gnome into an acceptable desktop. (I forget which ones)

Then during one install I was having trouble getting one of the work arounds to work. (I believe it was a distro bug) Which lead me to give up and try KDE again. (Hadn't used in years) I was kicking myself for not doing that sooner everything works as it's supposed to.

I do miss gnome's Expose-like windows overview thing though. KDE has one too but it's not as good. But it's not as important as having my desktop behave like a desktop without some third party hacks (which will probably break at some point or stop being maintained) tricking it into behaving normally.

I had exactly the same experience. I've been using Gnome for the last 7 years, with few extensions that were essential. The latest upgrade to Fedora 38 broke everything. Extensions, fractional scaling, Gnome and apps were crashing.

I tried KDE after many years. Other than some UI choices that I find not that great, it has been an amazing experience. Everything works out of the box. No hacks are needed for electron apps, fractional scaling, no extensions necessary.

I really do wonder what I do wrong with KDE every time I try it.. I see people write stuff like this, but my experience is the complete opposite. KDE is the most sluggish horrible mess for me every time I try it, it feels like a game constantly fluctuating between 15 and 25 fps when interacting with it.

Gnome on the other hand has never missed a beat, despite having it's issues needing solved with extensions. Performance wise it's always been 10/10, even on my 3x4k setup.

Wish I didn't need wayland, because I really just want to go back to xfce..

That is odd, I have never had performance issues with KDE. It was no quicker or slower than any other high end desktop system.

My only issue with it is that it seems to try to do a little too much - but that is just a matter of taste.

Personally, KDE is the jack of all trades - it can do anything you ask it, Gnome goes a little too simple, I really like Cinnamon as a middle ground. But each to their own.

Yeah I really don't understand it. There really has to be something wrong somewhere because I can't imagine KDE actually being as bad as I experience it, because absolutely nobody would be using it if so.

To me my favourite is xfce by far, it is so simple and fast without being too simple where it becomes an inconvenience. But, I need wayland so Gnome and KDE are the only really good alternatives for now. (Yes I know there are plenty of alternatives like sway, enlightenment, etc etc but no.)

Are you using Nvidia? I remember there was an issue with Nvidia and Aurorae (one of the window decorator used by kde). Try changing system theme in kde settings in case one of them doesn't trigger the slowdown issue.

Same issues on both my nvidia desktop, my amd desktop, and my amd laptop. I definitely first suspected nvidia, since well, it's nvidia. But I wouldn't have the exact same issues on other machines without nvidia as well then..i hope

Haven't tried KDE lately, but I tried it a couple times on the last 20 years, and every time I couldn't sustain more than a couple hours.

Main complain is that it is noticeably slow and the GUI looks like an experiment to turn all pixels into clickable things. I think there is nice tech under the hood, but that's not what I'm looking for.

You should give it another try. It's improved a lot.

Cinnamon seems to be forgotten/underappreciated, I really enjoy using it. I've tried a range of different desktops environments, and I end up finding cinnamon just does what I expect, with reasonable defaults.

> Cinnamon seems to be forgotten/underappreciated, I really enjoy using it. I've tried a range of different desktops environments, and I end up finding cinnamon just does what I expect, with reasonable defaults.

The Linux Mint Cinnamon version is actually pretty good: https://linuxmint.com/download.php

But also, XFCE has always worked well enough - it's lightweight, responsive and has most of the features you'd expect, albeit little to no eye candy.

Cinnamon is pretty cool. It’s old school desktop paradigm but clean and modern looking. I urge anyone who likes XFCE to try Cinnamon.

My main issue with Cinnamon is that fractional scaling doesn’t work well (to be fair, it only works in Gnome and KDE) but since Cinnamon handle bigger text very well, I have a nice experience just by checking « bigger text » in accessibility settings (while XFCE will scale text up but will keep the rest - mostly icons - really tiny).

Other than that, it’s a labor of love.

I can second this. I have no need for Wayland at the moment and am still happy with XFCE but every time I read a comment praising KDE I give it a go again to see what I am missing out on. But it always feels, 'off'. I cannot quite put my finger on it. It feels convoluted, a bit sluggish. There are some animations/transitions which get in the way for me. I really do want to like it and honestly wonder if I am doing something wrong.

Just one little thing ruined my workflow back when I tried KDE ~2018. It was the newest Plasma version back then. What really screwed me over were bugs with window focus. Sometimes you have to click twice to get a window to focus and it's really really breaking my workflow in a subtle way. It wasn't the only problem, but one that I didn't even notice at first that they really annoy the heck out of me.

It was then when I tried the obviously inferior Gnome (3.28 iirc). And while I felt a bit constraint with it, I was so much quicker with it.

> There are some animations/transitions which get in the way for me.

I do hate those (but I hate all animations/transitions in desktop environments). You can turn them all off, though -- that's what I do.

> KDE is the most sluggish horrible mess for me every time I try it, it feels like a game constantly fluctuating between 15 and 25 fps when interacting with it.

This may be an issue with your specific hardware. I never encountered slow-downs with KDE, even when fancy compositor-effects were new and I went overboard[1] with them, everything was smooth as butter.

1. Who wouldn't want their wobbly, semi-transparent windows to disappear in a burst of flames when closed?

That is the weird part, it happens on all my various machines. I have an RDNA2 laptop, KDE is sluggish. I have a 3900x+2080Super desktop, KDE is sluggish. (Though that's nvidia so..) Even my 5950x+7900xtx desktop, KDE is sluggish.

I really do not understand it, it's almost as if KDE just runs out of sync with my heads internal fps.

My KDE has fantastic frame-rates on an old Polaris AMD card. I never recall KDE being particularly sluggish, even when I could only use Intel's Integrated graphics.

In KDE, moving mouse cursor to top left usually leads to expose-like behavior unless it is unconfigured.

Yes I am always configuring this out because I find it annoying... but others may like it?

Same story for me. I was so happy with my workflow on gnome3 with some extensions (top bar workspace scrolling for example) but I was tired of the extensions breaking and the move to horizontal workspaces killed it for me. Moved to KDE. Although I can't say I'm happy now that I think about it.

Give a chance to XFCE 4.18 please.

That's actually the desktop I was using the longest before I realized I wanted a more feature complete desktop. For example I prefer a file manager with integrated file search over Thunar + Catfish. Also xfce has a bug where it will change the resolution everytime the screen goes to sleep. That being said I might've been happy with LXDE + xfce4-panel + Dolphin but it seemed safer to me to use one desktop environment rather than mix and match parts from the different ones.

Why is a searching file manager a value add? I usually structure my filesystems to the point I know where everything is going to end up before it gets there. The only exception is image files, and even then, I try to structure things to keep the madness constrained.

The only thing that adding search to a UI ever seems to accomplish in my experience, is giving UX people an excuse to foist another query language on the user, and decreases the overall navigability and discoverability of a filesystem.

Yes, I understand there are lost causes who don't know anything exists that isn't on their desktop; in fact, more exist than is necessary because we've stopped exposing people to the fundamental units of organization inherent to information storage.

It's at the point where every time I end up using a search bar, I twinge, because someone couldn't be arsed to figure out a way to help me actually come to terms with the shape of my data.

Not everything in my system is organized by me. In fact most of it isn't. I'm not going to reorganize all of the zip files or repositories I downloaded and extracted. I'm also not going to learn where the distro decided to put things that I might have to touch.

Thunar search now lets you filter directory and offers a button to search with Catfish , click and it then opens Catfish with search results of the term you where looking for (no need to reenter search term)

Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're describing what I remember about using Thunar + Catfish.

In Dolphin and Nautilus I'm able to search using the file manager and results are treated like another directory I can navigate back to them and select and/or run commands on them. It could be just my perception but I also think searching is faster than with Catfish. I really can never go back (until Thunar has that too).

The issue I always had with XFCE was that the edges of windows were set to 1px which made window resizing terrible and I had to spend time Googling how to change the grabble area, until the next update and I had to do the same again.

XFCE is awesome, but let down by some rather sharp edges.

I find it that has way to many buttons

>Configuration With dconf

If you do this just know that the Gtk devs consider most gsettings to be private and any end user changes made with dconf might just disappear one day and never come back. Or they might be left in but just not respected by gtk so that setting them does nothing. As a GNOME user on the latest Gtk4 you're not supposed to be customizing your desktop like in the article. It is not supported even if you can (for now) technically do it. Support issues related to removal/ignoring of gsettings will be told this and closed.

I would rephrase this concern as "dconf is not a stable API" rather than "you are not supposed to do this". It's my computer, I am supposed to do whatever I want, but using unstable API comes with costs that should be understood.

> It's my computer, I am supposed to do whatever I want

I don't think the Gnome devs share that view.

I suppose Gnome is aimed at the Red Hat enterprise customer base. Those computers are no private systems, they are company hardware. What matters for company hardware is standardization: easy to roll out, easy to train users, which means a standardized, simple GUI. Building @hellodanylo 's dream workflow isn't the mission and doesn't scale anyway.

If you want a custom desktop workflow exactly to your specification build it yourself or pay someone to build it. Expecting people with different opinions to do it for you for free will certainly be a disappointment.

>> Gnome is aimed at the Red Hat enterprise customer base. Those computers are no private systems, they are company hardware. What matters for company hardware is standardization: easy to roll out, easy to train users, which means a standardized, simple GUI.

This is largely the case:

https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/gnome-desktop...

As stated in https://lwn.net/Articles/600506/: "When a project is controlled by a single company, that company's needs will almost certainly win out over anything that the wider community may want to do."

On the other hand, when a project tries to please everybody it will undoubtedly regress into a mess of options, toggles, extra buttons, have an atrocious UX and only be usable for the 'in crowd'.

The few OSS tools I know to not have a terrible UX are tools built by a single author or a small team with a coherent vision. It's definitely a place where the bazaar model of software development doesn't seem to work as wonderful as with OS kernels or development tools.

I agree that there is a balance between customization and "cleanness" in design and implementation.

However, I think the GNOME 3 and 4 designers went too far and alienated many users:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-finds-gnome-3-4...

https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-42-the-nonsense-continues-...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/wte7tr/gnomes_design...

https://linuxreviews.org/GNOME_Developers_have_Made_Their_Mo...

https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming...

When a designer's "coherent vision" eclipses the needs of the software's users then users get frustrated and either fork the project or go to another project. MATE (https://mate-desktop.org/), Cinnamon (https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon), and Unity (https://unityd.org/) exist largely because of how far the GNOME 3 designers went and how they were not willing to compromise their "coherent vision":

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=121162

https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1910

https://web.archive.org/web/20101129161856/http://www.pcworl...

The Gnome 3 adversity is ancient history at this point and in my opinion very much a fabricated feud to drive up news article engagement. Publishing an article with a few open bugs or a disagreeing opinion doesn't say much about the quality of the software in general. I find the latest versions of Fedora with Gnome very usable, also in comparison with Windows/macOS. I don't have a need for very specific customisations and I think the Gnome people know it's but a tiny percentage of their users that use the very exotic features.

> If you want a custom desktop workflow exactly to your specification build it yourself or pay someone to build it.

Or use a DE that allows sufficient customization.

They do, as long as you do it without expecting them to bend over backwards to accommodate your specific snowflake setup.

Ah yes... my snowflake setup where I expect to be able to paste file paths into Gtk file->open dialogs without it erroring out.

Bugs will always happen, of course, but let's not pretend that those are conscious decisions.

Generally true. But this one 100% is, and it's been a concious decision since it was introduced by the removal of the gsetting org.gtk.Settings.FileChooser location-mode. This was done intentionally by Gtk dev mclassen and he has been downright hostile about not fixing it since then. Gtk/GNOME devs do not think being able to type/paste file paths in File->Open dialogs (gtkfilechooserwidget.c) should be allowed. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/938

They didn't even acknowledge or leave the bug reports it caused until this month: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872 despite it being introduced in 2014 and me reporting it 2 times every year since then. And there's about 0% chance of this bug being fixed despite them finally leaving the bug report there instead of closing it.

Hmm, maybe I'm misunderstanding, but AFAICS I am able to paste file paths into those dialogs? Steps to reproduce: copy a file path, Ctrl+O, Ctrl+L, Ctrl+V. So I guess I'm misunderstanding what behaviour you're referring to?

Yeah, that attitude is one of the things that leads me to avoid Gnome.

Does it matter though?

In the case of GNOME, absolutely.

GNOME devs are infamous for actively fighting users' desire for customization. They have a long history; here's[¹] an example from a couple of years ago (not sure how the situation described evolved); this [²] is an article that describes the wider point of view.

[¹] https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming...

[²] https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti...

Unless you're able to maintain a fork of the whole system by yourself, yes it does.

Additionally noting that some of the dconf keys in the article have already been depreciated in the meantime. e.g. `/org/gnome/desktop/interface/gtk-theme` is to be replaced with `/org/gnome/desktop/interface/color-scheme`

(though even worse, some apps specifically look for the former, so you need to set the latter through the settings app, then the former through dconf anyways, for full dark theme through all apps!)

e.g. `/org/gnome/desktop/interface/gtk-theme` is to be replaced with `/org/gnome/desktop/interface/color-scheme`

That's an ominous sign of things to come --- no more themes, all you get is (some) colours to choose from. It already happened to Windows.

Partially, the other reason as far as I can tell is that the method of dark/light detection was based on the theme chosen, so if you wanted to mix light and dark themes (e.g. dark terminal, light otherwise), the app had to guess which theme to load. Instead now I think its a singular theme with subsections (and additionally, a 3 state theme selection, default, prefer-light, and prefer-dark. default suggesting that apps choose what is best for them).

For tens of years now, theming has been a prohibitively difficult thing to get into regardless: I'd rather try making a cohesive theme for windows than try with GTK.

For Windows theming, the Microsoft acknowledged WindowBlinds 11 and Curtains are both working options.

https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/

Theming is not a thing anymore since Gnome 3 anyways. I really regret the amount of themes you had available for Gnome in the past...

For real - no more theming Gnome?

I haven't used it for a few years, but custom themes and styles is one of the key features for a customisable desktop environment and was half the fun from using something like Gnome or KDE now that Windows makes it hard and macOS makes it impossible.

Googling shows that as recently as 2022 there are articles on using themes. Is this a very recent change?

So do the developers, it seems. (I think you mean "miss"?)

Yes indeed, I always had my favorite theme from gnome-look.org

For someone that only runs 3 programs (terminal, emacs and firefox) gnome is a terrible choice. In fact, a desktop environment is a terrible choice.

> I want good text rendering and windows and buttons with rounded corners

You don't need gnome or KDE for this. I run a primarily terminal oriented desktop, but my GTK apps still look great. I still run picom and could easily do rounded corners if I wanted.

My point is that there are much better options than gnome if you want a beautiful minimal setup especially if you get into tilers.

I only want a handful of "apps" with windows I open. But I also want a little wifi thing in the corner I can click on. I want a spotify thingy in the topbar with the current song title and a pause button. When I hit the volume up button on my keyboard I want a little thingy to pop up to graphically display how the level is changing. And so on ad infinitum. Oh an I also don't want to configure the custom optimimal indicator for each case.

I tried a few stripped down options but it turned out a full GNOME environment that I barely use works best.

This is all trivially easy to setup in any environment.

It's all solvable, but it isn't trivial (for me). Every little thing requires a bunch of googling, evaluating, and setup. For example, I'd have to decide what kind of network picker I prefer, which isn't a choice I ever want to have to make: https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/ck66cz/question_how...

Gnome is great for this usecase. I only use emacs and libewolf, and gnome is the best desktop experience I've had.

I used i3/bspwm/etc for years before, and was convinced it was better until I had to use Gnome at work for a bit. Now I use Gnome everywhere.

The UI polish is nice. Stuff like wifi and bluetooth just work well without having to dig into wpa_supplicant or w/e. I can plug in external monitors and easily rearrange displays.

Sure you can set all this up in a bespoke custom environment, but you have to set it all up, and predict future needs. Its nice not having to dig into or install something whenever I realize I need to do something I didn't account for. I use my PC for getting stuff done, not to get on the top of r/unixporn.

I could not (respectfully) disagree more. It's true that you can get a (seemingly) working system out of the gate, but that's rarely where I experience issues with Gnome or KDE. My issues usually happen after errant updates.

To address all of the issues you are listing, I just use NixOS and call it a day. I have snapshot support, I can change channels on a whim, swap out kernels on a whim and rebuild everything on a whim. If I want to nuke everything, I can have a new system up and running in under an hour because I just build on my meticulously configured configuration.nix and various flakes.

My point is that I don't want my DE to dictate how my system works. I mainly use CLI tools and configs, but also use Gnome and XFCE tools for select things. In the past 2 years I've never had a build issue and I run on bleeding edge versions.

You stating that you use your PC to get work done (and not r/unixporn notoriety) insinuates that those that don't agree with you are obsessed with superficial things. I can just as easily say you lack the knowledge of how your computer works so you lash out to mask your ignorance. Remember, this isn't Reddit, some of us here know what we are talking about.

I also use NixOS. It does not solve the problems I am mentioning. It also does solve issues due to updates, so not sure what you mean there. Changing system configuration is the easy part. Finding out which program fits your needs is the hard part.

The problems I've had on i3/bspwm/etc before are like the following:

- Client asks me to share my screen on projector. Since I'd never configured an external monitor on my laptop as I never thought I would need it, it of course did not work with just plugging in HDMI. Did not have time to go figure out how to create a desktop on another monitor with i3.

- I need to connect to a wifi network that has a weird config that needs weird config with wpa_supplicant though cli/config. Though NetworkManager just works.

- I'm sent an image which doesn't render right in feh, so I have to find another image viewer.

- I'm navigating a PDF that uses a feature I don't know the zathura command for.

- After laptop shuts down without notice, realize dunst hasn't been showing my low battery notifications for some time.

These are all common problems with a custom minimal setup, that are solved by using a full DE, such as Gnome or KDE.

> My point is that I don't want my DE to dictate how my system works...

Thats fine. Thats not everybody though.

> You stating that you use your PC to get work done (and not r/unixporn notoriety) insinuates that those that don't agree with you are obsessed with superficial things

I apologize for the wording if it came across as offensive. I intended to convey that not everyone cares about a "beautiful minimal setup". Sure, if you do, more power to you. Though these setups are not the path of least resistance for people who do not care about being minimal. For people who do not want to tinker with their DE, I would not recommend such setups, and would recommend Gnome. Back when I had more time, I loved tinkering with my DE, but I have limited time now and I'd rather tinker with implementing Lisp interpreters than with my DE.

I'd be interested in reading a writeup on this subject; I've always enjoyed running linux without a DE but the awful text rendering makes it a sub-par experience. I have one of the lcdfans modded thinkpads running Fedora and awesomewm in lieu of gnome shell.

But I still have most of gnome involved because something in there somewhere makes things look "nice" and if you just do a barebones install of X/wayland plus your WM of choice, things tend to look awful, and frankly I haven't got time nor energy to figure out what the magic sauce is.

It used to be that you have to fiddle with a lot of fontconfig settings to get decent rendering results, but they've been shipping mostly sane defaults for quite a while now.

Hinting for some reason still has to be enabled manually, but very lightweight tools like `lxappearance` make that a single click, if you don't want to touch XML by hand.

For the past 15 years, my desktop has been

• openbox (also handles keyboard shortcuts etc., can be configured visually with obconf, which can also handle font settings iirc)

• picom (for compositing; before, the tools it was forked from)

• dunst (for notifications)

• arandr (for configuring external displays)

• flameshot (for screenshotting)

• Random LXDE bits as necessary (lxpanel at the absolute minimum, lxsession when I need to deal with polkit things, lxappearance sometimes)

It doesn't do much in terms of system configuration etc., but I didn't find I need much anyway these days. Printers etc. I no longer use, and most system settings can be configured with systemd's localectl/timedatectl once and left alone.

>lxappearance

My understanding is that lxappearance is for GTK stuff only; is there a similar tool for Qt-based stuff?

I set QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qgnomeplatform in my xinitrc and don't care further, seems to work fine.

This is my DE free terminal-centric setup:

https://imgur.com/a/8mAoT2u

It took me about 3 weeks to figure everything out. You ideally need to use a distro where you can build from scratch (Arch/NixOS/Void/etc) if you want to truly be minimal. If you are OK using NixOS I can give you my configuration.nix.

I have the same problem

Some people don’t want to mess around with Linux to that degree. The OP said he wanted a seamless base system; he can always “fall back” to vanilla gnome if the customizations break somehow. With a custom desktop environment I always kept Gnome installed anyways “just in case”.

That's fine, but you will gain that time back after the initial setup is done. Pretty soon you will be fighting the system rather than it working for you.

The point where Gnome tends to go to shit is when installing the new major/minor update.

I guess twm would do then.

Openbox is a good floating wm if tilers aren't for you.

> I think that GNOME Shell is the most attractive and useful window manager for any operating system out there.

> I set /org/gnome/shell/disable-user-extensions to false, which completely disables the user extensions feature of GNOME. User extensions are a mechanism that allow users to write GNOME extensions in Javascript, similar to how Chrome and Firefox extensions work. […] I'm not sure that disabling user extensions actually disables the Javascript engine completely, but it definitely minimizes it to the least possible scope.

Gnome Shell itself is largely written in JavaScript.

From https://gjs.guide/extensions/overview/architecture.html#shel...

> GNOME Shell's JavaScript codebase uses these libraries to create the user interface you interact with every day, organized into modules. A number of these modules are re-used throughout GNOME Shell and are commonly used in extensions

I wrote a tiling window manager extension for myself in 2010. At least back then it was a very weird JavaScript environment and I didn’t enjoy programming for it. It was best to write all the code for browser and use dependency injection with small Gnome Shell specific parts because debugging in the browser was so much easier.

Good observation.

Turning off extensions is where OP lost me. In the last year, the single biggest quality of life improvement for me has been discovering the Argos[0] extension, which basically lets you put whatever text/menus you want in the top bar by writing scripts that print to stdout. To save space, I hid the dock (I use [1] as a replacement alt-tab), so the top bar is the only piece of screen that isn't OS chrome.

On my top bar right now I have the time in four time zones (including the ever-important UTC to save a mental calculation when logging at logs), the name of the current Wifi access point, and some VPN details gleaned using a combination of ip r, ping, nc, and curl. Another extension shows free RAM. I look at them dozens of times a day.

[0] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1176/argos/

[1] https://gist.github.com/cbd32/cbec9a32b32bd9e93b0d2696c71b5f...

There's a typo/thinko there too? Should be true not false.

> Gnome Shell itself is largely written in JavaScript.

And its "performance" is what finally made me switch to XFCE.

JavaScript in Gnome shell is not doing any heavy lifting... all such things are done in C code.

Yeah, sure.

https://feaneron.com/2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-mem...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Shell-JS-Exts-Problems

Plenty of other links to share if you want.

"GNOME is huge and kind of bloated, and it's hard to disable various unwanted components. GNOME Shell is amazing, but a lot of the other components of GNOME are simply unwanted. This is what turns a lot of power users away from GNOME, which I think is a shame given all of the other amazing things about GNOME."

GNOME needs a lobotomy and an enema.

Lobotomy: there is too much opinionated stuff as default and trying to change it is WAY more work than it should be. The configuration steps shown in the article illustrate this pretty well.

Enema: the bloat needs to be removed. Let me choose my own apps rather than trying to be a kitchen sink with its own default apps:

* cheese

* evolution

* evolution-ews

* evolution-help

* gfbgraph

* gnome-boxes

* gnome-calendar

* gnome-contacts

* gnome-dictionary

* gnome-documents

* gnome-getting-started-docs

* gnome-initial-setup

* gnome-maps

* gnome-online-miners

* gnome-photos

* gnome-software

* gnome-user-docs

* gnome-user-share

* gnome-video-effects

* gnome-weather

* simple-scan

* totem

* tracker-miners

* yelp

Why not ask me what I want / need instead of installing it all?

Windows lets me disable optional components, why not GNOME?

That's entirely up to your distro. The core GNOME shell doesn't require hardly any of this.

gnome developers claim that gnome is a single block and actively fight splitting it into packages. They'd rather have one single "gnome" package containing all of it.

I've used GNOME for a long time and never seen any sentiment like that. You'll also note that the GNOME project is split across many, many dozens of repos and isn't one enormous monorepo. I've also never seen a distro that demands you install all the GNOME core apps. There's always a metapackage for just the basics as well.

I don't think as a user your insight on what happens with the packaging is so relevant.

Packagers patch and do a lot of things that upstream might not appreciate.

Where's the evidence that upstream cares? Many package maintainers are also upstream project maintainers or contributors at a minimum. I may be "just" a user but as a user of the unstable version of my particular OS I've submitted my fair share of bug reports, both to the package maintainer and upstream, and maybe I'm hitting some sort of lottery but more often than not, there's overlap. I guarantee you that GNOME Calculator's devs don't have a care in the world whether a metapackage in some distro that includes their software has a hard or soft dependency on Network Manager. There is no upstream for a metapackage.

Are there any sources for this? I have a hard time believing that GNOME devs actively fight distros to make *checks note* gnome-boxes a required install on GNOME desktops.

Remember when gnome developers claimed that the gnome calculator absolutely needed the network-manager to manage the network?

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=681834

That's not what's happening in this report. This is answering the question of whether an all-encompassing metapackage should prefer to match upstream or integrate more with Debian's philosophy. "Upstream only tests with NM and only supports NM for some features" vs "if it's not a hard runtime dependency, it's a Recommends or Suggests, not a Depends." It's packaging trivia. Decade-old-plus packaging trivia for a single distro. You can install gnome-calculator without any of the rest of the GNOME shell so this is a horrifically disingenuous comment you've got here.

Ah I didn't know I was supposed to link every single relevant email from the mailing list.

No, just actually represent the situation accurately in what's supposed to be a good-faith discussion. Maybe provide any evidence of the claim you're making. It'd be appreciated.

>Let me choose my own apps rather than trying to be a kitchen sink with its own default apps: >Windows lets me disable optional components, why not GNOME?

Because that isn't in-line with the Gnome devs' vision, or how they want you to use Gnome. If you don't agree with their vision, then why are you using their software?

If you want a desktop environment that lets you configure it the way you want and disable things you don't want, Gnome simply isn't the DE for you. I really don't understand why this is so difficult a concept for so many Linux users. It's been like this for well over 10 years now (Gnome3 was released in 2011), it's not something new. The Gnome devs have infamously been hostile to users who want to do things differently from their vision.

>> Because that isn't in-line with the Gnome devs' vision, or how they want you to use Gnome. If you don't agree with their vision, then why are you using their software?

Sometimes you don't get to choose.

If GNOME is the only desktop environment on your employer's enterprise Linux distro and you do not have root or other window manager choices due to corporate security policies then the GNOME devs' vision is what you get.

GNOME 2 was fine. It was customizable and did not shove opinions down your throat.

GNOME 3 and 4 have gone the way of MacOS and Windows 11, but worse because there are fewer customizations and bizarre defaults.

>If GNOME is the only desktop environment on your employer's enterprise Linux distro and you do not have root or other window manager choices due to corporate security policies then the GNOME devs' vision is what you get.

That's part of the job. If you don't like it, too bad. I've had to use Windows at many jobs, and that sure as hell wasn't configurable the way I wanted, but it was part of the job. Part of considering a job offer is what the work environment is like, and another part of work is usually putting up with stuff you don't like. It sucks, but nothing's perfect. Personally, I've been using Linux at work for ages and have never been forced to use Gnome; I've always been able to switch to something else, though it's not so well supported.

>GNOME 2 was fine. It was customizable and did not shove opinions down your throat.

Gnome2 was run by a totally different group of people. This is like comparing Twitter 10 years ago to Twitter today. Unfortunately, this kind of thing can happen with any organization over time.

>GNOME 3 and 4 have gone the way of MacOS and Windows 11, but worse because there are fewer customizations and bizarre defaults.

Yep, exactly.

>> That's part of the job. If you don't like it, too bad.

Agreed, being forced to use what frustrates you sucks.

I currently use xfce at home since its behavior and defaults more closely align with GNOME 2, Windows {XP, 7, 10}, fluxbox, blackbox, openbox, and GNUStep. All of those desktops / window managers provide enough customization and flexibility so I can setup things how I want them to work fast and be comfortable.

>> Personally, I've been using Linux at work for ages and have never been forced to use Gnome; I've always been able to switch to something else, though it's not so well supported.

The previous version of the enterprise Linux distro had more desktop environment choices.

In the new version, they threw out everything but GNOME leading to the current frustration.

I'd wager that a large portion of desktop Linux users choose Linux because they want configurability and to fiddle with their system to tune it to their preferences. Encountering such an opinionated software suite on the platform is a culture shock for those people.

>> Encountering such an opinionated software suite on the platform is a culture shock for those people.

Exactly.

It is worse when such opinionated software is the only available corporate default that cannot be changed.

It's not even it being opinionated, it's being _so hideously_ opinionated. Windows is a pretty good spot, IME - KDE is a little much, macOS maybe a smidge too little, but GNOME just feels like a straitjacket.

There's been a serious entitlement problem among foss users for as long as I can remember.

I suspect a major part of it is just the demographic/age... "gamers" are similarly entitled, with more toxicity thrown in.

I think requesting the maintainers not be actively hostile towards users isn't users being entitled as much as being frustrated.

FOSS users are accustomed to having choices.

How many Linux distros can you try out?

How many different desktop environments / window managers can you choose from?

Which text editor do you want to use?

How customizable is your text editor?

Which command line shell do you want to use? How customizable is it?

If you are accustomed to having choices, but then you suddenly do not, is that entitlement?

And yet with all those options at their disposal, many of these people feel entitled to the one they picked never changing, depriving the developers of their freedom to choose - and they're the ones doing all the work! Sometimes to the degree of directing hostility and abuse at the developers, rather than just picking another option or leveling up with a fork.

With all those choices given to them, these people are so utterly selfish and lacking in common decency, they can't see how appropriate and important it is that those developing the software also have the freedom to choose what direction they take the fruits of their labor.

But I think these are just hallmarks of plain immaturity.

It reminds me of children having tantrums when mom doesn't cook the free meal they want, instead cooking what mom and dad like. That's what entitled foss users resemble, and I'm pretty sure a lot of them actually are children so what should we expect.

>> With all those choices given to them, these people are so utterly selfish and lacking in common decency, they can't see how appropriate and important it is that those developing the software also have the freedom to choose what direction they take the fruits of their labor.

As I stated elsewhere in this thread: Sometimes you don't get to choose.

>> It reminds me of children having tantrums when mom doesn't cook the free meal they want, instead cooking what mom and dad like. That's what entitled foss users resemble, and I'm pretty sure a lot of them actually are children so what should we expect.

Unsurprisingly, people do not like to be force-fed food they do not like:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-finds-gnome-3-4...

https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-42-the-nonsense-continues-...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/wte7tr/gnomes_design...

https://linuxreviews.org/GNOME_Developers_have_Made_Their_Mo...

https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming...

It's condescending and offensive to treat others as children just because they disagree with a designer's "grand vision".

That is the main reason why so many GNOME forks sprang up:

MATE: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=121162

Cinnamon: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1910

Unity: https://web.archive.org/web/20101129161856/http://www.pcworl...

People want tools that can help them get their work done and do not get in the way.

Forks are a healthy part of FOSS, that's exactly what's supposed to happen.

If your employer sucks and limits what software you can run, don't put that on FOSS developers' backs. Find a better employer if you can't change their policy and it's that important to you.

The article is about removing such components from GNOME. Windows doesn't ask before installing its components.

Both break subtly when you go around removing/disabling things that arn't meant to be removed/disabled

only some of those choices are actually required by gnome. not the whole evolution program especially, although the data-server portion might be.

I'd be happy if, after a long work day, it wasn't "gnome-shell" that was top of my CPU time list...

Seriously - today so far it has used 1 hour 15 mins of CPU time! In that time, we could have computed pi to billions of digits, yet somehow all gnome-shell has to show for it is that it managed to keep a clock updated and occasionally switch apps.

For anyone reading this later...

I finally dived into what was consuming all the CPU time in gnome-shell. Turns out most of it was spent in clutter_actor_finish_layout in clutter-stage.c, part of gnomes layout engine.

The function runs fast, but was being run thousands of times per second. Every object on the screen (ie. every menu icon, every status icon, every bit of text) was having its position recalculated at 60 fps.

Someone has already noticed and fixed the bug:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/2679

So in 12 months time, the fix will hopefully make it to everyones distros releases. Till then, enjoy the warm lap.

Nice. I'm pretty sure clutter is no longer used in gnome, it's just a forked gnome-shell dependency at this point, if memory serves. Kinda surprised they hadn't gotten rid of it there by now.

Last I heard clutter was no longer being maintained, and that was several years ago.

You do realize it's the thing compositing your desktop, right? it's not 1995

For which, no CPU time is needed - all it's doing is pointing the GPU towards the right buffers to render in the right places.

It's a long-running process that's waking up constantly for IPC+compositing duties alone.

If you're still on X I'd expect more of the compositing cost reflected in the Xorg process than gnome-shell.

But on a "modern" Wayland-based gnome session, the gnome-shell process encompasses what used to occur in Xorg. So all that time is now attributed to gnome-shell.

It's not like you just arrange the GPU with some buffers and never wake up to send it commands on what to draw when. The compositor is a rather busy process, esp. if you have many clients/windows active.

This stuff was easier to reason about in the Xorg days with WM "policy" running in a clearly separate process from the X "mechanism" side. Wayland tends to conflate everything, unless the compositor developers choose to use separate well-labeled threads for things like input/compositing/policy...

I don't personally use gnome so it's inconvenient for me to check despite mild curiosity. It may be interesting to look at a threaded view of `top` if you're on Wayland, and see if gnome-shell has clearly separated threads.

Interestingly, modern Xorg uses separate threads now, from this machine:

  524 anon    20   0  637516  92996  53592 S   5.3   0.6  82:54.35 Xorg
  525 anon    39  19  637516  92996  53592 S   0.0   0.6   0:00.00 Xorg:disk$0
  526 anon    20   0  637516  92996  53592 S   1.0   0.6  36:32.18 Xorg:gdrv0
  527 anon    39  19  637516  92996  53592 S   0.0   0.6   0:00.00 Xorg:disk$0
  529 anon    20   0  637516  92996  53592 S   1.0   0.6   1:10.52 InputThread

So gdrv0 alone has consumed 36.5 hours during my ~1.5 day uptime.

If this were a Wayland situation, that time would be reflected in my compositor process instead.

~83 hours for the main Xorg thread, which I presume is largely IPC but X also does heaps of crap from its huge protocol on-CPU so I think it's best to just ignore that.

I debugged it, and found: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36608714

I like Gnome's default look (rounded cornesrs and sensible font size comparing to, say, KDE's) but I hate that it copied the stupid MacOS layout with the menubar and dock, so wasteful. DEs in the 90s, including Gnome itself were fine with the taskbar. Idk why we suddenly need 2 bars now.

> MacOS layout with the menubar and dock

It doesn't have a menu bar. If GNOME used the top panel for menus, and I could control them with the keyboard and turn off hamburger menus everywhere, I'd dislike it a lot less.

Do you mean the top panel? No menus there. Not even status icons, if the GNOME devs get their way.

It's not Mac-like. Unity was Mac-like. GNOME is more like iOS on your desktop.

I love GNOME and Debian. But Debian's live install of GNOME contains a lot of unnecessary packages like games, dictionaries, Thai terminal etc. And it is difficult to hunt the package name of an app too. Annoyed by all this, this is my way of installing OS:

1. Install Debian Netinstall with only standard packages.

2. sudo apt install gnome-core --not install-recommends

3. You get a very minimal GNOME installation now.

There are minor inconveniences by this method too like Evolution services being installed. But it is way better than a lot of bloats present in Debian live.

XFCE twitches its fingers and smirks.

LXDE, which has always had trouble with sleep, muffles a yawn...

And I'd use them in a heartbeat if it weren't for the 1px wide window borders with hard grab edges that make window manipulation a hassle. Fortunately, Mate doesn't have this problem.

I hated this too, until I discovered Start+Left Right click drag Moves / Resizes windows. Since then, the Windows way of hunting the edge is the more annoying one.

> Start+Left Right click drag

I cannot parse this. What do you mean?

You hold the Windows/Super key on your keyboard while clicking and dragging on the window with either the left or right mouse button.

If you hold Super and left-click-drag, it moves the window around the screen as though you are clicking and dragging from the title bar (like most people would normally move a window around).

If you hold Super and right-click-drag, it will resize the window depending on what quadrant of the window you initially clicked and which direction you're dragging. Similar to if you clicked and dragged the corresponding corner of the window.

It's extremely nice to not have to aim for the precise edge of a window.

> It's extremely nice to not have to aim for the precise edge of a window.

This is why all modern window managers don't require you to hit the precise edge, but rather have a "grace" zone around the edge that also activates moving/resizing.

It's nice to be able to do these kinds of things one-handed.

>> It's extremely nice to not have to aim for the precise edge of a window.

> It's nice to be able to do these kinds of things one-handed.

Was that supposed to be snarky/mocking? It's the internet, so it's hard for me to tell sometimes.

In any case, I do agree that those grace zones are nice, too. I'm fairly sure that Gnome Shell has them as well.

I like to have both. I usually keep my hands on my keyboard's home row most of the time, so when I do reach for my mouse (I'm right-handed), my left hand is typically still sitting on a-s-d-f-space (or below space), so hitting Alt or Super (depending on the window manager and its settings, IIRC) with my thumb and dragging my mouse around is typically pretty comfortable and requires almost no precision whatsoever. Those grace zones are nice, but they obviously can't be huge, so you still have to do some aiming--especially on a laptop touchpad. Having the ability to enter into "resize and drag mode" via a modifier button where I can be super sloppy and know I can't "miss" just feels good to me; it feels like I don't have to change my concentration/focus at all.

Both of those use Gtk and Gtk is written by the Red Hat paid Gtk devs. Those devs have already removed the ability to paste a file path into a File->Open gtk dialog without it erroring out. The foundation under XFCE and LXDE and MATE has been and is still being eroded away. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872

And there's nothing the DEs can do about the dumbing down and removal of features in Gtk.

The article is from 2018, but to find and script settings, this person almost exactly does what I do with macOS.

I usually do:

% defaults read > 1

then tweak settings and then do

% defaults read > 2 % diff 1 2

I look at the diff and add those to a shell script, which I run when I do a new macOS installation.

While I appreciate the goal, I'm surprised that it ends up being less work to start with GNOME and rip that much out rather than starting with a lighter option. I get that the listed goals/features are perhaps well covered by GNOME, but I can't imagine it's really the only - or easiest - way to get there.

> I version control my Firefox preferences using Firefox's obscure user.js feature

Noting that enterprise policy replaces a lot of this, and works easier with flatpak based firefox et al. It also allows for auto-installing extensions.

Discussed at the time:

Lobotomizing Gnome - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17185569 - May 2018 (221 comments)

Linux desktop experience is degrading quickly.

For me Gnome is unusable because it doesn't natively support fractional scaling under X (and crashes frequently wïh Ubuntu patches). Also it can't render XWayland fonts without heavy blur.

I'm wondering how is this guy working with 3 x 4k displays in Gnome.

KDE, despite all its problems, is the only environment which, at least, supports modern displays.

> my personal feeling is the less Javascript in my life the better

Don't tell him that the whole Shell is JS.

(2018)

These days I find Gnome (with Dash to Dock) to be the best DE for me. Better than Windows, better than Mac, better than KDE.

It feels like every other DE, including Windows and the plethora of Gnome 2 clones literally hates the very idea vertical task bars. It's like these people live in a parallel universe where most monitors aren't 16:9 or 16:10, thus wasting vertical space. Thanks but no thanks. Windows 95 supported that out of the gate but windows 11 doesn't. What a crazy world.

I used to prefer XFCE for the longest time but it's just too old school and I get tired of configuring it on my laptops.

You can put XFCE and KDE panels on the left or right, resulting in a vertical task bar. This is a 10 second operation...

I know I can but the vertical bars are not first class citizens was my point

What's missing in KDE? Far as I can tell, it works exactly as it did in Windows 95. Unlock taskbar, grab taskbar, move to side of the screen.

Did I not just confirm that KDE and XFCE have vertical taskbars? Of course they do.

XFCE is just too old school for me. I have launch icons and launched items. Clumsy and it wasting space. Easy to screw things up while managing launchers UI items/placeholders. These problems are not vertical bar specific.

KDE? I only speak for myself here - it is not missing anything but simplicity. Too much stuff to configure and I get lost, then frustrated. I think I liked it a bit more in the early 2000s.

> I have launch icons and launched items.

Then install Docklike Taskbar:

https://docs.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-docklike-plugin/st...

https://github.com/nsz32/docklike-plugin

Formerly Dockbar-X, I believe.

https://github.com/M7S/dockbarx

> KDE? I only speak for myself here - it is not missing anything but simplicity. Too much stuff to configure and I get lost, then frustrated.

That's a fine reason to dislike KDE. I'm just saying, the process to configure a vertical tab bar specifically, is exactly as complicated, step for step, as it was in Windows 95.

- Unlock tab bar

- Drag tab bar to the edge

- Lock tab bar

I'm asking what's missing to make that a "first class" feature.

So KDE which lets you do what you want out of the box (vertical taskbar) with one setting change is not good for vertical taskbars but GNOME that doesn't have that baked in at all and requires a 3rd party extension to that is a better choice?

Oh and you'll still have the horizontal activity bar on GNOME too.

> It's like these people live in a parallel universe where most monitors aren't 16:9 or 16:10, thus wasting vertical space

I don't know. I use widescreen monitors, and yet I hate vertical task bars and much prefer "wasting" the vertical space. But I agree -- the user should be able to have whatever arrangement they prefer.

If it wasn't old school this screams NsCDE or Windowmaker. But they are very old school.

My problem is that both KDE and Gnome do not stabilize their API like X11 did. Although Gnome API appears a bit less changing than KDE.

Packaging-wise, both KDE and Gnome suffered equally (despite Gnome-dev's huge resistance to do many-package approach). I favor the KDE approach to minimize presence of untested bloatware.

Right now, I have been fighting vulnerability abuse against dbus usage of both KDE and Gnome (by red team) so I've settled on Xfce for now.

(My friends have been suggesting Cinnamon/Mint so my early eval seems promising after having applied basic Whonix/CISecurity lockdown).

The article does not mention the app gsettings (in package libglib2.0-bin, at least on Ubuntu 20.04). Perhaps it came along after the authorship of this 2018 article.

Anyway, gsettings provides a convenient CLI to a fair amount of customization -- I have myself a script of over 20 invocations to set various look-and-feel tweaks. To get yourself started, have a look at the output of gsettings --list-recursively.

I did the same when I ran GNOME, but I realized I'm doing too much work to mold it to my taste and I still end up unsatisfied.

So I switched to tilling window manager and never looked back. I can customize and setup up things just like I want. Tilling window management is to be honest secondary function for me. Customization is number one.

I thought I would try learning gtk a few days ago. went to the website and couldn't even get the hello world example to compile on my system (PopOS). I tried to trouble shoot but as a fairly newbie c programmer, it was futile. these kinds of things matter if you want to ring in new users.

They do have an onboarding workflow inteded for newbies: The Gnome Builder flatpak. Even as a "Gnome hater", I'd say it works pretty well for what it sets out to accomplish.

I'll check it out. would have been nice if they mentioned that in the onboarding tutorial

Everyone has a different 80%, I like the automation, I would use it to enable my favourite extensions and configure them, I just feel more comfortable with wobbly windows and a desktop cube (and many others l).

might as well just switch to dwm, dmenu, and st?

i3 floats my boat, but similar thinking. For multiple monitors, there's xrandr, solve it once and you're good forever. Why hire a secretary if the only thing you need to learn is to type?

I’d rather hire a secretary so I can spend my copious time doing things other than figuring out a daemon so I can plug in a monitor

yes. solve it once, then solve other things.

I'm using jwm as lobotomized gnome 2x

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