Comment by anneessens | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anneessens | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, absolutely. Perhaps not directly with the DE itself, but the DE affects how I work.

On Plasma, I have it set up so I have all title bars hidden and I use custom keybinds to close, minimize and maximize windows, which saves screen space and reduces clutter. On GNOME you cannot minimize windows at all if I remember correctly.

I have virtual desktops disabled and only use one desktop to manage all of my windows, while GNOME fundamentally works around using multiple virtual desktops as far as I know.

GNOME doesn't have a system tray, which I find essential. For example, I can see just by looking if Discord has an unread notification. Or I can close OBS to the system tray without quiting the application, which reduces visual clutter. I know you can add this with an extension, but I'm just referring to vanilla GNOME.

I often use KRunner to temporarily write something while still seeing the contents of my screen, while GNOME's equivalent is full screen I believe.

I'm sure there are many other ways, but these are the ones I can quickly think of.

> On GNOME you cannot minimize windows at all if I remember correctly.

This is incorrect. You can minimize windows on Gnome, but the button to do it is hidden by default. It can be re-enabled in Gnome Tweaks, and there is also a keyboard shortcut (Super+H) for minimizing.

Gnome is however indeed fairly workspace-centric.

As for customization, out of the box Gnome is quite rigid, but its extension ecosystem far surpasses that of KDE. You can use extensions on Gnome to for example get a dock or system tray back.

Oh, I didn't know that shortcut for minimizing. Is there a reason the button is hidden by default?

I never really understood how to efficiently use virtual desktops or what their benefits are compared to one desktop. Would you mind to explain?

Well, I would imagine that is because you generally only need extensions on KDE for niche things, while GNOME needs extensions for more 'basic' things. Obviously you don't need an extension for a system tray if one already exists by default.

> Is there a reason the button is hidden by default?

Because GNOME developers mindlessly pursue "minimalism" with religious zealotry, finding an outlet for their frustration of not being good enough to work for the Church of Apple.

> You can use extensions on Gnome to for example get a dock or system tray back.

As I recall, those are exactly the kinds of extensions that get broken by Gnome updates on a regular basis.

I think I see one difference - I'm not trying to use each environment the same. My iPad wants everything to be full screen, so that's how I use it (although I have been playing with Stage Manager). Windows has good support for tiling now, so I use that. On Gnome I lean into the workspace stuff. KDE I don't know as well, so I use the mouse for just about everything.

I enjoy learning the ins and outs of the different environments and frankly I wish the differences ran even deeper. I often think about how fun it would be if Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, BeOS, SGI IRIX, OS/2, Sun CDE, and all the other systems were still being developed. But then the Electron / web app people would probably still try to pave over everything cool and unique on each system to run one mediocre app everywhere.

I understand that GNOME has a clear way how it wants you to use the desktop, but I don't like that way for the reasons I described. And it's not just a 'different' way, I feel like I lose functionality and flexibility in a lot of regards. Although, I guess it's hard to say for sure since I never used GNOME for an extended period of time.

That's the beauty of different systems. You always lose functionality no matter which way you switch. A Windows user might miss PowerShell + COM on Linux. A Linux user would miss having access to the filesystem on iOS. An iOS user misses the ubiquitous URL scheme for sharing code and data when they switch to Windows or Linux. I still miss Rexx and the object-oriented workplace shell of OS/2.

I'm sure if you gave GNOME an extended trial, you would adapt and find some things you actually prefer.

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