A proposal to switch Fedora Workstation's desktop from GNOME to KDE
lwn.net
lwn.net
Shame. Definitely prefer KDE over Gnome. Gnome has a lot of weird "gnome"-isms and design choices that makes it come out looking like discount Fischer-Price MacOS
Funny because Gnome's defaults are so not what I want, that it really doesn't stay out of my way, on the contrary, it keeps frustrating me, and the worst part is that it's really not easy to change it to your liking. Had to use Ubuntu Gnome at work and it made me pull my hair out.
At least with KDE, IceWM, XFCE, OpenBox, etc. there's gonna be some setting or at least a config file to change what bothers me, instead of looking for the 20th extension which either is out of date and doesn't work on Wayland, or will break at the next Gnome update.
Gnome is only good if what's out of the box fits you like a glove, and then it's VERY good. Otherwise, forget about it, it's like trying to run a marathon in a shoe that doesn't fit you: it will be very painful. And I'm too old and set in my ways to completely overhaul my workflow and usage patterns to a new DE paradigm, the way Gnome expects of me, instead of sticking to those DEs/WMs I know already work for me.
YMMV.
Then they log off, and go back to their polished MacOS or Windows machines to play games or watch movies.
But ultimately, I am in a terminal probably 90% of my time, and I want a DE that facilitates that... which GNOME does.
I feel like this would apply better to stuff like i3, IceWM, OpenBox etc. , no? Gnome is definitely for those who want to use a GUI, not get rid of it, otherwise they would use something a lot more minimalistic instead of something that eats up 1.2+ GB of ram just to launch an app.
>For a lot of people it's a comfortably simple container for a terminal, web interface, or GUI driven config management tool and nothing else.
But you can do that with absolutely every WM/DE though.
that being said, I fell in love with Adwaita's design and the GTK headerbar applications for their simplicity and elegance. I so fell in love with it that I begrudgingly decided to switch to GNOME desktop on Ubuntu, just so these applications would feel native.
a few years in, and i'll be real; you're absolutely right about how GNOME expects you to totally overhaul your workflow. that being said I regret to say that now I am fully married to the GNOME workflow and can't even bear to use MATE anymore (other than for brief stark fits of Compiz nostalgia)
I have seen this comment in regards to Gnome a few times across various discussions. Not really sure that this actually means. Gnome shows notifications at top center which is more distracting than notifications in lower right corner. If you want to quickly search and launch something you have to go to overview mode which shows all windows, workspaces, dash, which is very distracting when all you wanted to do was search application.
On my desktop I use sway, coming from i3, and it is mostly working OK. Every time I tried Gnome and Wayland I had ocean of issues and after couple of days reverted to Gnome with X.
KDE recently switched everyone on Arch to Wayland (the new default), making it my first brush with Wayland, and maaan... I'm impressed with how performant Wayland is (it's as smooth with composition and no screen tearing as X11 is without composition and with screen tearing -- and the key input latency is palpably less than in X11), but there's been one little problem: total system freezes periodically. Mouse, keyboard, sound, everything. A totalitarian kind of freeze -- the kind only possible with Wayland's design. :p And the periods were once every day. Then, after a few days, twice every day. Then once every 15 minutes! Then once every 5 minutes!! As I tried to look up how to switch it back to X11, as though angry with me and wanting to stop me, it started crashing faster!!! (I figured out it was the little gear icon at the sign-in screen that allows you to switch KDE back to X11.)
So I'm sticking with X11 for now. :p I'm also exploring WMs like dwm and OpenBox to see if I can have something leaner that won't threaten to kick me off of X11 anytime soon.
With both KDE and Sway I use different scaling on each monitor and it smooth and perfect.
You mean Arch recently switched its KDE users to Wayland.
KDE has no say on what Arch's defaults are. That's what distros are for.
Nate Graham championed community goals such as "usability and productivity", "consistency", while also focusing developers on high-priority bugs and blogging weekly about the progress: https://pointieststick.com/category/this-week-in-kde/
On KDE you can also use extensions which are equally wonky, but KDE offers so much more out of the box options that I find myself needing far fewer extensions.
Also, KDE is much quicker on implementing stuff like VRR or HDR support which Gnome is still lacking. But at the same time, KDEs implementation is still lacking in some areas. While I personally like the "move (relatively) fast and deliver early results" mentality, being on a semi rolling release like Fedora I'm not stuck with the broken state for very long. In that sense, I can understand why people may be annoyed with partially implemented features when they're stuck with them for a long version lifecycle.
I have no interest in KDE. It looks a little too much like Windows for me, and my time is limited, so I'm looking for out-of-the-box solutions and as little configuration as I can get away with.
It seems we as an industry just can not help ourselves with constantly nitpicking things that could just be left alone. Gnome has been the default for ages now. Anyone who uses Fedora regularly is aware of the spins, is aware of KDE, and could, or would, use an alternate desktop environment, should they be so inclined to do so.
Changing the default would just create work and not fundamentally solve any problem. Having a robust default out-of-the-box experience is critical, and gnome already provides that.
On the contrary - anyone already used to Fedora is of course probably used to the spins and can pick whatever they want. But for new users coming from Windows, the defaults are everything, and the default of GNOME is needlessly confusing.
Yes, its default setup looks like Windows. Yes, 4.0 to 4.2 was the dark days (and the devs openly said that they're considered tech previews, back in the day).
However, when some spends some time with it and tunes it one's liking, it becomes a third hand. Dolphin handles tons of protocols and have features that makes 10+ applications unnecessary. Some of the "effects" are actually usability improvements, which are indispensable when someone starts to use them.
People may not like it, it may not be space efficient as some GNOME themes or macOS, but that thing works, doesn't crash, and improves productivity.
And, you don't change settings every day. I'm opening settings app so rarely that most of the settings either changed or evolved over time. I don't know what's where. I just use it the way I installed and tuned god knows when.
Plus KDE ecosystem has some of the best tools in its class. Did anyone give a good run to KATE and Konsole recently?
Konsole is the best multitabbed terminal in my experience on Linux. I tried more "modern" or fashionable ones, but Konsole works great all of the time on all of my systems and it supports all the features I want (including graphical output using sixel, which is something I use in my own prototype tools all the time).
Kate is fine now that it has LSP integration, but it still can't compete with something like the VSCode ecosystem for plugins and first-party support from software frameworks and programming language teams. So I've since gone back to using VS Codium.
The best thing about Konsole is it's a framework to begin with. So tools like Yakuake can just import Konsole as a "unit" and build upon it.
I don't expect KATE to compete with VSCod{ium,e}. I expect it to be a code and git aware text editor and it fills that role perfectly.
As a funny side note, at least for Golang, KATE's LSP integration works way better than more expensive tools like BBEdit.
For bigger projects I skip this free-looking-proprietary-Microsoft-thing and use Eclipse IDE instead.
It's not like the community is devoid of good taste, just go look at r/unixporn. There are plenty of people who know how to make things look good. Why aren't their sensibilities represented in either project?
Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of issues with design choices in both GNOME and macOS (don't get me started on the "flattening" trend to eliminate UI signifiers and affordances) but on the whole it feels like they are at least thoughtful in how they choose to strike a balance between efficiency, learnability, functionality, accessibility, consistency, and aesthetics. I haven't used KDE in a while, but my impression was that it was not far behind.
Whereas the majority of r/unixporn screenshots I've seen are gaudy with a focus on aesthetics above other considerations. That may be a good taste for some and I also wonder why someone hasn't made a desktop environment for folks who like that sort of thing, but it's not surprising that the most popular ones have a more mature approach to design.
I'm not really sure what I find better. That's why the difference is uncanny. A graphic designer could probably pinpoint it. Maybe it's wasted space? Or the gray in GNOME? It looks like no one knew how big or what color to make things, and just sort of hedged.
I don't think my bias is with macOS since I've also used Windows up until 7 and never found that uncanny. It's just a different aesthetic.
It's an interesting stunt, I guess. By 'stunt' I'm referring to the proposal being written in a deliberately provocative manner with a goal other than the stated one.
Reading the "proposal" it's quite clear (to me) that it's not exactly serious. I'm a little bit sorry[0] to say this, but it reads like a fanatical sales pitch. I don't want to pick it apart, because that's not the point. But for one thing, a serious proposal to seriously make this change would justify its claims, by -- for example -- pointing to something like surveys and statistics.
I think it's a bit of a shame[1], anyway, because as you read further, the sales-esque tone gives way to an earnest description of things wot KDE did good and the whole thing takes on a noble air, albeit one covered in obnoxiously heavy pens and, well, air fresheners.
[0] if this was the idea, it's seriously well done
[1] I have no idea if the people involved see it as a success or not
Notifications? Background apps? One of the AppIndicator shell extensions? Something else?
FWIW, I like that Gnome is more "opinionated" than KDE.
But what I really want to say is that Red Hat's contributions to Gnome are not that large recently. I often see comments along the lines of "this should be easy for Gnome, they have Red Hat backing them", and it's really underestimating how self-sufficient the Gnome community is and how many legs it has to stand on, because it's really not "all Red Hat".
The fact that you need extensions for something as simple as dock functionality is insane. The number of basic settings that have to be touched with gsettings because they don't have a GUI option is frustrating. The fact that all my extensions get broken for a month after every single release is downright infuriating. Some apps like the task monitor are so over-simplified as to be downright inferior to e.g. the KDE or MacOS task monitor in every way. The libadawaita theming changes are extremely annoying, as the DE apps don't obey the same theme as my other apps.
With that said, when it works, it's my favorite desktop experience. I'll try out COSMIC as a replacement eventually.
I think a lot of users today weren't even born when the QT controversy was happening yet they keep bringing it up like it's an active showstopper. I think this piece of lore keeps getting repeated so often everywhere, that people forget where it came from and assume it must be a current issue if people still keep bringing it up.
AFAIK two reasons.
For one, KDE 4 was considered horrible, making everyone switched to Gnome, and due to inertia, they stuck with in instead of going to KDE 5. And some users can be incredibly petty, stubborn and opinionated, just because they tried KDE 4 one time, hated it, and then keep bad mouthing it years later even though they haven't tried KDE 5 and their opinions are out of date, they'll still keep bragging how they tried KDE once and it was shit so nobody should bother with it according to them. Even on HN. All this bad publicity didn't help since other users took it as gospel.
And two, the release cadence of Gnome versions was on a fixed calendar basis, meaning distros like Ubuntu and Fedora could plan their own releases to line up with that and always ship their newest distros with the newest Gnome, while KDE wasn't and would update the KDE Gear framework, QT and KDE release at totally different times unallied to any fixed dates, making sync planning for distro releases to ship with it very difficult. The KDE release cycle is more fitting for rolling releases. I heard they're planning to change this in the future and switch to a fixed cycle as well.
It would have been much better if 4.3 was called 4.0 as it was supposed to be
At least they were honest and upfront about it that it's shit and it's gonna be fixed later. Gnome's response in such a case would have usually been "it's not a bug, you're just holding it wrong"[1].
There is no good answer to this problem.
The Linux kernel does this (or used to do at least) with odd version numbers.
Or you could call it -dev, or -unstable version. Or call it 3.90-dev or something
There are options.
The distro/commercial ecosystem preference for Gnome dates back to earlier times, and comes down mostly to geography and licensing.
Wrt/ licensing, the underlying GTK GUI toolkit had LGPL some years before Qt moved to also having an LGPL option under Nokia ownership. That meant if you were a commercial entity wanting to invest (as, e.g. Sun and Adobe did with GTK at various points), GTK looked like the better bet.
Geography: When the Gnome community initially forked out of the KDE community, the fault line was partially regional, with the core of the KDE community remaining in Europe and the initial Gnome developers being American KDE devs. As a result, for many years (and to this day), if you go to a Linux event in the US, you're more likely to run into a Gnome/GTK person, and therefore things are more likely to happen.
The software industries in the US and Europe also tick quite differently. The US for a long time offered more career paths for young kids in FOSS to graduate into product companies involved with what they were doing before (e.g. Red Hat). KDE/Qt developers have generally graduated into consultancy companies that spend their time on proprietary products instead (with exceptions).
These things have a lot of inertia and long-term effects.
It's interesting to see a bit of a reversal of this trend now, with the latest breed of meaningful new Linux deployments that get to make fresh choices (e.g. Asahi for Apple Silicon or the Steam Deck) generally shipping KDE Plasma instead of Gnome.
> I heard they're planning to change this in the future and switch to a fixed cycle as well.
KDE has had time-based releases and has also been doing LTS releases for about a decade now, ever since the 5.x series.
But your comment still contains some truth; you're probably thinking of the monthly release cadence the KDE Frameworks libs have had vs. the slower Plasma cycle. This has indeed caused some discomfort at distros over the years, and KDE is now making changes to make this easier.
Why there is no option on Gnome to ungroup windows in dock/launcher without installing third-party extensions. On KDE it's one click. Not everybody likes to click 2-3 times to open desired window.
Gnome's default image viewer can't even crop or resize photos.
There is a ton things like this that make KDE far more usable out of the box than Gnome.
The only thing that is better on Gnome is HiDPI handling. KDE works kind of OK with wayland on HiDPI screens but some apps have issues with very slow scrolling, e.g. SublimeText and LibreOffice apps
so that's what's been going on?
is there a bug report i can monitor? is a fix coming?
KDE was LGPL and flirting with the idea of making money. GNOME was FOSS purist and GPL, making it a safer bet at the time.
Then again, maybe Qt is so much better today than GTK because Trolltech is a company that makes money. (It's not even close; projects are fleeing GTK for Qt, and it's the reason why every GTK app is a toy compared to a Qt alternative, like Nautilus vs. Dolphin.)
LGPL means you can write closed source software against the open source toolkit, and yes I think it's fair to say this was a big driver for commercial adoption of GTK in the late 90s to early 00s as it seemed like the better ticket for "serious" closed source software on the Linux software.
The irony is of course that today, far more "serious" software (e.g. your Autodesks, Mathematicas, Abletons, etc.) with Linux releases has been developed with Qt and little or perhaps none with GTK since that earlier wave (where maybe the most complex app was Acrobat PDF Reader).
You have to use Qt if you want anything but trivial desktop software. D: If you've used modern GTK and Qt, it's obvious why.
[1]: https://salsa.debian.org/installer-team/tasksel/-/commit/dce... (they cited systemd integration too, but that situation has probably changed a lot since then)
[2]: It is also the default on other enterprise Linux vendors, such as Ubuntu (albeit customized) and even major KDE supporter SUSE uses Gnome Classic mode as the default for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
Tho there have been major works sponsored/supported by GNOME/STF to improve the entire accessibility stack used in the Linux userspace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9psDfEFf9c