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Comment by resonious | Hacker News Reader

This kind of complaint about GNOME is pretty common. I'm actually kind of surprised GNOME is the default for so many high profile distros despite the controversial UX.

That said, I personally find vanilla GNOME pretty easy to use. It only took me a day or so to get used to not having things like a taskbar. If you use the hot corner (which is also hated), you can switch to any open app with one mouse click just like with a taskbar.

So either I'm an alien, or people are more adaptable than they give themselves credit for, and will go impressive lengths to not adapt (e.g. making a taskbar for a desktop that's perfectly usable without one).

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I don't think UX is controversial, if you look at it from the perspective of average person. I was annoyed time to time by changes in Gnome UI. But I would not say I find KDE, XFce, Windows 11, Mac... more productive. I switched my old man from Windows to Gnome and had zero complains (which is rare). Having Gnome default makes sense as switching will not be a problem for advanced users. I personally don't have reason to switch.

>I'm actually kind of surprised GNOME is the default for so many high profile distros despite the controversial UX.

I've never understood this, and it sometimes seems like a conspiracy. It's a very controversial DE and has gotten a lot of negative reactions for many years now, and it was so bad that different devs made not 1, but 2 forks of it: MATE and Cinnamon, in addition to all the other competing DEs out there (KDE, LXDE, Xfce, etc.). But for some odd reason, all the highest-profile distros push Gnome. If they wanted to get more converts from Windows, or pitch themselves as an OS for office use that Windows users could easily switch to, you'd think they'd push KDE as the first choice, because it's the most similar.

Ubuntu extends the Gnome desktop in ways that make it a more "traditional" desktop environment.

Yeah, that's another thing I don't understand: why? If they want it to be like a traditional desktop, why not just use KDE? Instead, they're trying to shoehorn unwanted (by the Gnome devs) features into Gnome and taking on a huge maintenance burden.

OpenSUSE at least gives you the choice without nudging you toward any.

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