Ask HN: Why is Gnome so inceridlby, insanely, bad?

> Firstly, there are no min/max icons on the windows...

I'm mostly with you on this one. They should be present by default. Now I can't speak for Fedora, but on Debian there are two configuration apps called "Settings" and "Tweaks." Tweaks will let you configure the top bar of windows along with a few other options. It would seem to me to make sense that Settings and Tweaks should be one app, but whatever...

> Second, it has a top bar that is like on a mobile phone and has no real functionality...

I think this is a matter of taste. I tried KDE and stuck with it for a while, but it seemed a little to hard to configure and I wasn't happy with what I ended up with. This surprised me as I was familiar with KDE's reputation for configurability.

Now on Gnome, I have configured it to show the task bar when I touch the left edge of the screen. Configuring this was too difficult, but it wasn't any worse than figuring out how to configure the task bar the way I (mostly) wanted it on KDE. With Gnome, I got the behavior I wanted. With KDE, I never quite got there.

The people involved are terribly ideological, for one thing. They just don't listen. Ever.

I can understand that. But how can a group of people, making a freaking UI, make such fundamentally bad decisions as a group? That is what I just do not get.

Red Hat has always targeted corporate buyers who don't actually have to use the software they're buying for one thing.

Avoiding complexity, mostly. Sometimes simplicity is the right choice, sometimes it's the wrong choice, but it's often the most stable choice. Stable programs are easy to maintain, localize and secure.

I don't agree with everything GNOME does (like, how do we still not have a stable extensions API?), but I daily drive it because it gets out of my way. For development purposes it's perfectly suitable.

If all you do is run xterm all day it is OK. On the other hand I use most of the Linux machines in my life via ssh from a Windows or Mac machine.

Recent versions of Ubuntu are getting decent in my opinion though although I still mostly use my Linux laptop to RDP into a Windows machine at work or my personal Windows machine.

> how do we still not have a stable extensions API?

Mostly because they allow you to do anything possible to the shell via extensions that is exposed. If they'd limit the APIs to a stable subset it would be much more limited in what you could do with it.

It comes down to disdain for the end user. Nothing you can say will change their mind because they're right and you're wrong because you're a dumb user who doesn't know what you need and they're the engineer with the credentials to prove it.

I will say though, one good thing about Linux is the ease with which you can choose something different. You don't have to use gnome or unity or snaps or even systemd if you don't want to, you can't say the same for the other two large userbase desktop systems, where youre stuck with the decisions of the designers with no recourse. So if these developers make things that are only uses by people because it was the first thing they installed, that's fine, I have my other options and I like them.

I know everyone is hating on Gnome, but I love it. I have been daily driving it for years, and it keeps getting better. I have been using essentially the default experience for most of that time.

As someone who likes heavy keyboard centric flows, but still likes using a mouse, gnome feels like it was made with me in mind.

The keyboard navigation in the overview feels just as good as it does with a mouse.

First, I never liked Gnome, I remember trying it few times years ago, and quickly returning back to fvwm2 every time. On the other hand, I never understood why window managers put icons on the window title bars, and in my own fvwm2 config, the max and min icons were the first thing I removed. I mostly used keyboard to toggle between maximized and unmaximized state of a window, and if I really needed a mouse for it, I would double click the title bar with the same effect (I also used keyboard to toggle vertical only and horizontal only maximization). With practically unlimited number of virtual desktops, I never needed to minimize a window, and I usually had too many windows open for a taskbar to be useful, instead I had a popup menu for finding windows (both just this desktop and all desktops). Now, after switching to i3, my windows still have no icons on title bars, and I use rofi to find windows, so still no taskbar.

I don't know that Gnome is bad.

I certainly hate it, personally, and won't use it. It makes everything difficult. But there are quite a lot of people who love it, and that tells me that my opinion of it is due to a difference in taste, not a question of quality.

>in order to switch between applications, you have to use tab or get into this desktop section by clicking on said icon

What I do is to configure the first 5 function keys to switch to the 5 apps I use most frequently. f2 (not Ctrl-f2 or Alt-f2, but plain f2) for example switches to my browser.

I use to like Gnome 2. Simple, clean and efficient. When Gnome 3 was launched, I was already using a mac book, so didn't try it.

  > Firstly, there are no min/max icons on the windows.

My GNOME on Ubuntu has min/max icons for the windows. What am I missing?

  > Second, it has a top bar that is like on a mobile phone and has no real functionality on desktop(ie. it shows time and not much else).

Time and system tray icons (wi-fi, account stuff, etc). Yes. I added some extension that turned it into a global menu bar, because I'm used to macOS and I like it that way. I also have my workspaces (virtual desktop) switcher up there.

  > yet again, you will find there is yet another third party extension what will allow you to transform this hidden dock into constantly visible dock

I have a visible dock. It was originally on the left side of the screen but I moved it to the bottom and disabled the setting that made it span the width of the screen. I didn't need to install a third-party extension for this?

  > I tried KDE as well. That was issue-less from the get-go, like any desktop environment is supposed to be.

Then... use KDE, if it fits your tastes better? With Linux, you have that choice.

I am not excited by GNOME, but it works pretty well and is both easy to and very highly-configurable. I wonder how many of your complaints are due to how it differs from the desktop environment you're used to. Also, you can customize all this -- a lot of the time with just GNOME Tweaks and no third-party extensions.

Well, it all started with a little thing called Ubuntu Netbook Edition around 2008 or 9, can't remember. People wanted to experiment with different user interfaces and experiences for your core environment to see if they could make UX workflows better, make better use of display real estate, make things more ergonomic, etc. Eventually, the netbook edition environment because Ubuntu's Unity desktop environment, and gnome2 became Gnome3 with similar sorts of interface ideas.

It didn't matter that nobody liked the new interfaces. It was dismissed by developers as "people are resistant to change", and that really was the beginning of this paradigm that developers know better than users what they need and the world we now live in of tolerating what is available and people being herded into behaviors by UX designers.

A lot of other decisions have been made to fundamentally change the Linux experience since then as a result of the normalization of this, the most popular init system, systemd, subverted our existing ones, we have all kinds of deviations from the Unix way, and some are good I think but generally, administering a Linux system went from something a single person could do and understand the entire system in their head to something that requires continuing education and niche specialization. Systems evolve, yes, but Linux is basically fundamentally different than it was in those days, it's still got the monolithic kernel and the basic Unix like structure, but managing a system is now much more complex than it used to be.

I don't think I know anyone who uses gnome. If you're just trying to get the usual desktop type experience you're used to, you can use KDE, XFCE, MATE (which is a fork of gnome2), I recently checked out LXDE and found it to be utterly fantastic so far, it usually looks 95-ish out of the box but themed it looks nice and modern. If I were to recommend a "normal" desktop with a full suite of basic software I'd recommend that. Or, you can build something from components, that's what I usually do these days since DEs come with a lot of stuff I don't need, I like Wayland so I use either labwc for the classic desktop windowing and stuff, or sway for tiling and I'll tell you, tiling is where it's at once you get the hang of it. Those mobile phone looking full-of-extra-steps-to-get-to-anything environments like what youre talking about are absolute trash as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah, Fedora has no gnome tweaks by default. To me, it's just another reason not to use Fedora. The primary reason being Fedora is essentially an IBM distribution, and IBM could screw up a wet dream.

But it is one of the most popular and recommended distributions out there, ranking top 3 on anyone's list. So dismissing it like that is quite pointless. Issue here is Gnome, not Fedora. Window manager UI simply cannot behave like this, in its basic state. Needing external hacks(literally) to make it usable is just preposterous.

Well, this is how Fedora sets up gnome. Most distros don't do this. Caveat emptor.

TLDR, you're exaggerating. It works fine