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Comment by masom | Hacker News Reader

It's really sad what happened with Gnome3.

Gnome2 was a good functional desktop, sure it was copying the 2000s with windows 98/2000 style, but it worked. Hell, even OpenStep is more functional than Gnome3 as a daily computer interface.

Gnome3 targeted a weird mix of incompatible devices, like a windows 8 interface, and kinda failed as a design given the devices it optimized for never took over the market. There's not that many tablets running Gnome or touchscreen laptops anymore.

It's almost like Android took the design team by complete surprise, while they tried to make desktops a tablet experience, but failed at doing both.

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> Gnome3 targeted a weird mix of incompatible devices, like a windows 8 interface, and kinda failed as a design given the devices it optimized for never took over the market.

I'm not sure about that. Convertible laptops are quite popular as a product category, and GNOME 3 works great on those. Besides, MATE and Xfce are still around if you prefer a traditional desktop interface.

Agreed. I gave gnome a pass for years because, well it’s largely designed for touchscreen devices right?

Fast forward to 2024 I get a Linux tablet with gnome installed (phosh) and guess what? Not a single gnome video player exists that works well with the touchscreen, and many of the apps only work by keyboard!!

We lost so much in the transition, and they didn’t even bother to nail the supposed new use case. Gnome in itself is a complete failure, so far at least. Cinnamon and Mate are decent but suffer from GTK deterioration. Phosh seems to work well enough.

I like kde these days and have it on a machine, but every time I open the context menu on konsole I get upset because there are a hundred options in there. I want a simple menu.

FWIW (not much) but I love Gnome3.

I have my Arch Gnome3 setup that resembles a tiling window manager... a la as demonstrated by Typecraft - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1kZd1f724U

I used to run Hyperland but was tired of constantly tweaking it... so this is good and easy enough.

Nice, I still want to dive into Niri or PaperWM (Niri is inspired by PaperWM but more minimal, needs Wayland and written in Rust where PaperWM is a WM on top of Gnome).

I hear good things about COSMIC as well. But I'm too busy being productive at the moment to mess up my well working NixOS/Vanilla-Gnome based laptop :)

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