I sometimes wonder what it would be like today if we had just kept iterating on GNOME 2 rather than trying to do 50 different new things simultaneously...
Personally I still use MATE :)
Personally I still use MATE :)
I consider KDE even more polished than the MacOS and Windows desktops.
Why does the toolbar need giant copy/paste buttons? Is any terminal user actually clicking buttons to copy and paste? The vertical space those buttons take up is enough room for at least 2 more lines of actual terminal output, which is important.
The UI is just such a mess.
For your complaint, have you thought about the fact that those buttons are very useful when running in a virtualized environment (which many people, including me, frequently do)? It saves you from having to fiddle around with matching the key combinations for copy/paste you are used to on your host.
Plus, using KDE in general does not mean you have to use all it's apps. I personally use Tilix instead of Konsole most times. Just like most would probably prefer to use Firefox or some other browser instead of Konqueror.
By default everything is so big that even a gorilla could hit it with a fist.
Not that my eyesight is the best at this age, but I still like to keep my screen real estate to the actual content instead of MASSIVE buttons.
Having spent a long time on i3wm, I learned a lot about how to build your own DE effectively. These days I'm on KDE but definitely don't just assume that I want to use the kTool for everything, I've brought a lot of things from my i3wm days with me.
It's still, to this day, full of growing-pains-bugs, so every time a die from a thousand papercuts. I use NVIDIA+Wayland though and a lot of issues stem from that. Still, GNOME behaves better for me
As a side note, getting to wobbly windows has become a milestone of a Gentoo installation for me now - GPU driver has to be functioning for compositing, so by that point the system is largely functional. Feels like a rewarding treat at the end - it's a trivial graphical task on any modern hardware but it still feels like a fun flex after growing up with Pentium 4-esque workstations that couldn't handle KDE at all.
My other gripes this time around also include:
1. Inability to make my secondary monitor static, while the main one gets to switch between virtual desktops, which is my preferred way of working 2. I couldn't find a good screenshot tool that would be able to capture rectangular sections of the screen on Wayland (AND worked with scaling), besides the built-in one, and I hated the built-in one because it insisted on opening its own window every time and I couldn't find a way to make it just silently take a screenshot and put it in the buffer. 3. Probably something else
When AI gets to a point where I can just have it fork Gnome and make the changes I want to it without a large effort from me, it will be a momentous occasion :-)
Whereas I feel like KDE has an interface cloned from Windows, which is a traumatic experience.
I like Gnome. And I like that they didn't do a dock.
I don't need a list of all my running apps in icon form, which makes the KDE bar redundant.
If Microsoft would care they have all the penguin tools,
https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-sphere/product-overv...
What sucks in Windows is that you have multiple layers of old configuration editors none of which allow you to configure everything, want to change Network settings? There are literally 10 different places to do that and some haven't changed since Windows 98.
MacOS has this things where stuff you should be able to configure isn't or at least you can't rely on it being configurable next time. Just running a binary can be a challenge of remembering which obscure key you need to hold down so your OS treats you like a big boy. Every software update removes icons from my dock and I have to pray my audio interface still works (or roll back, which is a pain in the..)
The thing Windows and MacOS got going for them is that there is a lot more softeare for them, but since the enshittification-wave you can't really trust that something that works today, will work in a year.
KDE Plasma on the other hand just gets better, everything is configurable, the network settings alone put any other OS to shame easily. All the rest just seems to work, the desktop environment never once got into my way and when it did I could change it into not doing that ever again.
PS Thunderbird also uses quite a lot of JavaScript. The calendar WebDAV sync is JS-based.
Yes, this was a primary reason[1].
KDE took a different approach, balancing power user needs vs. average user needs. That's where I wound up after I reached the point where maintaining a 2,000 line .fvwmrc was no longer appealing.
My conclusion was that there is no "one-size-fits-all" desktop. Fortunately a good chunk of formerly duplicated functionality has been moved outside of GNOME and KDE so I barely notice when I'm running a GNOME program on KDE these days.
I used to like Mate and moved to Cinnamon but lately I just use XFCE and call it a day.
Yeah, the desktop roller coaster is fun for a year or two, but eventually you get tired of constantly being jerked around for no reason so you switch to XFCE and everything just works and stays the same for decades. The PC desktop is a solved problem, and XFCE is the solution.
I moved to XFCE soon after and it's great. I found a random plugin with last commit 7 years ago and it works Just Fine today. I set up my desktop 3y ago and it works the exact same way today. I know all the screens I use by heart. It's great.
Although I must say, I'm a sucker for animations and background blur and wobbly windows especially. Loved KDE for that.
I wish I could have XFCE's stability + animations. Ah well.
You are the second person I see adding this qualifier. In other words, it isn't all that great until modified.
I get that you are also referencing other overall design paradigm. But the fact that such a, to so many people, essential piece is missing after so many years is just a bit odd to me.
Granted, Gnome has improved over the years but there was a lot more missing that took a long time to get fixed and there is still a bunch of stuff that I think is user hostile. It is one thing to be opinionated about UI and UX, it is a whole other thing to look like you are actively fighting large parts of your user base.
If we are talking about historical examples (since then mostly "fixed"):
- No Minimize or Maximize Buttons out of the box. Early Gnome 3 versions only had a close button. To get the minimize and maximize buttons back, you had to use the third party Gnome tweak tool. Apparantly we all needed to get on the tiling or workspaces train.
- No option for a visible taskbar of any kind. Not even a clear dock with running applications, you had to actively enter the activies overview to switch windows.
- No ability to place icons on the desktop, at all. No files, no shortcuts. It was just there to have a pretty background.
- Dropping support for any sort of system tray (notifications area) leaving no place for background apps like messaging clients, sync tools, etc.
- The "where heck is my power off button?!" enigma, the system menu didn't have a power off button unless you knew to old the alt key.
Then if we are talking about stuff that I think is still broken:
- The hate for visible menus where every gnome app has a hamburger menu that is impossible to turn off in the native Gnome apps and as far as I know also doesn't really have a work around.
- While great for customizing things, the fact that extensions are seen as essential is also problematic to me. Extensions can, and will, break with newer Gnome versions. This in turn leads to a less stable experience.
- Nautilus is just a poor mans file manager as far as I am concerned.
If I could help it I wouldn't use Gnome. But I can't escape it entirely due to work related shenigans.
Despite my love for Gnome (and preference for over all others), there have definitely been frustrations over the years at design decisions and developer attitudes (lots of "I know better" and "you're using it wrong" which sometimes has it's place and within reason can be healthy, but in many cases I think was uncalled for). Still though, I think what the Gnome team has built is incredible
I spent a happy hour drawing 'workflow diagrams' based on my interactions with the UI doing ordinary stuff. As might be expected most of the time I was in the 'desktop view' i.e. interacting with windows in one or more spaces. Only a small % of time was spent in either of the overviews (activities and applications, now relegated to an icon on the Dash).
Can you isolate what it is about Gnome 3/4 that you like more than (say) a traditional bottom bar DE like xfce?
(+)Looking at Endless OS. They use Gnome DE but with some modifications that I was trying to pin down the logic of. Main one is a persistent Dash that auto-hides.
It definitely did feel like they were getting ready for mobile/tablets when they designed and released Gnome 3, but I felt they did (and do) a great job at making a fantastic desktop and mobile interface. I was a vocal advocate at the time basically saying, "Yes let's consider how it will work on mobile, but we can't compromise the desktop experience in pursuit of it." I do think they went a little too far on minimalism (for example, the lack of system tray to this day still irks me, and although I don't like to install extensions, that one is a must), but they did make a beautiful desktop that functioned very well for desktop/laptop use. The keyboard-driven nature makes it a joy for me, and the toolbar and hot corner make it very usable for a mouse-driven user. Even plain Gnome 3 is plenty usable, and among non-technical family members who I've installed Linux for, they generally love it and it's simplicity. For more power users, extensions are a thing (though I would agree the dev landscape for them is awful and it's in part because of the Gnome team's decisions).
I would love to see them build in a system tray, and try to make the APIs more stable from release to release so extensions aren't on a constant treadmill of breakage.
We lost so much functionality in the gnome 3 transition, and they didn’t even succeed at touch.
Browser based video players work well with touch so the hardware is fine.
You won't get this landscape of diversity and customization if you just iterated on GNOME 2.
The GNOME developers have signaled over and over again that they're unwilling to provide stable APIs for UI customization. Being a developer myself, I can see why it's a burden, but the current situation is that it's being done anyway through unofficial extensions and users are left to deal with the random breakage.
Signed, former contributor to Gktmm during the GNOME 1.0 days.
Recently the list shrank, but many problems still exist. https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...
Linux is Not Necessarily an Operating System -> no but we have distros that are.
QA/QC, Bugs and Regressions
Lack of General Software and Games -> just has different software, and de have wine/proton but fair ms office and adobe comes to mind.
Poor File and Folder Sharing Situation on the Local Network -> really not an issue, we have smb ftp ntfs... But maybe a skillissue.
Lack of Funding - > not really, ms for example funds a lot og linux dev.
Hardware Support and Compatibility -> At least better than MacOS
.... I have been mucking around with Windows lately, and two things that caught me off-guard was the difference in file sharing and remote desktop between the two platforms. Unix and, by extension, Linux grew up in networked environments. I was really expecting it to be better than Windows.
Consider NFS. It's plenty fast, in the blows the socks off of SMB sense. It mounts as a regular file system, so it gets along with every Unix application. Is it appropriate outside of a local network? Nope. About the only way access control will work properly is to centralize account management, either on a server or by manually matching up the UID/GID on each system. Not only is that more work, but I really have to wonder about the security implications of that. Samba is also a pain to setup on Linux, at least if you're not running one of the big desktop environments. Protocols like FTP aren't really meant for file or folder sharing. I suppose you can wrap them up as a FUSE file system. Otherwise you aren't going to be accessing files from applications remotely, unless they built in support for those protocols.
The thing that really blew my mind though was Remote Desktop. Click a checkbox to enable it on Windows (Professional), select any users who you want to have access, head over to another computer, and log in with your account. Video works. Audio works. It isn't doing anything funky, like VNC, where the gate-keeping is managed by a single password.
Don't get me wrong. I'm firmly in the camp that most of the weaknesses (and lack of strengths) that people see in either Linux or Windows is mostly about familiarity. Having used Linux almost exclusively for a quarter century, I can certainly attest to that. I can count the strengths of Windows on the fingers of one hand (IMHO) and using it is a battle to maintain my sanity.
I also don't see a lot of the issues people cite, such as local file sharing (or remote desktop), as being something that affects most users. For personal use, most people have shifted to online services. For large institutions, there are professionals to manage the quirks of either operating system. That pretty much leaves small businesses and enthusiasts. Other issues are truly issues, but they are impossible to resolve without throwing away the advantages of Linux (like the claims of there being too many distributions).
For remote access I think ssh -X works? Not sure it will work with Wayland, but I am not a fan of that anyways.
`ssh -X` will work for some X applications. Heck, if you're connections are between two computers on a LAN and you don't care much about security, you can just make sure `DISPLAY` is set and open up X with "xhosts +". Tunnelling through `ssh` is useful when you're going across a public network, trying to get into a private network (heck, I've used ssh tunnelling for Remote Desktop between Windows machines in this case), or need a secure connection for any number of other reasons. A couple of caveats though, not all X applications will work this way and you have to redirect audio yourself. This would actually be my preferred approach since it involves displaying an application remotely, rather than an entire session. That said, there are too many caveats these days. Thirty years ago though, it was great!
On the Windows side of things, you can run into situations where you have really old specialized devices where the manufacturer is long gone, so the driver downloads don't exist anymore.
Also no garantuees that there isnt bugs in windows drivers. Good luck reporting bugs to same level
Including distributions killing drivers, because "no one uses them".
You mean fixing bugs ? No way. It is boring as hell. /s