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Comment by donmcronald | Hacker News Reader

One of my complaints with Gnome is that I can’t hand it to a normal person and let them use it because it’s not obvious how to use it. The entry point to everything looks like a horizontal scroll bar in the top left corner and basic actions take more clicks than Windows.

The biggest battle desktop Linux is losing is the one where a minority of devs are dictating their preferred compute paradigm to a majority of users that don’t agree it’s a good solution.

I can “fix” Gnome in about 2m with extensions, but that doesn’t help when a new user loads it up for the first time and is hit with the unintuitive ideology of some nerds.

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> The biggest battle desktop Linux is losing is the one where a minority of devs are dictating their preferred compute paradigm to a majority of users that don’t agree it’s a good solution.

Absolutely. A commercial product can succeed while maintaining an auteur's vision, so long as that vision largely aligns with users' needs. In contrast, open-source projects are often not viewed through a "product" lens, to their detriment.

When this happens in open source, we get clunky and idiosyncratic (though sometimes lovable) software like GNOME and GIMP. When it happens in the commercial world, we get projects like Megalopolis.

> I can’t hand it to a normal person and let them use it because it’s not obvious how to use it.

I'm not sure that means anything. Every time I have to help my kids or wife with a Windows problem, I'm perpetually plagued by how weird it is.

The only people who find Windows easy or obvious are already Windows users. And yes, the same can be said of Linux environments.

Gnome is way simpler to use than Windows. If you let grandma or a kid with no prior Desktop experience, I’m pretty sure they will find Gnome more intuitive. The problem is that it is too different for a Windows user, so the switching cost is high.

Intuition is based on prior exposure. What exposure do i need to understand GNOME?

For example, how am i supposed to discover how to maximize a window?

I very much doubt that they will, because Gnome heavily uses the obnoxious UI paradigm where controls are hidden away, and you need to perform "magic gestures" (like moving the mouse cursor into a corner) to even get them to show up.

I don't even understand why they thought it would be a good idea. On mobile there is at least the justification that it helps keep the valuable screen estate for "important things" (although anecdotally I've seen how much more my mother and grandmother both struggle with button-less iPhones because they can't remember the gestures). But on the desktop, even on laptops, it is a very weak argument.

Gnome is as simple as Windows 8.0. Maybe even less. We know the history about Windows 8.0.

Gnome made several decisions toat make it super complex for normal users. Windows have a taskbar. Mac have a dock. KDE have a taskbar.

And I really like Gnome design language, UI. But the UX is awful.

Using a computer take training. Look at a windows user switching to macOS. It's not intuitive for them either. GNOME is actually nice, even if it's less customizable than KDE.

MacOS has some really clunky stuff. I hate finder. I like Gnome once I add dash to dock, tray icons, and window manager tweaks. I’m just saying the defaults are a bad choice if they want adoption.

Totally agree. Dash To Dock + App Indicators seem like they should be part of Gnome. I end ups changing to the icons to Papirus as I prefer those. They make Gnome really nice to use.

I use GNOME without extensions. The default are fine by me.

But your use case is why GNOME have extensions. To alter the defaults and add stuff that they don't care about, but you do. In macOS, you have to basically reverse engineer and use private APIs.

Now if only GNOME didn't regularly break the more useful extensions...

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