Comment by reissbaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reissbaker | Hacker News Reader

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This generally isn't my experience with GNOME.

You have to install an extension to get a dock at all.

No, there's an auto-hiding dock built-in. Pressing the Super key acts like better version of Apple's Expose feature: it shows the windows you have open, auto-opens the dock, and focuses the application launcher search bar so you can just start typing and launch an app.

You had to install a system tray extension

I'm sure you needed to at some point, but (as you mention), that's no longer the case: it's built in by default.

clipboard manager

If you mean clipboard history... That's true. Although macOS doesn't have a built-in clipboard history viewer either, and I never particularly missed having one. There are plenty of GNOME extensions with clipboard history if you want one.

Generally speaking I like GNOME much more than KDE, since GNOME's gesture support is much better than KDE's. I also personally dislike Windows-style infinitely-nesting-menu taskbars, which is what KDE uses, whereas GNOME is more macOS-like (although it has its own, IMO slightly cleaner style... And of course, it's much more modifiable than macOS).

> No, there's an auto-hiding dock built-in. Pressing the Super key acts like better version of Apple's Expose feature: it shows the windows you have open, auto-opens the dock, and focuses the application launcher search bar so you can just start typing and launch an app.

So, not a Dock.

People don't want their whole desktop to fly everywhere and zoom out when they just want to quickly switch or launch an application with the mouse. They just want to mouse over the bottom of their screen and click.

Same for launching an application via keyboard / doing a calculation / finding an emoji. People just want something akin to Spotlight (think uLauncher on Linux). Something lightweight that pops over and allows them to quickly do the thing, without a lot of visual clutter happening and then happening again in reverse.

> People don't want their whole desktop to fly everywhere and zoom out when they just want to quickly switch or launch an application with the mouse. They just want to mouse over the bottom of their screen and click.

for switching between programs, gnome is designed around workspaces instead of stacking and covering windows so you aren't expected to fly into the expose view to switch apps you just swipe to the side to your other program (or scroll in the corner with the mouse, or press meta+alt+left or right).

For launching programs just press meta and type the first couple letters of it's name. This is exactly the same how I open software on windows, and imo it's quicker due to not taking my hands off the keyboard.

I think it's silly to look at a new desktop and be mad at it for not behaving exactly like other desktops. If you grew up using computers that behaved like gnome you'd likely be just as uncomfortable with a stacking based desktop like windows.

People don't want their whole desktop to fly everywhere and zoom out when they just want to quickly switch or launch an application with the mouse. They just want to mouse over the bottom of their screen and click.

I don't want to do that! And, I am in fact a person. I do not want to switch applications by clicking on things with my mouse at the bottom of the screen. I want to switch applications with keyboard shortcuts or with touch gestures, which GNOME has great support for; and both of those can open the dock too (although you can also alt-tab and skip the Expose-style feature).

Again, it's just a matter of preference and taste. My taste is much more strongly in GNOME's default direction than KDE's default direction.

> No, there's an auto-hiding dock built-in. Pressing the Super key acts like better version of Apple's Expose feature: it shows the windows you have open, auto-opens the dock, and focuses the application launcher search bar so you can just start typing and launch an app.

It either requires using a keyboard or moving your mouse to the opposite direction of where the dock appears.

bit unrelated, but the newest version of macOS (Tahoe) does now have a clipboard manager

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