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Comment by dgxyz | Hacker News Reader

It's bad when stock Gnome is better. That's where I am now.

Switched to KDE Plasma last month and very pleased I can have square-corner windows again.

Corners are great aren't they! :)

I had a hard time with Gnome but now I got used to it and it's amazing for me. I just can't believe they still haven't implemented scrolling speed setting...

Gnome had a scroll speed setting but it broke and disappeared somewhere around the switch to Wayland without getting replaced.

Gnome says libinput should deal with scroll speed. Libinput says GTK+ should deal with it. Patches have been lying around for both but neither has gained any traction.

I like Gnome's DE in general but this issue showcases the rough edges of open source collaboration the Gnome project is infamous for.

Even KWin's (original?) implementation of the feature wasn't great and caused issues with applications, apparently: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/4672#not... Broken as though it might be, at least they're trying something, which I appreciate more as an end user than the complete lack of scroll settings.

KDE plasma is the best DE that exists right now (once you configure it to mimic gnome 2).

Gnome 1 had the best design of all the Gnome versions.

> once you configure it to mimic gnome 2

Why is it better than Gnome 2 then? This is what I prefer (it's called Mate now).

I was a Mate user for ages. It's great. Unfortunately, the lack of development is starting to show. For example, no fractional scaling for 4k monitors.

I've configured KDE Plasma to look almost identical to Mate (the defaults are similar to Windows, nice, but I prefer the Mate layout):

- top panel / bottom panel

- desktop switcher bottom right

- task bar on bottom

- desktop button bottom left

- clock top right

- app indicators top right

- app icon launchers on top bar

- app menu top left

It's not just layout, either. Gnome can be configured to do much of this, but it just feels terrible. Task bars can't be dragged to re-order. Desktop switchers just have numbers instead of contents. Animations are slow and annoying. Etc. Etc.

> For example, no fractional scaling for 4k monitors.

I don't have a 4K monitor, but what does `xrandr --output HDMI1 --scale 0.8x0.8` do? I have a 1024x768 monitor and do to all the useless whitespace in modern programs, I scale into the opposite direction.

But I agree Gnome lost the plot completely, and sadly Gtk too. Which is a pity, because I prefer GTK+ to Qt, but they deprecated so much useful Widgets and the alternative given is 'just don't do that'.

You can use xrandr to scale the desktop, but it's not the same thing.

You can render at 2x in Mate, and then scale it down slightly (ie 1.25x1.25) with xrandr, but taking a large image and scaling it down using a cubic filter won't look as sharp as real fractional scaling.

The command you gave is upscaling, which will be worse than 2x + downscaling.

Real fractional scaling scales the sizes of elements before rendering. This results in the sharpest image and there is no resizing/filtering in the loop.

Then I don't understand how this actually works. Doesn't this require support by the underlying UI kit? Because after the UI kit, there will already be pixels and scaling that will always be blury.

Yes, it needs to be supported by the UI kit. That's why GTK needs to support this, not just Gnome. Gnome uses GTK4, which supports this. Mate uses GTK3, which does not.

KDE Plasma uses QT6, which also supports this.

So applications using e.g. Motif or some custom UI toolkit have completely wrong sizes then?

> Gnome uses GTK4, which supports this. Mate uses GTK3, which does not.

Damn. I tend to build against an older GTK3 version, because GTK deprecated so much good stuff, but that means my programs won't work correctly for that. I need to look whether it's easy to backport this.

I'm not sure about GTK3. But I know that KDE plasma has a setting for legacy X11 applications (I think all this fractional scaling stuff requires wayland). It can render them as-is or scale them up (bitmap scaling).

I love gnome, at least how it's implemented by recent Fedoras. Whenever I go back to Mac I wonder why spotlight and mission control are two different functions

Spotlight and Mission Control (and the dock) being separate is good, and them being tied together on Gnome is horrible.

I just want to type which app to launch or do some quick math or search for something, I don't need my windows and UI to fly in 14 different directions and then back again every time I need to do those things. Ditto for just want to lazily do something on my dock with the mouse. It's seriously one of the most ill designed off-putting UX things about Gnome.

Agreed. Even Windows has some nice stuff when it comes to windows management IMHO. Every time I end up on macOS I miss the various Windows/GNOME behaviours e.g. window snapping to the right/left half, pressing the Win key to see all open apps, maximise buttons that doesn't put the whole app into full screen mode, etc.

macOS gained window snapping last year, and you can bind some keyboard shortcut to the “exposé” view (which is triggered by a trackpad gesture by default)

full screen is still its own thing as you mention, though

The key binding for Exposé is just F3 on most keyboards!

I agree that macOS has become worse, however your examples don't really count:

Window snapping was implemented some time ago: https://www.macrumors.com/2024/06/12/macos-sequoia-window-ti...

Instead of win key, you can press F3, or just set a hotkey that works for you in the System Preferences

Instead of clicking the red maximize button, you can double-click the window header / title. This will use an algorithm to try to resize the window to the best size for its content.

You can also hold ALT and press the green button to mazimze.

The app still gets to decide though! Most programs do go full size with an alt+green click, but not all. A column-style Finder window, for example, seems to go taller but no wider.

Option-click green button does window maximise (normal click does full-screen)

Technically it’s zoom, and how it functions is dependent on the app. In Finder it used to resize the window to a size that contained all the icons. Clicking it again would revert the window size.

Ah I wish I knew that, thanks for the tip!

Maximize is green. (Any chance you might be color blind?)

Green is “Zoom window to fit content”, not Maximize.

That changed many OS versions ago.

Gnome has the same issue, it's just less noticeable because the radius of the round corners is smaller. The draggable area of a window is 90% their drop shadow.

Except when it's a Qt application, which has no drop shadows because client-side decorations shenanigans.

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