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Can’t stress enough how much I hate this type of article. Endless nitpicking without realizing that this isn’t some big budget project by a bunch of full time paid staff. It’s largely a volunteer project because Linux desktop environments aren’t part of most companies’ money making in the way server software and embedded devices are.
Most of the complaints are obtuse or taking something that KDE has and complaining that GNOME doesn’t have it. None of this stuff helps anyone. At the very least it could be framed as a proposal for changes in the GNOME issue tracker or forum. But these polemics against GNOME are a dime a dozen.
Especially annoying was the complaint about GNOME being too “mobile-first” which is hilarious because GNOME IS USED ON MOBILE DEVICES. You can load postmarketOS on a hundred different devices with GNOME and use GNOME apps and they just work. It’s so stupid to be against writing software for mobile devices in 2025. Desktop operating systems are less relevant than they’ve ever been. How many “native” apps does KDE have compared to GNOME? For desktop and mobile? Flathub has dozens or hundreds of simple applications that work on mobile devices and desktops thanks to GTK4 and libadwaita. And developers don’t have to write any special code to make them work on desktops, phones, tablets, 2-in-1s, etcetera. The UI elements just adapt automatically. And they almost automatically get new features implemented in GTK and libadwaita.
You shouldn’t use that word.
ok I edited it
Thanks.
Looking deeper I found that Gnome was composed of so many dreadful decisions
That’s how I feel about KDE.
Using KDE has made me realize how distracting feature creep can be and has made me infinitely grateful for GNOME’s hostility to shipping unfinished or band-aid fixes (though it does have its drawbacks).
KDE will always have more mass appeal just because of current computing culture (and that’s a good thing, we need someone to take the fall for Windows and Mac refugees) but imo GNOME’s design fundamentals is so rock solid and nice to use.
I originally started using Gnome because it looked different from Windows. When they went to Gnome shell, I loved it even more. Nothing cluttering the desktop - just hit super and start typing or select off the pinned dock list. It worked great because I’m 20 years into Linux and I’m used to starting programs from terminal.
10,000 year GNOME imperium,
Death to KDE
But seriously if you don’t like it, install KDE. Shut up about GNOME, some of us like how it works more than a standard Windows interface. Why does every desktop have to work exactly the same?
This person should have their computer taken away from them lmao.
GNOME doesn’t have a minimize and maximize button because they’re not needed. If you want to hide a window in GNOME you either can physically hide it using the window context menu either in the app or through the shell or you can go into shell overview and throw it into another workspace.
Me “minimizing” an app on GNOME
It’s 2024, people expect apps to have little icons near the WiFi icon. Why is Gnome throwing out decades of people’s training and expectations? Wait, what’s that?
Computer Science has devolved into training people to accept private capital products as philosophy and disregard all other things. There is no system tray in GNOME because there is no accepted system tray protocol on GNU/Linux. Designing for background apps that run without a window open isn’t part of GNOME design and is part of the shitty slow proprietary OS interface that demands that all chromium junkware be open at all times to make your computer seem slow so you buy a new one.
Is this a fair comparison? No. Do I care? Yeah, obviously.
Summarizes this whole shitty blog post.
Here’s an evergreen quote from 2005 about the whole Gnome situation:
I don’t use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn’t do what I need it to do.
Please, just tell people to use KDE.
Linus
Here is a quote from 2005 (when GNOME 3 wasn’t even an entity) checkmate gnome liberals!!!
Also GNOME does have a minimize button, but you have to enable it. I use it. You can enable it using dconf/gsettings or let GNOME Tweaks/Refine do that for you
Underrated part of GNOME is that dconf is so easy to interface with compared to other bespoke configuration languages.
It’s so programmatic in all the right ways.
I didn’t even realize KDE doesn’t have a settings API like GNOME. I thought they shared that stuff.
But yeah the fact that settings have a schema, types, a storage backend, a DBus API, and a C API, make it really flexible and reliable. Like GNOME Tweaks and dconf Editor being able to configure the system from a Flatpak app that has some permissions holes punched in it.
Love to engage in Windows/MacOS apologia to make some tired KDE Plasma > Gnome blog post.
No UI will be perfect for everybody, and gnome certainly has its flaws, but I like it. It looks good, it’s fast on my computer, and it leaves behind the dumb windows style menu system.
Didn’t read, but I agree that gnome is bad.
Why do you think so?
I started writing about all the different things I don’t like about gnome but I realized that it’s veered wildly through several different user interface types since I’ve been around it and some of the stuff I was gonna bring up isn’t even currently part of the ui metaphor or even design philosophy.
Sure I dislike gnomes mobile ui model now, but what really bugs me is the absolutely hallucinogenic level of changes it’s been through. Even if I did like its current iteration, I had better not get attached, it’s likely to change so it can chase some new thing in a few years.
So not only does it piss me off now but learning to like it or changing my mind would just be setting me up for failure later.
Doing something so badly that even the people who like what you do will be negatively impacted is impressive though. Olympic level design failure.
KDE FOR LYFE BRUH
Ppl trash windows and then want the exact same thing on Linux
The author talks about how Windows 8 was a disaster and how Microsoft reversed course with Windows 10, but a lot of what they did in Windows 10 was cribbed straight from Gnome. Turning the Windows key into a search function where you can type the first two or three characters of an application and hit enter, that came from Gnome (which, in turn, was inspired directly by the tab-completion interface in modern Linux shells, and part of the reason they started calling it “Gnome Shell”). Microsoft completely reworked the way the “Start” menu works to accommodate this keyboard-driven workflow. Using the Windows key and up / left / right arrow keys to maximize windows or send them to the left / right half of the screen, that also came from Gnome.
Gnome / GTK have made some questionable design choices, but at the same time a lot of these touch-friendly modifications were being introduced, Gnome made a giant leap in terms of keyboard-driven interface which has been copied by its rivals. Not quite to the level you see in tiling window managers, but vastly superior to the status quo of “stacking” window managers of the time, including Windows and Mac OS.
KDE folks have it the worst with this. Calling KDE Plasma a windows clone makes me hurt so much because of how much they contributed to the entire field of computer science and how Windows had copied them as well.
Windows is the ripoff privatized version of KDE.
Made me think of “I dont care for Gob”
I currently use KDE as it provides some functionality that I need that is more difficult to access in gnome. But in general I prefer gnome, especially for people new to Linux, coming from Mac or for converting laptops into home servers.
My main criticism is that it seems tailor-made for MacBook users and needs to be hit with a hammer a few times to get the user experience correct for m+kb or ex-windows users.
My main complaint about Gnome is that extensions will often break or no longer work whenever Gnome gets updated. But to stoop to the level of Windows/MacOS apologia for a massively tl;dr KDE Plasma > Gnome rant?
Gnome is fine.
My main complaint about Gnome is that extensions will often break or no longer work whenever Gnome gets updated.
There’s a JSON file that controls this and most extensions just break because their authors don’t update that variable for the new version when they’re perfectly fine otherwise. Plasma 5->6 broke every script/extension but it’s never put on the spotlight because GNOME advertises desktop extensions far better than KDE because GNOME is so conservative with major changes.
I think we need another desktop environment with a silly name and even sillier logo. & do it right this time.
Someday I will be seized by the madness that tells me to write a DE, and I promise I will make it 100% must-have killer features that revolutionize the desktop experience, and it will be called “Buttholes”.
Its flagship OS will be fecOS (its a reskinned debian distro)
Seems kind of silly to complain about. I dislike Gnome too*, but I can use one of the 10,000 other choices of desktop environment, or still like 10 if I want to limit myself to ones popular enough to have official Ubuntu variants built around them. It’s not like there’s some vendor lock-in making me accept a DE I dislike because all my apps are stuck with it. This is Linux.
*Gnome 2 was awesome at the time though, and it took the world a long time to catch up.
What a silly article.
