To add another opinion. I love gnome 3, Its by far the nicest DE I have used on linux and what I would recommend to anyone to start with. I have used XFCE/Mate/Plasma/Unity and none of them worked as well. Its usually not even so much the design (although xfce does look very dated) but that they seem to have such little development resources that many parts of the DE are lagging software wise 5 to 10 years behind what they should.
XFCE is still in the process of upgrading to GTK3 when GTK4 is already out and they still have made no progress on migrating to wayland so its not a usable DE for a modern desktop experience.
Gnome just works and it just works very well. After using xcfe for a year I would go to report multiple bugs only to find they have already been reported years ago while on gnome I have only opened feature requests.
Gnome 3 was when they started taking over keybinds from common software on linux, so you had to hunt down the 3 or 4 places where they were configured to unbind them back for the user.
I just miss Menu bars. Which is why I use Mac OS now (thrown back to using Linux now for a few months until my new MacBook arrives). I used gnome since gnome 1.x and it apps like evince were totally cool and now they are just confusing and hard to use.
Want to print something? Hamburger menu and find the Print Symbol. Want to open a recently opened file? No submenu under „files“, you need to open a new window to find a selection. So much stuff one needs to learn ...
This is exactly my experience of Evince earlier this year when I attempted to upgrade. Some of the menus are on the left and some are on the right and why oh why does it not do what it used to do
FWIW I adore Gnome 3 too. I very recently switched to Linux from Windows 10 on my gaming PC (my last experience with Linux was with Mandrake a couple decades ago...), and of course I had to try every DE under the Sun. None quite works perfectly (for me) like Gnome 3 does. But that's the beauty of it: there's a choice for everyone!
Why does a user care that XFCE is on an old version of GTK? I can see why that would frustrate developers, but I don't see how that surfaces to users as a usability issue.
GTK2 fails in a lot of ways. The main one that bothers me is when I open a GTK2 app, it picks the DPI scale of one of my monitors so when I drag it over, instead of resizing to the new dpi scale, it will either become massive or tiny.
Gnome with wayland supports it but every time you start an xwayland app you notice issues. Native wayland/gtk3 apps have been flawless for me. Things just snap to the new scale when you drag them across.
OK, but I'd still like to know whether a firefox-wayland window will flawlessly snap to the new scaling factor when you drag it to another monitor whose scaling factor is different from the original monitor.
(Same question for Electron apps, particularly VS Code.)
This doesn't make sense to me. Surely scaling the window according to the settings that apply to the monitor it's on is a job for the window manager, and not a job for the software running inside the window?
If the window manager were to upscale a window, you would get the typical artifacting, such as blurriness, from the upscaling. The application toolkit is the best place to do scaling, as it knows how to render text etc.
This is how it works on Windows as well; if the application reports it correctly supports scaling, Windows will let the application handle scaling (otherwise Windows will do it for the application, with the usual caveats).
>if the application reports it correctly supports scaling, Windows will let the application handle scaling
In contrast, unless I am severely mistaken, MacOS has the application render the window normally, then applies a scaling algorithm to the output when the user has set a scaling factor (which on a Mac is set usually through System Preferences > Display) that is not an integer. (I.e., has set fractional scaling.)
I much prefer how Windows and Wayland do it. (When I use Windows, I have the luxury of free choice in the apps I use: I spend .99 of my time in VS Code, Google Chrome and a few recently-written Microsoft-provided apps like Settings. A Windows user who needs old apps or apps written by less sophisticated developers might have a much worse experience.)
In fact, I am leaving MacOS after 11 years largely because of its relatively bad implementation of fractional scaling. I find it too blurry. (If my lifestyle required the use of a laptop, I might have stuck with Apple.) But I am unusual in ways that probably make a good implementation of fractional scaling much more valuable to me that it would be to the average user.
I ran into a bug with GTK2 stalling out with some malformed DBUS messages (symptom: your application takes an additional 20 seconds to start). So I made a sample app that demonstrated the problem, ran some system traces, tried to engage the GTK developer community and only got an "eww, gross, not touching that".
It's pretty clear that GTK2 has been left out to bit rot at this point and it's going to completely collapse at some point. Only option is to update your old apps.
Thanks for the link, I had not found that myself and the workaround suggested (installing the Unity integration module for GTK) worked! It generates a spurious error message about Unity not being on the machine, but that's way less annoying than a 25 second pause on startup.
I also like GNOME, but only with a couple of extensions installed. It totally blows my mind that the way Dash to Dock works is not the default behavior.
Are they perhaps scared of patents? The whole UI tries hard to be not like Windows or Mac OS, for IMHO little user benefit.
I have tried to use Gnome in the past, seeking an easier life, but the multiscreen support was just not good enough. I use i3 instead.
No, they just think the current UI is better, and they're doubling down on that. E.g. in the next version, the app/workspace picker will be shown after login, and not the desktop.
At least for the dash to dock behavior, the Gnome designers opted against a permanent dock to minimise "distractions" and allow one to "focus on the task at hand". This language pervades much of the literature explaining Gnome's design. See for example https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/shell-introdu...
Which is nonsense, because the default behavior is not a permanent dock, it is a hidden dock that appears on mouseover. And it is tuned perfectly IMO, it never comes up by accident and always comes up when I intended to do so.
I agree with the rationale about not having a visible dock, the extra space and lack of distraction is great. But Dash to Dock doesn't harm that goal whatsoever IMO.
> To add another opinion. I love gnome 3, Its by far the nicest DE I have used on linux and what I would recommend to anyone to start with. I have used XFCE/Mate/Plasma/Unity and none of them worked as well.
Sure, XFCE doesn't work as well as Gnome 2. But you can't use Gnome 2 anymore. XFCE is way better than Gnome 3! (At least, as of the time Gnome put out version 3.)
And yeah, this indicates a very serious problem on the part of Gnome.
I've also used a couple of DEs. Unity aside, GNOME is bold enough to stick out and do something different. The GTK human interface guidelines result in apps that are something different (also usable!) and the activities view is a genuinely awesome approach to alt+tab.
KDE is just windows and a bunch of panels. It's expertly put together, but there's really nothing more to it than that. Rainmeter can do much the same that it can on Windows.
I don't understand how this can be argued to be a point in gnome's favor. Gnome's HIG is only followed by the 5 or 6 core apps that ship with it. The rest of my apps do their own thing (yes, even gtk-based ones).
From my personal perspective as someone who uses both KDE and Gnome daily, both are just windows and a bunch of panels. What gives KDE an edge is that it doesn't try to force its weird conventions on me.
Only in the default config... To be nice to Windows expats.
> It's expertly put together, but there's really nothing more to it than that.
It's ultimately configurable! So it can be anything you want. (Plasma can "simulate" any DE with the right config).
Additionally modern KDE/Plasma is more lightweight than "anything GTK". (This may sound strange to the older people but things changed over the last years).
You’re being downvoted but I don’t see a clear reason for it. The parent gave their opinion, you give your opinion, it’s all a fair discussion. I suspect you’re getting downvoted just because people don’t agree with you.
XFCE is still in the process of upgrading to GTK3 when GTK4 is already out and they still have made no progress on migrating to wayland so its not a usable DE for a modern desktop experience.
What's wrong with GTK3? And "modern desktop experience" just reads like meaningless marketing fluff.
There is nothing wrong with GTK3. Clearly we have been using it for a long time just fine. I mention it because gtk3 came out in 2011. Which means it took the xfce team 9 years to perform a migration which still isn't complete yet.
Now I don't want to shit on the work of the xfce team because they work on this on their free time and provide us alternative options and ask nothing in return, but its a data point showing why one would preference Gnome over XFCE. The Gnome team has a lot of resources behind it to just get things done and push new technology out faster than the rest.
The problem is that to get the new features you have to accept a new way of working. One that is worse than the classic MacOS or Windows 2000 was. Another reason many folks are in no hurry.
XFCE is still in the process of upgrading to GTK3 when GTK4 is already out and they still have made no progress on migrating to wayland so its not a usable DE for a modern desktop experience.
Gnome just works and it just works very well. After using xcfe for a year I would go to report multiple bugs only to find they have already been reported years ago while on gnome I have only opened feature requests.