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Gnome 3 went the wrong way, pushing for apple aesthetics without apple functionality.

I mean on apple, I can launch a console and through every upgrade still get the "same" console back, usually with some scrollback for context. That was lost entirely after gnome 2. I mean that's a "minor" thing but as a developer that cost me wanting to do any further development, which I'd been working on getting into. And then there was needing to run master versions of everything and not distribution versions, which made things amazingly disruptive to work on a computer that also had to do other tasks (eg : job work). This has since gotten reachable if you have really giant hard drives, but that's budget too... anyway the walls were so high then I walked away, and nothing has suggested they've gotten any easier or any more worth climbing.

Rule 1 for any UI design team is don't copy Apple. (or if you do, justify it. "because Apple" isn't good enough. Even Apple isn't sticking to this).




For all this talk about the Mac-ification of GNOME, as a primarily Mac user I absolutely cannot stand Gnome 3. There is nothing Mac-like about it, it is just bland, weird, and terrible. MacOS does not force you to use the Launchpad, for example. The menu bar is still here. The Dock works as it always had. To me one of the worst developments of the Mac UI recently is the disappearance of title bars, but this was a thing in Gnome long before it caught on at Apple.

A decently configured KDE or XFCE is much better, and much closer to how a Mac works.


The main issue with Linux desktops is that they can only provide part of the experience, because they don't control the whole stack, so there is no "decently configured" out of the box, neither for users nor for desktop developers.

Hence why the two most successful OS based on Linux are using it as an implementation detail for a Web runtime, and a Java/Kotlin runtime, alongside standard ISO C/C++, POSIX subset and some specific OS frameworks.

On GNU/Linux the moment someone tries to impose such vertical stacks, a fork lies waiting.


That’s very true. When you use a decent distro, the main apps are themed properly and somewhat cohesive. But the illusion falls apart the moment you wander a bit from mainstream applications. Having consistent themes and behaviours for Qt, GTK 3, and GTK 2 (so, the common denominator, which is the bare minimum but not many fancy features) only gets you partly there.

So, by “properly configured” I meant “with settings tweaked over a couple of years until the apps I care about behave sensibly”.

What I like with macOS is that the easy path produces the most consistent UI across the platform. It does not prevent stupid developers from reimplementing everything (hello, non-standard text fields in Adobe software, non-standard notifications in battle.net, and overall appalling window themes). But at least they have to go out of their way to do it, and applications from developers who care are great for not much effort on their part.




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