GNOME has kind of always been on the opposite end of the configurability spectrum from KDE, IME.
But also I'm not super clear on how libinput fits into the picture, I think there used to be some Synaptics-specific integration in certain places that I never went back to, to confirm the differences (switched to libinput several years before, and I've completely forgotten since what I was trying to solve back then).
Anyway, I ended up writing a mostly-personal-anecdote below, that would likely not help, so you can probably skip it (if you do want to try anything, KUbuntu and https://neon.kde.org are both on top of Ubuntu, and there's other distros, but I've not kept up with any distro I might recommend)
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I tried Ubuntu (w/ the GNOME default) once (back in KDE 4 times IIRC) and the lack of almost any flexibility felt like I was stuck in a sandbox (a literal one, like from when we were kids, not that it's easy to remember that far back).
The only other time I felt like that was when a friend gave me their old iPhone (6 IIRC?) "to see what it's like" and I had to give up trying it out because both the OS, and the few apps I could find (for its max supported iOS version), had random chunks of features missing (tbh I should've jailbroken it, then it'd just be one more piece of hardware I have no immediate use for - but I digress)
KDE is far from perfect (switched to Wayland recently, and been tracking a few QoL leaps in the next couple releases), but I can at least try to tweak it - same goes for using NixOS or ZFS tbh (not going to even defend those, but I have done both Gentoo-like shenanigans, and randomly RAIDed a dual-SSD laptop, respectively, quite painlessly despite not preparing for it from the start, and the weirdness budget is personally paid for a thousandfold).
Meanwhile I run into e.g. GNOME apps using libadwaita nowadays needing environment variables (that appear deprecated?) to apply the KDE gtk integration theme so they don't stick out like a desaturated winamp skin.
I've never felt like "power user" applied well to myself, like I'm not doing the equivalent of weight-lifting for computers, never want to be doing sysadmin if I can avoid it, I just want to have enough control to make things seamlessly neat for myself.
Opinionated defaults are great in the same way you'd set up a house for a marketing reel, but if I actually buy it, why would I have to deal with a landlord telling me I can't paint the walls or move/replace some furniture to maximize my comfort?
The "personal" in "personal computing" is supposed to be the same as the one in "personal property", and so I'd have similar expectations of "can screw with it without asking for permision" for both (modulo real estate being seen as an investment, and building codes, etc. - should've picked a smaller example than a house, oh well).
To stretch the house analogy further, just like I have leased (some corporation's) private property as office spaces, I would be fine to doing the same (also for business reasons) with e.g. a cloud platform (most likely through GHA, whenever they announce the paid tiers) - tho be fair to everyone, this applies far more to walled gardens than opensource software like GNOME.
Also, to be clear about the "sandbox" thing: sandboxes (and/or ideally more objcap systems) are great, and I think that the XDG Portal work is incredible for what it allows: the apps are getting sandboxed, the user getting more power over them.
Even without Flatpak (which I keep meaning to try out), I was happy to see e.g. the KDE Wayland screenshare dialog outright has an option for "create virtual screen" (which can further be configured in the KDE settings, and e.g. partially overlapped with a physical monitor, etc.).
If the app was in charge, they would barely enumerate some of the windows correctly, let alone provide new virtual screens.
So what are you using or recommending? Recently switched to kubuntu from gnome-ubuntu, and while some pain points have gone away (lack of global menu can partially be kindof mitigated, didn't have to fiddle with touch acceleration like on 20.04), I'm not impressed: middle-click gets in the way a lot and can't be switched off, power mgmt tray is lagging badly behind power events, weird dock preview and not-so-great app switching, somewhat fiddly touch targeting at times, FF crashing, updates not smooth, insists on chromium as default browser, point-/tasteless Windows-y sounds and looks, ...
All the while there are ZERO GUI apps or other capabilities I'm using that I didn't already use 15 or 20 years ago.
Eying a return to Mac OS which at least doesn't feel like you're treated as guinea pig by dicks with attitudes. Linux notebooks seem barely good enough for uninspired enterprise work on bloated IDEs and Docker/other container crap only there because said dicks couldn't agree on a set of (really old) lib versions and gui toolkits.
> middle-click gets in the way a lot and can't be switched off,
What do you mean by this? What happens when you middle click, that you don't want or expect to happen?
> not-so-great app switching
How do you like your app switching? I agree that the default isn't great, but in System Settings you can tweak it beyond all reason. I can help if you tell me what you want.
> FF crashing
I haven't had that happen. What addons do you have in Firefox?
> insists on chromium as default browser
Again, System Settings. Or, from within the Firefox settings, there might be a way to set it as default.
> apps or other capabilities I'm using that I didn't already use 15 or 20 years ago
What apps or capabilities do you feel are missing?
Half of the time I want to press right-click or even left-click on the touch pad it actually registers as middle-click which is very annoying as it means a window gets closed rather than focussed; don't want middle-click at all. Undesired Middle-click-paste also happens a lot.
When I click a link from Thunderbird (weirdly as it sounds when Thunderbird is a Mozilla app) it opens chromium; dialog to set FF as default doesn't change this.
I need to retest and maybe reconfigure app switching from a (vertical) dock as you say; just doesn't feel fluent as it is.
Occasional FF crashing should probably be addressed at Moz. Maybe it's because FF on gnome gets more usage and testing. Btw, does SuSE (or Manjaro) still have a global-menu patch for FF because kubuntu (understandably) doesn't maintain such patches?
I don't use KDE or Wayland - I use awesome-wm with X11. I don't get a lot of Firefox crashes but one odd behavior I have noticed is that sometimes, after closing all Firefox windows, the firefox process continues to run (unresponding) in the background.
When this occurs, clicking links results in no browser windows opening. At this point I run `killall -9 firefox` and oddly, in that very moment, the link I clicked will open up in Chromium.
I guess I can remap middle-click to left-click using the wayland equivalent of xinput from a shell script or something. The apparent-FF-crash story described by johnmaguire and eddyb sounds very much like another thing I believe is happening on my notebook. Between these fuckups and the general alienation going on in Linux land (wayland, snaps/flatpack, systemd) I've got to say I'm not enthusiastic to go through those chores and teething probs just to get the same-old gui apps like Inkscape and GIMP (plus FF/Thunderbird) running, so right now I'm leaning to go back to Mac OS more than ever (used Mac OS on and off from 2003 to 2016).
How much shm is enough depends on both the browser's rendering engine and the display engine, but apparently 1.5GB shm use isn't out of the ordinary. You won't find any references to shared memory (or even general out of memory messages) if Firefox crashes in this way, so it's just another thing to keep an eye on.
I am using KDE (aka Plasma5) in Wayland mode, on NixOS unstable.
I would not recommend NixOS, just like I mentioned, and I didn't really want to get into the weeds of why, but while Nix is something that more people should try out if they're already familiar with unfortunate asymmetries (e.g. "git's data model is really nice" vs "git's CLI has sharp edges and some workflows the data model implies are entirely unserviced") and/or like to play around with experimental unpolished software, I would maybe avoid it until they actually come up with a "more declarative"/"less computational" flavor for 99% of usecases.
I've used openSUSE in the past, and while YaST2 might be less relevant now, it was shocking how much similar things were outright lacking back then (a lot of this was pre-NetworkManager to be quite fair).
A lot of people like Arch, and if Debian/Ubuntu package management doesn't get in the way I suppose KDE Neon might be nice?
(I keep forgetting KDE's Discover exists, it might also help with not dealing with package management directly)
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> FF crashing
Quite ironically, if it is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1743144 that's technically a gtk limitation (not only does it lead to the FF main thread having to poll gtk often enough to keep the Wayland connection from breaking, but when it does break it calls `_exit` so Firefox can't even do crash reporting, and they refused a patch to address this), and it can also happen for Chrome (which also uses Wayland through gtk AIUI).
If you want to check if it is the case, you can look in the logs (e.g. through `journalctl -o with-unit -r`) for "error in client communication".
> middle-click gets in the way a lot and can't be switched off
Are you talking about the feature controlled by System Settings -> Input Devices -> Mouse -> "Press left and right buttons for middle-click"?
(that is, if you intentionally press both buttons, does it trigger middle-click?)
AFAIK that's off by default, but I am on a different distro and running KDE/Plasma 5.25.4 and maybe it changed at some point, or maybe it's specific to touchpads? (which I sadly can't test because I only have an older Nvidia laptop, that can't use the Wayland-compatible drivers, or rather I would have to switch to nouveau first and deal with that etc.)
> insists on chromium as default browser
I've had issues with this in the past, some apps provide their own configuration instead of going through XDG mechanisms, or at least have suboptimal defaults.
I would check the settings of the apps which cause chromium to start, and maybe play around with Flatpak/forcing the use of XDG Portal, but that might be too much to ask.
> GNOME has kind of always been on the opposite end of the configurability spectrum from KDE, IME.
which gets weird, when they push on you things like:
- opening WiFi-portals in whatever crap browser your distro ships with GTK. Executing random JS code in the process.
- make XWayland startup absolutely inconfigurable and hardcoded in C (or was it Vala) and for whatever reason MAKE IT LISTEN ON ABSTRACT SOCKETS (which no Xconfig anywhere else does)! (problem here: if any user-namespace container shares your network namespace and you do a naive xhost +SI:localuser:user - it works for any container, because abstract sockets are not stowed away in the filesystem).
At least the first issue I'd like to report, but don't know how and where...
But also I'm not super clear on how libinput fits into the picture, I think there used to be some Synaptics-specific integration in certain places that I never went back to, to confirm the differences (switched to libinput several years before, and I've completely forgotten since what I was trying to solve back then).
Anyway, I ended up writing a mostly-personal-anecdote below, that would likely not help, so you can probably skip it (if you do want to try anything, KUbuntu and https://neon.kde.org are both on top of Ubuntu, and there's other distros, but I've not kept up with any distro I might recommend)
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I tried Ubuntu (w/ the GNOME default) once (back in KDE 4 times IIRC) and the lack of almost any flexibility felt like I was stuck in a sandbox (a literal one, like from when we were kids, not that it's easy to remember that far back).
The only other time I felt like that was when a friend gave me their old iPhone (6 IIRC?) "to see what it's like" and I had to give up trying it out because both the OS, and the few apps I could find (for its max supported iOS version), had random chunks of features missing (tbh I should've jailbroken it, then it'd just be one more piece of hardware I have no immediate use for - but I digress)
KDE is far from perfect (switched to Wayland recently, and been tracking a few QoL leaps in the next couple releases), but I can at least try to tweak it - same goes for using NixOS or ZFS tbh (not going to even defend those, but I have done both Gentoo-like shenanigans, and randomly RAIDed a dual-SSD laptop, respectively, quite painlessly despite not preparing for it from the start, and the weirdness budget is personally paid for a thousandfold).
Meanwhile I run into e.g. GNOME apps using libadwaita nowadays needing environment variables (that appear deprecated?) to apply the KDE gtk integration theme so they don't stick out like a desaturated winamp skin.
I've never felt like "power user" applied well to myself, like I'm not doing the equivalent of weight-lifting for computers, never want to be doing sysadmin if I can avoid it, I just want to have enough control to make things seamlessly neat for myself.
Opinionated defaults are great in the same way you'd set up a house for a marketing reel, but if I actually buy it, why would I have to deal with a landlord telling me I can't paint the walls or move/replace some furniture to maximize my comfort?
The "personal" in "personal computing" is supposed to be the same as the one in "personal property", and so I'd have similar expectations of "can screw with it without asking for permision" for both (modulo real estate being seen as an investment, and building codes, etc. - should've picked a smaller example than a house, oh well).
To stretch the house analogy further, just like I have leased (some corporation's) private property as office spaces, I would be fine to doing the same (also for business reasons) with e.g. a cloud platform (most likely through GHA, whenever they announce the paid tiers) - tho be fair to everyone, this applies far more to walled gardens than opensource software like GNOME.
Also, to be clear about the "sandbox" thing: sandboxes (and/or ideally more objcap systems) are great, and I think that the XDG Portal work is incredible for what it allows: the apps are getting sandboxed, the user getting more power over them.
Even without Flatpak (which I keep meaning to try out), I was happy to see e.g. the KDE Wayland screenshare dialog outright has an option for "create virtual screen" (which can further be configured in the KDE settings, and e.g. partially overlapped with a physical monitor, etc.). If the app was in charge, they would barely enumerate some of the windows correctly, let alone provide new virtual screens.