Comment by dapperdrake
20 hours ago
GNOME essentially gutted itself when it switched away from GNOME 2.
Somehow they still stuck around as a broken default. Go figure.
IIRC, then a lot of documentation still mentions GNOME first and then KDE second.
Furthermore, Ubuntu without the prefix is GNOME. Kubuntu is KDE. And all the others like Lubuntu, etc. all seem "special" to casual users.
Think of what the average university student installs in a VM, when they need to run some random command-line tool. Plain stock Ubuntu.
And GNOME lives on as a sorry excuse for a bad copy of MacOS desktop looks without the feel.
> GNOME essentially gutted itself when it switched away from GNOME 2.
It gutted itself because quite frankly it was anemic at best. I was a heavy KDE 3 user back then and I vastly preferred it compared to gnome 2, but as a long time linux user I also recognize that ALL desktop linux solutions were pretty rough back them. This "gutting" was certainly painful and questionable but what we have today, KDE 6 (it also went trough painful changes in KDE 4) and GNOME 49 are leagues ahead of what we had back them and I honestly think it's important for both of these DE to remain distinct.
> And GNOME lives on as a sorry excuse for a bad copy of MacOS desktop looks without the feel.
It feels nothing like MacOS because it doesn't have 40 years of macintosh baggage in it, resulting in it being much more approachable for PC/windows users. I dare say GNOME earns it's distinction of being neither mac or windows, but it's own thing. It is very usable and approachable across beginners and advanced users, but lacks that depth you encounter in the competition.
Minor correction, the K Desktop Environment is instead called KDE Plasma starting with version 4
TBH Gnome 2 (initially) was half-inspired from Mac OS 9. Specially the former spatial mode in Nautilus.
Are there any active gnome 2 forks? That's when I left gnome, too, and I haven't found anything I like as well.
MATE was forked around the time GNOME 3 was released and is still going. https://mate-desktop.org
Some people consider Cinnamon to be a GNOME 2 spiritual successor while still using a lot of GNOME 3 stuff under the hood. https://projects.linuxmint.com/cinnamon/
Yeah, Cinnamon is amazing. Traditional desktop and just works.
As a long-time GNOME user, I support this sentiment entirely. What a disaster. It keeps getting worse too. Now you can barely even tell foreground from background windows thanks to this Adwaita bullshit. First they removed all the features, now they're removing all of the visual information.
Same, I've using GNOME for a long time and haven't switched yet out of laziness and being busy with other things, but the next time I have to upgrade my laptop I'm giving KDE a spin, I'm tired of GNOME replacing useful features with... nothing.
They deprecate something and replace it with an app that looks sleek because it has no buttons, and it has no buttons because it has none of the features that I use. And this has happened with the file browser, the image browser, the pdf browser, the text editor... I've lost count. GNOME is seriously worse to use now than it was 15 years ago. At this point I'm not sure what they have left to butcher, but every new version they seem to surprise me with something new they found to mess with.
It's not just worse. It's MUCH worse. I'm in the same boat. I want to change but I don't know what to and haven't had the energy to put into that yet. This desktop is dead though and they're just beating it's dead corpse at this point. I've tried KDE a few times and it was just too disorganized for me, so I might just do something simpler like awesome or one of those tiling things and add in what I want. I used to just use openbox. There must be something equally simple for Wayland.
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I finally took the plunge and upgraded from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 on my work laptop. With that come all the gnome package updates and such.
I reboot, load up my session, and a little while after need to grab a couple files from a zip archive. I double-click it in Nautilus, nothing happens. I give it a couple more clicks before I suspect something broke, right click it, and see "Extract" as... the default cursor action...?
I go back up and see five fresh copies of the folder that was inside the zip. I delete them all, go back to the file itself, right click, open with > file-roller. I try and drag'n'drop the couple files I need: doesn't work, for some reason. Great, they've broken drag and drop, too.
I look it up, stumble on https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4, 7 years old issue -- I can already tell this is gonna be a joy; scroll down some, see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4#note_1..., and audibly groan.
> is drag and drop extraction from Nautilus (or other file managers) really that important?
Why, yes it is! It's even worse if you go and _break_ drag'n'drop support on X11! I'm not even using Wayland!
But, oh well, looks like file-roller is unmaintained and outside of core Gnome scope now. Nautilus' zip capabilities are enough, they say! Why would a user want to inspect the contents of a zip archive before wanting to extract it, or god forbid select specific files, after all? Definitely not worth keeping as a core OS/DE feature.
And the PR on file-roller that fixes this on wayland with... a custom fuse virtual filesystem?! has been untouched for the past 2 years, never to be merged.
I'm moving to KDE, thank you very much.
"> is drag and drop extraction from Nautilus (or other file managers) really that important?
Why, yes it is! It's even worse if you go and _break_ drag'n'drop support on X11! I'm not even using Wayland!"
It is apparently not important enough for anyone to actually work on it. But maybe it is for you?
Yep. This and a million other features just keep evaporating. Every few months we get a new downgrade.
To be fair to gnome, most modern software has moved this way.
It's bad and I hate it, but at least it's not surprising.
Kubuntu isn't really feature complete compared to Ubuntu, for example the installer doesn't allow to create a zfs on root install.
I feel like the difference is that Kubuntu installer is specifically intended for users wanting the Desktop experience via KDE, whereas the Ubuntu installer can be used for multiple use-cases such as headless Servers or Desktops. Server admins might have reason to run zfs for root, but typically Desktop users are not really needing zfs when they have 1 or maybe 2 disks. There are other filesystems that provide some of the primary features without the overhead of zfs.
If one knows they want/need a zfs root on their Desktop, then they are likely capable of getting the KDE packages setup through the main Ubuntu installer without needing the Kubuntu installer.
As a desktop user I definitely have a lot of benefit of ZFS even with one drive. It's got bitrot check, copy on write (better crash protection than journals) and snapshots. All life savers especially on desktop. ZFS doesn't only shine on big arrays.
And yes you can do that but I don't use Ubuntu a lot and I hate gnome so obviously I tried setting it up through kubuntu when I wanted to give it a spin.
I'm not a fan of Ubuntu anyway due to systemd and snap but these days I'm on FreeBSD as daily driver and very happy with it. It was just when I was last deciding on an OS that I tried it. Also tried arch and manjaro and a few others but I didn't feel at home there either.
zfs on Linux has not been production ready for decades. People have lost data from it. There's no real reason to allow the default installer to do this.
If you understand the risks, you can do it yourself.
> zfs on Linux has not been production ready for decades. People have lost data from it.
I don't think that's true. Other than with ZFS-native encryption, which I grant has been less reliable, it's been rock solid for a very long time. And I've run >1PB of postgres databases on it professionally, so I feel fairly comfortable in that assertion.
> There's no real reason to allow the default installer to do this.
The default Ubuntu installer at least used to support ZFS, which is the point.
Wow. Ran Kubuntu and never noticed this. This makes the "special" Unbuntu derivatives even less interesting to casual users.
Zfs is pretty much the only thing, everything else is exactly the same after the system is installed
> And GNOME lives on as a sorry excuse for a bad copy of MacOS desktop looks without the feel.
This is an inaccurate description. GNOME is a copy of (the worst parts of) Windows 8 and Mac OS, not just Mac OS.
But seriously, GNOME isn't that bad, and there are people who genuinely enjoy it over KDE. Choice is what makes the Linux ecosystem great.
However, I do agree that KDE is probably a saner default than GNOME, if the goal is to make the transition from Windows to Linux easier. GNOME is (probably) less buggy than KDE, simply due to having less features overall, but the UX is going to be completely alien and off-putting to most casual users.
If I look back at it, GNOME is likely responsible for me abandoning all of my attempts to transition to linux when I was younger. I had no idea KDE or alt desktop environments even existed back then and even now distros don't make it easy to discover/experiment with them. It's to the point I have some internal bias against trusting any distro that uses GNOME as the default.
I hope in the future KDE overtakes GNOME to become the "standard linux" experience.
The most used Linux user space is Android and the second is probably ChromeOS.
GNOME was ... weird in an uncool way even in version 2 if you ask me. The file picker dialog I distinctly 'member being particularly bad.
Personally I really like GNOME, and don't in any way consider it a "sorry excuse".
It's not perfect, of course, and it may not be to your liking, but that's just personal preference. I don't particularly care for KDE, but I don't go around spouting vitriol about it for no good reason.
"How do you know if someone does not like Gnome?
Don't worry, they will tell you."
It is very rare that people who use Gnome feel the need to shit on other DEs, but the opposite seems to be pretty common.
Not surprising, when gnome it's already the default everywhere.
GNOME is polarizing with its feature minimalism and non-traditional desktop, and many people therefore are unhappy it's the default choice in all the big distros.
Gnome is just plain not the best choice for default. More people are better served with KDE for instance.
Then why are not other distros that provide other defaults "big". Why do people use distros that lack the features that they want?
I respect all other DE's and window managers, I only hate Gnome.
And I only hate it for being the default option. I believe it hasn't gotten its position based on technical merit or user preference but because Ubuntu is pushing it at such, plus I also hate Ubuntu and the company behind it.
Like if people genuinely like Gnome, I don't understand it but that is fine, we are all different. I would just love to see more fair play.
Please. The only thing that's stayed constant through GNOME's history is that the developers have been rooting for other Linux projects to fail, like when System76 announced they were starting COSMIC (since completed and released) [0][1].
> It is very rare that people who use Gnome feel the need to shit on other DEs, but the opposite seems to be pretty common.
You know what they say. If you encounter one jerk, then you encountered one jerk. But if you meet 1000 jerks, and you think everyone who isn't your ally is a jerk, then maybe it's because you have a pattern of user-hostile and developer-hostile decisions which have given people reasons to dislike what you've done to their software ecosystem.
Also, parent comment wasn't "shitting on" GNOME. They were criticizing the design, the first time user experience, and the decisions of downstream projects on which software to center. You are kinda shitting on other users though, IMO, by reframing valid criticisms of GNOME in terms of personal attacks.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20221004085739/https://twitter.c...
[1] https://system76.com/cosmic
"Please. The only thing that's stayed constant through GNOME's history is that the developers have been rooting for other Linux projects to fail, like when System76 announced they were starting COSMIC (since completed and released) [0][1]."
Discussing in semi-private forums if other projects have enough resources to implement certain features is not rooting for other projects to fail. But good that you could dig up a quote from 3 years ago!
"You know what they say. If you encounter one jerk, then you encountered one jerk. But if you meet 1000 jerks, and you think everyone who isn't your ally is a jerk, then maybe it's because you have a pattern of user-hostile and developer-hostile decisions which have given people reasons to dislike what you've done to their software ecosystem."
I don't understand what you mean here.
That's a wild anecdote. I avoided KDE for YEARS because the guy that got me into desktop Linux told me it was terrible and I took his advice as a given. He and the folks he introduced me to all talked massive shit about KDE, and they used Gnome.
This was back around the time Gnome 3 came out.
Oh and when I switched to Plasma two years ago, a GNOME user I used to be friends with came out of the woodwork to tell me how shit KDE is
keep your anecdotal stereotypes to yourself bud. Maybe the real anecdote is that the people you know are unpleasant?
notably, I'm not in contact with the people I've told this story about, anymore.
To be fair, the transition to KDE 4 was super painful. It was basically the Python 3 moment for KDE but worse because they removed a lot of features and gave you a buggy mess instead.
Considering Gnome 3 released like three years after that it makes sense that he you would have discouraged you from using KDE.
It took KDE many years to recover from that. Of course using Gnome 3 instead is a bit extreme. Even broken KDE 4 was probably preferable to that. He should have recommended Xfce or something.
KDE these days is pretty amazing and for sure worth checking out. Though I sometimes still mourn the greatness that was KDE 3.5 even to this day and I am rocking Cinnamon these days.
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It is not an anecdote. You can just read the comments here.
But you seem to have other experiences, I can't say anything about that.
It’s the default because it’s much easier to provide a consistent desktop with gnome compared to KDE. Let’s face it, most quality Linux desktop apps use GTK. Even Firefox uses gtk.
So you can make KDE the default but you’re going to be forced to ship a smattering of gnome/gtk apps anyway with different ui/ux and looks.
On the other hand, you can easily ship a GNOME desktop without even shipping qt libraries at all.
I would argue it's the other way round. :)
Even GIMP, the one GTK app I would never expect to be surpassed by a KDE app, is being outdone by Krita these days.
> Let’s face it, most quality Linux desktop apps use GTK.
As I wrote above, more than a few large applications have switched away from GTK to Qt including Wireshark, Openshot, and now Audacity. How many large apps have switched the other way?
Then there are the "quality" apps that have always been on the Qt / KDE side of the fence: Kdenlive, FreeCAD, Krita, Scribus, qBittorrent, Qt Creator, Dolphin... And that's free software. It is a slam dunk for Qt on the commercial side.
> Let's face it, most quality Linux desktop apps use GTK.
My only dependents of GTK are Qalculate, Chromium and Firefox. I do not use the GTK version of Qalculate (but the Arch package includes it anyway) and I would never count modern web browsers as having a significant dependency on any UI toolkit. Am I missing out on a high quality Linux desktop experience?
Is this an actual usability problem, or is the UI just less pretty when you use GTK apps in KDE?