Comment by asdf88990
6 hours ago
One of the most unfortunate things to happen to Linux on Desktop is Gnome and their childish and contemptuous behaviour towards users. Of close to the 20 years of using linux on desktop the large part of it away from Gnome has been the best.
In fact, I think decoupling things from Gnome has been one of the best outcomes of Wayland.
The year of Linux will start the day we have a capable wayland desktop environment that is not foreign to Mac and Windows users without chasing stupid churn. /rant
In what way does KDE not already meet this requirement? It operates similarly to Windows, and the features they add don't tend to do anything to the base experience.
I've not used it in a very long time, but I also get the impression that Cinnamon is also familiar in this way and doesn't make major changes.
Seconding KDE, I hope it overtakes Gnome as the main Linux DE. It had some rough teething problems with Wayland, but it's very good now. It has a much less... opinionated interface than Gnome, and it doesn't eat as many resources either. It also doesn't try to stop you from customizing things if you want. I finally switched my main PC off of Windows for it last month.
Gnome 3 is one of the best things to happen to Linux on Desktop, and a salient example of actually modernizing the desktop.
GNOME 3 doesn't implement very basic, table-stakes DE features and patronizes users for expecting them, turning them instead toward a horrid, unsandboxed, privileged user script extension system which has no place in a DE.
They could have just kept hacking on GNOME 2 and we'd have been in a better place. If it wasn't for modern KDE I'd still be using xfce, a project which respects its users.
I wanted to wire an webcal/https ics link into the GNOME calendar the other day: absolutely no way to do that. There's a prominent calendar in the top bar of GNOME, and it seems no one actually uses it?
GNOME 3 is what happens when you follow the Apple designer-is-always-right philosophy without Apple-level talent.
> The year of Linux will start the day we have a capable wayland desktop environment that is not foreign to Mac and Windows users without chasing stupid churn.
I mean that's KDE Plasma 6 right? Over the past few years it's pretty much become the standard Linux DE. From https://pointieststick.com/2025/12/28/highlights-from-2025/ :
> Today Plasma is the default desktop environment in a bunch of the hottest new gaming-focused distros, including Bazzite, CachyOS, Garuda, Nobara, and of course SteamOS on Valve’s gaming devices. Fedora’s Plasma edition was also promoted to co-equal status with the GNOME edition, and Asahi Linux — the single practical option for Linux on newer Macs — only supports KDE Plasma. Parrot Linux recently switched to Plasma by default, too. And Plasma remains the default on old standbys like EndeavourOS, Manjaro, NixOS, OpenMandriva, Slackware and TuxedoOS — which ships on all devices sold by Tuxedo Computers! And looking at the DIY distro space, Plasma is by far Arch users’ preferred desktop environment.
> It’s a quiet revolution in how Linux users interact with their computers, and my sense is that it’s gone largely unnoticed. But it happened, so let’s feel good about it!
> In fact, if we exclude the distros that showcase their developers’ custom DEs (e.g. COSMIC, ElementaryOS, and Linux Mint), at this point the only significant distros missing here are the enterprise-oriented ones: Debian, RHEL, SLE, Ubuntu, and the like. It’s something for us to work on in 2026, but clearly the current state is already great for a lot of people, including gamers, artists, developers, and general users.
I get the sense that Gnome's current popularity is largely because there's a bunch of enterprise specific features (i.e. LDAP accounts, headless RDP, Group Policy configuration) missing from KDE that companies or governments would have to cover the development costs for.