Comment by russellbeattie
2 days ago
In a year or so when today's top frontier AI models are free with your breakfast cereal, Gnome OS might actually be something to take seriously.
Here's my thinking: Gnome is notoriously 80% everything you ever wanted in a desktop environment and 20% "screw you, implement it yourself if you don't like it." It's been that way for decades and we all love them for it.
But obviously that level of support is not ideal in an underlying OS. However, the OS could have an automated trigger that fired any time a Gnome developer told you to go pound sand (a common enough occurrence). It would automatically ask your computer's integrated Codex or Claude equivalent coding agent to fix whatever issue you're having and to close the bug report after. Think about it! That might be an actual viable new way of running an OS distribution!
Bug fixes will just be prompts you can copy/paste! "Make this idiot's printer work. Decompile the driver and reflash the firmware if needed. Then mark the issue as resolved."
"Works on my machine" becomes a whole new thing as everyone ends up running their own bespoke AI augmented version of the base OS.
The future is now.
> Gnome is notoriously 80% everything you ever wanted in a desktop environment
their pivot from highly customisable kde-like experience to look more mac-like actually dropped that 80% towards 0 for me.
Also, fundamentally: for a Desktop ui to ask by default for more than one bar to stick into your desktop space is just greedy.
I'm sorry for how confrontational my reply is about to be, but the claim that GNOME is/looks like macOS is such a tired, boring remark. I just can't stand seeing it repeated anymore.
GNOME is opinionated as heck (often to its detriment), but it does not look/feel like macOS. GNOME looks orders of magnitude nicer than modern macOS. Rounded corners and an appreciation for some (poorly defined) ethos of "simplicity" is not the core of macOS. Implying GNOME is appreciably like macOS is as embarrassing as calling KDE a Windows knockoff. There are genuinely many many reasons to hate GNOME, but being closer to macOS than Windows on some wildly truncated spectrum of UI/UX is not one of them.
When the Alto was the only thing with windows, everything that followed looked like a Xerox Exec clone. Fifty years later, that argument rings as hallow as saying every novel is just a retelling of $LOCALITY_BASED_FIRST_NARRATIVE_FICTION.
That is a very fair assessment I feel. Also there's nothing wrong with being confrontational, we will not thrive on uniformity.
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Someone recently pointed out that they play a game to see how long it takes to scroll through HN comments and find one mentioning AI in a non-AI submission. I can't help playing the game too.
LOL. I love how you read someone else's smug comment and thought to yourself that repeating it would be so cool!
The current "Linux distro desktop" approach is just one of those bad ideas that won't go away.
Desktops work best as appliances.
If you want to do development work or want "Unix workstation" experiences and other things on a desktop then containerization can provide levels of flexibility and power that is unattainable on a traditional Linux distribution.
This sort of Gnome OS and KDE Linux OS approach is one of the better ideas to come along in a long time.
Nah, when agentic OSes become a common, the appliance dream will be fulfilled, no one would care, just like they don't care what OS runs on their DVD player.
As someone that tried to contribute to Gtkmm, and has a published article on the oldie The C/C++ Users Journal, there is hardly anything great to talk about GNOME since version 3.
One of the open source excels said this for adding 3d graphs. I found that forum post a few times over the years. I guess they finally added it but yeah there is a lot of that in open source
It's been 7 years and counting since Gnome removed the ability to set the desktop background to a solid color using the GUI. The solutions to it are to use a solid-color image, or use the "gsettings" command line tool to set the color manually... Rather than, you know, an actual basic color-picker user interface.
The threads about it are awesome.