Cross-posted from "It's that time again" by @Atherel@lemmy.dbzer0.com in !linux_memes@programming.dev
Just use KDE Plasma
This is what I concluded in the end...
Tried it. You supposedly can customize it any way you want, but after struggling for like an hour trying to make it look clean, I wondered why I was trying to force that. The UI in KDE is not clean. It's messy and has exposed many options I would never use. People love to hate on GNOME but I think they're only doing that because they know it's so popular. And it's popular for a reason.
I have a seemingly yearly tradition where I manage to convince myself to try out KDE then am usually back on GNOME after a week. I genuinely don't get the hate for GNOME. It looks clean, has great defaults (especially the keybinds) and mostly stays out of the way. I don't hate KDE, it's just not for me and that is okay.
I don't like the defaults of any the common DEs, so I always end up customizing whatever I use. Last time I tried KDE Plasma I was still running into bugs too often. I've been using gnome which is generally more stable, but it has a lot less stuff on it so I end up Frankensteining everything.
It's probably time for me to try Plasma again though.
I do at home, can't choose at work (but we keep pushing the people in charge)
I heard of imposing operating systems (which I'm also against*), but never specific distros or DEs.
* at least for technical people who know what they're doing and wont spam the IT support
My company started enforcing Macs this year but as a special exception they'll let us use Windows or Ubuntu. No other distro and the CTO must still authorize it.
The reason? Meet some vague security guidelines that the PR team wants us to be able to say we meet, by forcing us to run a spying agent to ensure our OS is up-to-date so I'm not vulnerable to leaking data I don't even have access to. But the tool doesn't support anything that updates frequently.
I had just built a brand new laptop for work and I refused to sully it with Ubuntu so I installed it on an old desktop and just been putting zero effort into fixing Ubuntu shit. Wifi often can't handle meetings, none of my cameras worked ootb - also can't go to the office anymore since I can't carry the desktop there.
Still a year away from being able to request the company buys me a machine again (last time there were no conditions for it) - but I don't intend to stay here until then.
The other week had a GNOME dev reply to a thread of mine on mastodon stating that the users desire to select a default terminal emulator was an "edge case" and it was beneath GNOME. then all the GNOME fanboys came out to his defense.
It's an insufferable DE and community.
I checked your Mastodon timeline but I don't see the post, only the one where you relate the story.
I deleted it because the GNOME users were getting annoying.
As insufferable as KDE users always shitting on gnome?
I've generally found gnome users just use it. New KDE releases don't have gnome fanboys bashing it, etc.
But new GNOME releases? Directly the opposite.
Really wish people would just chill.
I've generally found gnome users just use it
lol
As insufferable as KDE users always shitting on gnome?
This 100%
This is why I stopped using Gnome. After every update most of my extensions stopped working. Some took ages to get up to date or were abandoned. And there was no simple way to enable all extensions that the update disabled, having to manually enable them one by one. Maybe that has changed now? It's been yearsnow... Not that I would go back anyway, tiling managers is where it's at.
We all got choices, that's what I like about Linux. KDE seems to run great for most people, for me it always seems to bug out and act super janky (the panel editor in particular would bug out and crash constantly, I could never get the damn thing to where I liked it). If it was more stable for me I'd probably use it, I love customizing my system. I've tried making it work a few times, never seems to click.
GNOME's extensions may break on updates from time to time but my day to day experience with it is much nicer. While more rigid it's a lot more polished and doesn't crash out on me just using the interface. I like the layout of it. I'm glad KDE works for so many of you guys, but I'll stick with GNOME until a better option comes around.
That said, if anyone has a better suggestion for a desktop environment I'm all ears.
I don't use gnome because I don't think a desktop use interface should be designed for iPads
I've got Gnome installed on a tablet PC. It's not good there, either.
Which is why Plasma is better
GNOME is great but people recommending it to beginners need to make it clear that there is only minor customization, and that major customization / extensions will cause headaches.
Plasma is highly customizable out of the box. It's personal preference in the end of course.
Then, after that, you can introduce them to Hyprland which is EVEN MORE customizable, at the cost of learning the hyprlang and jsonc if you also want waybar.
And then there is sway. Which makes you cry but respected.
I think Gnome is the most beautyful Desktop out there. But it's UX drives me crazy. I tried it a few times but never could get used to it. I always needed extensions to customize it to my needs. But that's also what I want to avoid because extensions might break in the future. Therefore, Gnome is simply not the right Desktop for me.
But I'm happy for everyone who likes to use Gnome. The great thing about Linux: We have a choice!
I like how GNOME looks and functions for the most part, but I really wish the world provide more options instead of whatever design philosophy they think needs enforced.
Obligatory mention that Linux Mint's dev team have forked some GNOME apps into their own XApps* project. Part of the reason is so that those apps retain the user's window manager's look and feel rather than GNOME's enforced interface design. That might even be the main reason, but they also throw in their own improvements to the apps where they feel they're necessary.
They've not yet forked all GNOME-looking applications in Mint, and I'm not even sure they intend to, but it's a noble effort.
* Yes, it really is called that. Like I've said before, they probably could have chosen a better name, but they chose it before Wayland was a real threat and before Twitter got lobotomised.
X referred to a display server since long before Twitter was born.
Dunno, I saw GNOME 3 run like molasses on my PC, went "ok, this might be lost cause", went with LXDE and then XFCE, and now I'm like "if it's a beefy proper PC I'll go with KDEPlasma and if it's, like, very obsolete system I'll, dunno, go with XFCE".
GNOME is just opinionated. I get it, it was kinda vaguely modeled after Mac OS, which is kinda an opinionated desktop environment, but the thing is, it's even more opinionated than Mac OS ever was. The thing about (early!) Mac OS X was "hey, we have this slick desktop environment but also some power user features you might want to use. But we're not forcing you to!" (Kinda like GNOME 2!) ...GNOME has been kinda sweeping those under the rug, in my opinion.
Running 14 extensions on Gnome, literally never have had an issue, even through major version upgrades with Fedora. KDE and Qt are gutter garbage trash, fight me
Edit: wait I actually got downvoted lol your boos mean nothing
I am pretty much in the same boat. I think I have had one or two extensions break, but they weren't ones I depended on and they didn't seem that well maintained to begin with.
You guys are incredibly lucky then. I ran about 7 to 8 extensions and had the whole shell crash 3 times on me over a time of a few weeks, making me lose progress. The journal logs weren't helpful, the gnome-shell just crashed and bailed.
GNOME only makes it possible to make Extensions via directly patching shell code and refuses to create an API. They can say whatever they want, this way of doing things is inherently unstable and will always break at some point, and it's not primarily the fault of extension devs or users if that happens given there literally is no other way of doing it. Even something as simple as the RunCat extension is potentially able to crash your whole desktop. This is comparable to every single modification you do in KDE being a KWin script (that settings window does have a warning in front of it for a reason). Another comparison: This is also similar to how Firefox did Extensions until they adopted the common extension API in Firefox 3 (?), before then that browser was known to be crashing a lot and become sluggish quickly since any extension was monkey-patching code into it - exactly what Gnome extensions do to work.
It's one thing to have a clear design idea, but Gnome took away so many freedoms (even basic theming) while merely providing an absolutely ridiculous way for even the smallest customization to then blame users and extension devs when something breaks or becomes unstable. It's no wonder people are upset. System76 outright began to work from scratch, meanwhile Linux Mint is providing libadapta as drop-in replacement for libadwaita to patch basic theming features back into programs that use it.
If Cosmic drops its version 1.0 and keeps its promises I'd bet a lot on Gnome slowly but surely declining. It does what Gnome doesn't want to.
You clearly know a lot about how it works and I do not. I am curious though -- what extensions are you using that break?
I am hoping cosmic is all it's cracked up to be. I'd definitely consider switching for the performance benefits alone
I had some debates with Gnome devs about it which I primarily take my points from. One of them told me they actively decided against an API, for the mentioned reason.
Looking at some old screenshot, before I cleaned out a lot in an attempt to stop the crashing I had these (don't know which ones were still active when it crashed the third time, I only know it was about 7 to 8 and that I immediately began looking up how to install KDE out of frustration).
Ah ok. I have not heard of most of those. Here's what I've been using:
Come to think of it, I did have some issues with open bar and dash to dock a while back, but I'm pretty sure it was because 1) I was using dash to dock with pop_os's cosmic dock and those two do sort of the same thing so they probably conflicted and 2) pop_os is pretty behind on Gnome in general. Right now I think the are 6 major versions behind! Since a few months ago, the issues cleared up.
Also, I do realize that theming on Gnome isn't officially supported on an OS level, and I don't fully understand it all, but I do have a fairly consistently-used custom theme installed using Gnome tweaks. GTK3 iirc.
Gnome may have some issues, but I still think it's a much cleaner UI than KDE, and I'm pretty used to it at this point.
You're in a rather special position regarding the extensions in this case because except for 3 of them, they're all directly maintained by your distro of choice. Which, additionally, is super slow with updating due to focusing on getting Cosmic ready and therefore extremely stable (and outdated) given nothing changes. Distro-specific extensions really are one of the few places where this kind of unstable extension system makes sense, since your distro maintainer also controls the update flow of Gnome for you and can do proper QA on it w/ those extensions before making updates available. It's not a mix'n'match of code.
Also, I do realize that theming on Gnome isn’t officially supported on an OS level, and I don’t fully understand it all, but I do have a fairly consistently-used custom theme installed using Gnome tweaks. GTK3 iirc.
Modern Gnome applications using libadwaita instead of GTK3 or 4 will happily mostly ignore those, and the "User Themes" extension you need on modern Gnome to enable theming likes to cause problems. Usually one of the first "recommendations" you'll hear when Gnome starts misbehaving is to disable your themes as Gnome just does not want to have them. I was just straight-up told to "not use Extensions if you want a stable system" (after losing about 40 minutes of work, again).
I get what you're saying regarding my extensions, but that's only my desktop which is on pop os as you know. I also run arch on a raspberry pi 5 with gnome 48.5, Freon, dash to dock, and hide activities button extensions. On my laptop which runs fedora, gnome 48.4, and app indicator, dash to dock and Freon extensions. Don't remember ever having a problem with those. My general feeling is that yes extensions can have problems, so best to install only a few.
You say that about theming, but on pop os most apps accept the gtk theming and look great, no crashes -- I'm sure that's due to being on the old gnome version. The other two machines, I haven't messed with theming much because it already looks pretty decent to me, and those machines are more for casual use anyhow.
It really is a shame that they force you to update to the new version. If only there was some way to continue using the existing Gnome version until the extensions have been updated by their authors.
If you want to update your software broadly, it's a pain in the ass if you need to try to hold gnome and only gnome back.
And many of those extensions get abandoned after the authors get tired of the treadmill of having to redo stuff they already did.
Shouldn't that only apply if the other software depends on the new functionality in the updated gnome?
So if I want various things in fedora 42, but I have to refrain because my favorite extension hasn't been ported from fedora 41. I didn't use gnome largely because I got tired of keeping up with the extension mess.
Not all of us are trying to micromanage every little piece of software independentlly.
Pinning the version of one package doesn't constitute "micromanage every little piece of software independentlly".
No need to get hyperbolic.
If you're not willing to take even a small action to customize your system, then you should just take what you get and don't throw a fit.
I'm having a great time on GNOME, even without any extensions at all!
Good for you. I broke my GNOME Pop OS build, I assume because of extensions and pop not updating anything for 2 years. GNOME goes against the Linux philosophy of user customisation.
That is sort of the thing with Gnome. If you like it it's great, but if you don't there is nothing you can do to really change it. Like I think it's okay, but there are things I don't like and it is just too much effort to try to adapt it to my preferences.
there is nothing you can do to really change it
So far from true
See: the above meme
You're right. The several extensions I have used for years don't exist because: meme. The many settings you can easily change in 2 minutes also fake. Meme.
I'm sure that's what they meant. That you literally cannot change a single setting in Gnome. What a good-faith interpretation.
Same with Manjaro and the AUR.
So you have an example? It never happened to me the last 7 years.
It's your own fault you use GNOME
Hint: :q!
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