(If you know where I stole this from, I love you.)
I like Plasma.
I know, real brave take
I love Plasma. It’s fast, it’s stable, it’s beautiful, it’s real simple and I intuitive, it’s easily customizable via GUI, it’s packed with great features (that stay completely out of your way if you don’t need them). Even the KDE apps are awesome across the board.
It’s all down to preference, yadda yadda, but I honestly don’t understand why someone would use something like Cinnamon, XFCE or, god forbid, GN*ME instead of KDE Plasma.
That being said, just use what you wanna use.
I honestly don’t understand why someone would use something like Cinnamon, XFCE or, god forbid, GN*ME instead of KDE Plasma.
RAM usage. I sometime restore machines that just wouldn’t handle KDE. While GNOME is as heavy as KDE, cinnamon is lighter and xfce even more. An average finished KDE setup eats 4GB for me while a cinnamon one uses 1,5GB and an XFCE one 0,5GB. This makes KDE close to unusable on older 2 or 4GB systems.
Great point!
Might be especially important going forward unfortunately
Something’s not right here. You must be using more features with kde than the other desktops. Agreed the xfce is lighter, but the comparison isn’t that drastic. Kde will easily run on 4th ram systems. Configure it the same as xfce and you are at about 2GB ram.
Maybe, but 2GB would still be 4 times heavier than my XFCE average, I just wouldn’t use it for a 2 or 4 GB system, other softwares need their RAM too.
Gnome is very competently made except it’s made for a different genre of person to me, and their attitude towards customisation is outright disdainful. You install an extension or mess around in tweaks and gnome looks at you like you just used the salad fork for seafood.
I think it’s made for people who like Macs or sth.
Wouldn’t be a problem(people can use whatever makes them happy) if the gnome Devs shit attitude didn’t trickle outwards and harm customizability in other environments.
just used the salad fork for seafood.
What’s wrong with using the same fork for salad and seafood?
Posh person nonsense. At fancy parties you’re supposed to use different food weapons for each course and work your way from the outside in. Fairly sure the only reason it was invented was so rich ppl could show off how many fancy pieces of cutlery they owned.
Which is the vibe I get from Gnome’s design and its devs’ attitude in general. “Fancy party”. A bunch of dumbass rules you have no influence over and which people will sneer at you for breaking.
I hopped from a fully customized AwesomeWM install on Arch to Gnome on Debian and… there is something to be said about having your OS look & work cleanly out of the box.
Serious question. Why is there an expectation that your DE should be customizable? Isn’t the fact that you can choose one in the first place a customization?
Why is there an expectation that your DE should be customizable?
Why wouldn’t there be? It’s Linux. Everything should be customizable.
And it is. If you don’t like it fork it
I’m sure that’s the attitude that will help make Linux a prominent desktop OS among the general population. /s
I don’t care much about whether gnome is customizable, if people like it then great, but I hate how they’re forcong terrible patterns that often break other DEs (window decorations)
Because the point of Linux is I get to make it my own
If I wanted to use what the Devs tell me is the right setup and “just works”, I’d not own a computer at all. I’d just get an iPad, which has that appliance like “no options, just does what it’s made to do, works great under those constraints” thing going for it.
You have as much customizability as you will take for yourself. If you don’t like it, fork it.
I don’t think you understand the implications of what you’re suggesting.
Forking a project as large as Gnome is a massive undertaking. Not only is it a lot of up-front work to implement the functionality, but you also have to stay up-to-date with all upstream changes, and there’s likely at least a few Gnome developers that are paid to work on it full-time, so that is a lot to maintain. And not only do you have to build it for your own distro, but you also have to convince maintainers of other distros to adopt it as well and put it in their repositories, otherwise you have no community of users, which means no community of developers either.
Forking Gnome is wildly impractical. It’s not a feasible suggestion to make at all.
Orrrr I can use something else. Which I do. Something that respects the fact that my computer is in fact mine.
And like i said. It’d be fine if gnome was gnome… If it stayed in its fucking lane serving the people that like it.
But the gnome Devs have a lot of influence on how things like Wayland are taking shape, so their “let’s turn Linux into iPad” attitude does in fact affect me.
People did. That’s how we got MATE and Cinnamon; much better desktop environments.
Customization is necessary especially in the free software space because designers aren’t good enough to make acceptable defaults.
I love KDE, but each new install takes a bit of fiddling to get it just the way I want.
I wouldn’t have as much of an issue with GNOME’s lack of customization if they didn’t make stupid-ass decisions.
GNOME feels great to use based on the 10 seconds I used it for.
But I don’t like GNOME for many reasons.
Just use any Linux distro you like!
Stock Ubuntu with GNOME
I tried to use linux on a tablet, I’ve tried GNOME multiple times since it is apparently the best for touchscreen-only devices. This was hell.
As much as I’d love to be able to like that thing I just can’t.
Zero customisability, everything has to be changed through extensions, but the extension manager isn’t even part of GNOME’s core and has to be installed separately.
The settings page is severely lacking so I had to configure everything in .conf files or through CLI directly.
And the whole thing is as stable as a one-legged chair on top of a unbalanced washing machine.
KDE extension crashing : “oupsie a part of your desktop crashed and restarted as fast as possible, hope you didn’t notice”
GNOME extension crashing : “go fuck yourself, I burned your whole session to the ground, log back in and pray you weren’t doing anything worth saving”
In the end I customized KDE to look and behave like GNOME, this way around was surprisingly easier than just making GNOME bearable.
Oh and to the taskbar haters out there : my first computer was running windows 95 so you’ll be taking my taskbar from my cold dead hands, only KDE let me fulfill my dream of putting taskbars absolutely everywhere (even got two perpendicular ones on my bottom monitor)
I used a few different OSs before Windows 95 and I have also used a taskbar for the past 30 years. It’s just a design that I like. It’s like I feel grounded or something.
I just use a single taskbar at the bottom of my left-most monitor though. I ain’t all fancy like you!
Right now I use kde customized to look almost exactly like gnome.
I want to downvote you out of fear, yet I want to upvote you for the audacity
The beautiful thing, though, is if you want to, you can do that.
Now try to make Gnome look almost exactly like KDE. And then the real difference between them becomes obvious.
Now try to make Gnome look almost exactly like KDE.
… try to make a duck look like a camoflage octopus? mimicking what?
KDE does have a default stock experience you know.
Fair point
Care to share a screenshot?
I don’t love GNOME, but if you use it…whatever. Linux is all about choice and lack of lock-in.
If you want to compile CDE from the 1990s and use it as your DE…you do you honey boo boo.
[EDIT]
JFC apparent CDE is still around and had a stable release 2 months ago. Holy fucking case-in-point right there.
This but for me it is KDE.
What? No… that is wrong.
“How dare someone have a preference different than me”
Seriously though, I don’t get the gnome hate circle jerk. It isn’t for everyone but works well for some.
Same. I’ve used Gnome, KDE and XFCE (and OS X and Windows) and Gnome is my clear favourite. Claiming that their decisions don’t make sense is clearly false if it works so well for so many.
It isn’t all sunshine and rainbows though. Gtk3 theming doesn’t match libadwaita and gnome still lacks status bar support.
Gnome apps also tend to be overly minimalistic in some cases.
Oh this argument is just a meme and I’m here to enjoy that. But also KDE > Gnome, no question.
Gnome is the reason it took me so long to like Linux for daily driving, because it was the default DE on the distros I was trying. Thank goodness for Fedora+KDE Plasma. If someone else likes it, good for them - I like that they are using Linux.
I personally think gnome is way better than plasma. However, I understand why people don’t like gnome.
Everyone has a right to be wrong.
It’s extremely important we voice our opinion on bad design so that their decisions don’t become mainstream or standard.
GNOME has been a dumpster fire since 3 and the developers only care about what will result in the least amount of work for them. They think they’re as good as Apple, where they can be the sole authority on how their DE is used, but then they make incredibly stupid decisions like dictating where users can put the dock. Their design team is nowhere near the level of Apple and they should stop pretending otherwise.
Don’t use gnome if you don’t like gnome. No one is forcing you to use it.
I like gnome and so do many other people.
Don’t use gnome if you don’t like gnome. No one is forcing you to use it.
But I also don’t want it to be the default DE on mainstream distros that could be frequently used by Linux newbies. I suspect a lot of the people out there who tried Linux and then hated it because it was weird and too hard to figure out … came to that conclusion because the first distro they had defaulted to Gnome and they thought all Linux was like Gnome.
That’s nice.
I will continue to voice my opposition to poorly designed products.
Yep, me too. But I really like KDE apps
This made me laugh more than it should have. It perfectly captures how we all try to be neutral… until that one preference slips out. Classic moment.
Gnome and KDE both suck but in opposite ways. Want to change a behavior in Gnome? Well you better hope there’s an extension for that. Want to change a behavior in KDE? Sure. Good luck finding the fucking setting for it though. XFCE and Cinnamon are where it’s at. We also give a pass to MATE.
NOTE: These are my personal opinions and not a personal attack on you if you enjoy Gnome/KDE. Freedom of choice! 😁
Good luck finding the fucking setting for it though
they literally have a search in the options
I don’t think KDE sucks.
I’m very glad to have it. It’s the closest thing I can get to Windows 7.
I like gnome DE, I dislike the arrogance of the project team.
My straw was the login-to-exposé thing.
It was (and still is) the default input focus to the Search box on the Save dialog. Why? Just… why? Why would I ever want to start typing in the Search box when I’m saving a file. I have never, ever thought to myself as I saved something that I should search for something to name this thing I’m saving after something else somewhere on this filesystem.
Why? Just… why?
Any time you ask the Gnome devs this, you can expect the answer to be “elegance”. And then they block you.
Can you elaborate for the curious? I tried searching but couldn’t find anything. What’s the login to exposé thing?
Once upon a time, when you logged in you arrived at the desktop. Then typically you’d click a docked application icon or use the hot corner to open the overview (Apple calls it exposé on macOS) and search for an application to start. Some people would just hit the keyboard shortcut and start typing an application name. Very quick.
One day, the gnome team decided that since a lot of people do this, that immediately after logging in you’d arrive directly at this overview/exposé mode ready to type an app name.
Quite a few people didn’t like this change, and requested a setting so they could enable/disable it as was their preference. The response from the gnome team was essentially ‘get fucked’ enshrouded by weak/nonsense justifications for the change and for not making it optional, apparently taking the request as some kind of personal attack.
It was a trivial minor change but the way the team handled it was… lacking.
Yeah, that sounds exactly like the GNOME3 team.
For years, they fought back against giving users the option to change where their dock is, forcing them to be stuck with an asinine vertical dock because “vertical space is at a premium.”
They do this because they’re lazy and incompetent. They simply do not want more work for themselves and will browbeat any of their users into doing things the “stupid gnome3 way.”
Their designers are some of the dumbest people in the industry. Since they have a yes-man/echo chamber culture, they don’t ever get to learn from their mistakes because nobody holds them accountable for failure.
I prefer the default gnome experience to the default kde experience.
I also prefer the styling of most gnome apps, and actively dislike kde apps styling.
Gnome is less customizable, but customizable enough for what I want.
I’m also biased, because I was using Ubuntu since it came out, up until a few years ago 🤷♂️
I’m also biased, because I was using Ubuntu since it came out, up until a few years ago 🤷♂️
Yes. Same here. I’ll complain about pain points in Gnome all day, but I owe the various gnome contributors many thanks. Gnome has been a more than good enough daily driver for me plenty of times.
I love GNOME but I found the default usage pattern aligned very well for laptops. And I don’t mind they only implement finalized Wayland protocols. But Wayland moves so slow!
I use KDE on in my normal desktop because I want VRR and HDR for gaming. I like KDE but its default theme still looks rough around the edges and it has random bugs and kwin crashes when gaming and sometimes on resume.
Both have things I like and things I don’t like and I wish I could take the best from both.
I like Cosmic DE a lot because of this. It feels light, efficient, and smooth like KDE. But it feels coherent, consistent, and laptop friendly like Gnome.
… But Cosmic still feels a bit too incomplete for me to daily.
I prefer GNOME for the UX but I do appreciate KDE’s customization and settings. KDE seems more unstable though, I’ve had plenty of crashes from it vs GNOME
I do not know if this is a hardware thing but KDE has not been unstable for years.
🤷♀️ it seems good at recovering from crashes except for Dolphin
Sounds like it’s time for you to try danklinux.com
I think the key is to just not hate on someone else for having a preference for one you don’t care for. (And not being an overzealous missionary for your own preference.) It’s fun seeing the variety and people geeking out about the little intricacies they love about their favorites
That’s just a good approach to life in general.
That’s the right take. Every couple years I’ve given KDE a shot for a month and it just won’t click no matter how much I configure it, this goes back pre plasma. I dislike gnome but it’s closer to what I want out of the box, then popos came along and I realized I just wanted a tiling wm all along but needed the hybrid approach to enjoy adjusting.
I’ll give KDE a try again when they provide a way to track all of my settings via dotfiles. I tinker with shit a lot and I need the ability to track it all with a VCS. I’ve always kept KDE as a backup but its accrued so much config junk over a decade that its actually a pretty janky experience, and I’m not comfortable just nuking all my dotfules.
