What is your opinion on GNOME 3 and 4? Why do you like/dislike it?
I made this post because I really like the design of GNOME, and although i’d like customizability, it is mostly enough for my everyday needs. But I want to understand why people may choose other desktop environments…or why you would/would’nt use GNOME.
Ir was my first desktop I encountered when introduced to GNU/Linux and it is actually what made me delay my switch to GNU/Linux since I disliked it so much. back then I did not know there are more desktop options so Iit made me think the whole GNU/Linux is not interesting to me. It was not until a few years later until I was told there are other options and I was shown KDE desktop (not called Plasma yet back then) that I fell in love with GNU/Linux.
Why I did not like GNOME was that it was too limited and limiting and unconfigurable. And I would say nowadays it has gotten even worse while KDE Plasma has improved a lot. I think GNU/Linux would have a lot more success at capturing the desktop OS market if KDE Plasma would be the major and default desktop in all those enterprise distributions. It is just so much better and so flexible you can even turn it to mimic any other desktop or even better customize it to fit your wery own best way of workflow and using computers.
I remember my first time installing Ubuntu as a teenager and the fact that the desktop environment was Gnome made me hate it. At that age and time I wanted something familiar and Windows-like. Since then, 13 years ago, I always hated Gnome (and Ubuntu) and I don’t feel like that is going to change any time soon.
The new SteamOS opened my eyes to KDE Plasma and now I am running Garuda on my main desktop. Eventually I plan to switch to Arch and “make my own distro” or just use SteamOS once it gets official desktop release.
I use GNOME 43 on Debian 12. I sincerely enjoy it. The workspaces are intuitive, it looks and feels sexy, and it has a pretty great set of extensions. While I really appreciate other projects like KDE and XFCE, I think GNOME is probably the most mature DE I’ve used.
That said, I do have a few gripes. For starters, it’s pretty annoying that I have to use tweaks to access settings that should absolutely be included in the regular settings page. It’s also pretty dumb that I have to install an extension to be able to quarter tile. There are so e other small issues I have, but none more than I would have with any other desktop experience, and overall I adore what the devs have put together.
Using it because it’s the least buggy DE i’ve tried so far. With a few extensions the workflow isn’t too bad either.
I love the design of the applications in general tho, in the sense that they do one thing and one thing only and there aren’t a billion options trying to cover every use case without doing any of them well.
I like the overall design of the Gnome Shell (top panel) and the workflow with different workspace. I like it so much that I actually copied it in KDE. What I don’t like is the look and feel of GTK apps. They’re often so limited or the advanced options aren’t clear at the first look.
I can never stick with gnome/gtk because it’s been impossible for me to get a consistent theme/look across my apps.
Newer gnome/gtk has its DPI jacked so that the title bar, buttons, etc. are far too huge for my desktop or laptop, with the only fix being to tinker with the theme config files. Older gnome apps don’t have this issue, but their themes are incompatible so good luck finding a matching theme pair. Non-GTK apps would get stuck with the newer title bar — I swear it would be >100px tall. And doesn’t gnome/gtk 4 have an even newer theme interface that’s incompatible with 2/3?
I’ve since moved to openbox and tiling managers; they actually bother to get this right.
There are plenty GTK themes like GNOME Professional or Qogir, that you can apply to GNOME, and you can change fractional scaling and fonts. This myth that finger sized GNOME title bars cannot be changed is dumb.
I’m hopelessly addicted to Fluxbox still. I can configure the shit out of it with simple config files, and it’s just out of the way. Almost don’t have a system UI at all. In fact, if I didn’t need a sliver of screen for my clock and battery indicator, I’d get rid of the taskbar.
Hoping to move to something modern that runs on Wayland some day, but I haven’t found something suitable yet.
I like GNOME because I don’t want customizability.
OK, I like a bit of customizability, but I’m not a designer and trying to make things look consistent and nice is a pain. I once spent days making an icon theme work in Xfce (the freedesktop standards for naming icons are not followed by anyone… (meaning both Xfce and icon themes))
I use GNOME as is and accept it and everything is swell.
Also I use a laptop and I’m addicted the three-finger swipe window preview…
It’s vey pretty and clean but the default workflow just does not work for me. Having to dig up extensions for basic window management features which end up breaking with major updates is a pain. Also while gnome-tweaks is cool and all there are plenty of settings that should just be in the main settings app rather than being “tweaks” imo.
Overall I’d much prefer KDE Plasma, out of the box it has a lot of features and ways to configure it through the main settings app to fit my preferred way of doing things. While many see the plethora of options as a con, I’d rather have them there and implemented with the option to just disable what I don’t use rather than installing extensions to get what’s missing.
GNOME is great for people who enjoy doing things the GNOME way but if you need more than that it’s just a hassle to configure and maintain for me personally.
I don’t use it on the desktop, but it’s a pretty great interface on the Pinetab 2 I have. It simply behaves very well with touch input. One annoyance I have though is not having a “right click” with the touchpad built into the keyboard case. I need to use two fingers in Gnome. It’s not annoying enough to where I absolutely need to change it though.
How is the pinetab 2? I think about picking one up now and again but without pen support I’m really unsure. It would be awesome to use it with a wacom pen but otherwise I don’t know what I’d use it for. What do you do with it?
GNOME is opinionated and beautiful. Lots of focus on reasonable design instead of massive amount of customization. It also has a great app ecosystem and documentation. I love it.
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