• ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    21 days ago

    Gnome being the default in most major distros for the last 30 years is why Linux hasn’t taken over the desktop market.

    CMM.

    • Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      21 days ago

      Sarcastic comment or not, not knowing that you could use something other than Gnome (or what Gnome is in the first place) was the reason I avoided Linux as much as possible when I was forced to use it during my first year in university

      • VonReposti@feddit.dk
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        21 days ago

        I loved it when I first encountered it. It was simple, elegant, and easy to use. Over time though, things got bad. I relied on an extension to show the taskbar on all monitors as well as the “Other locations” tab in the file manager to see disk usage plus some other things but these two broke the camel’s back. Every upgrade the extension stopped working for a few months, but at least I could delay upgrading for a bit. That was until the extension maintainer went AWOL, so no update was made for at least a year.

        The “other locations” tab showed disk usage just a click away from my usual workflows. As someone who has a habit of making high utilisation of my disks, keeping an eye on disk usage was required. That was until Gnome decided we were too good for such an easy location so now the only place to see disk usage is in the disk usage analyzer that 1) is rarely used 2) takes a while to start up while it’s scanning the entire disk. My habit of checking disk usage thus died. Until I had to upgrade to the new distro version. And it turned out I didn’t have enough storage left to carry out the installation so my laptop bricked itself halfway. I was lucky that I could boot with a rescue image to clear some space and continue the upgrade but the first thing I did when it was finished was to install Plasma and kill Gnome.

        • locahosr443@lemmy.world
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          21 days ago

          I bought a mac mini to run some cad software as everything else I have is Linux KDE. Hated it so much after a few months I bought a laptop and win 10 IoT LTSC license… Gnome is the only desktop environment that pissed me off as much as macOS, and that’s after giving it a good try recently in Ubuntu Pro while working out a new auto roll out solution for work.

      • ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        21 days ago

        Yah, I’m not even being sarcastic. I think it’s over-simplistic interface and disinterest in keeping extensions working over the years has been a major pissoff of people that stuck their nose in and then noped out. Maybe former Mac users could handle it since they’re used to being herded around, but expecting Windows users to come into that bullshit and feel at home was a big mistake.

      • ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        20 days ago

        Reminds me of the garbage collector bug on Plasma that would take memory usage to several GB that the devs told people they were full of shit when they reported it and took a year to fix?

        Oh, wait, that was gnome. KDE devs give a fuck about their users.

      • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
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        20 days ago

        None of the problems in KDE and XFCE are caused by the maintainers deliberately making things harder for the user

        • atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone
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          20 days ago

          none of my problems with gnome were caused by the maintainers deliberately making things harder for the user

          the maintainers dont have to intentionally do something for it to be a problem that would make people not want to use linux

        • atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone
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          20 days ago

          linux is not familiar to windows users though
          a slightly closer UI would not change how many other things are done differently between linux and windows

          it would still not change the perceived difficulty of linux, people thinking you have to use the command line, or windows being preinstalled on everything, or some apps not supporting linux, or people not knowing WINE exists, or the many bugs i have encountered, or there being so many distros to choose and people getting confused, or people not having the time to switch to linux, or not caring about their computer, or people being afraid of change, or the many other things i have not listed

    • abra_k@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      21 days ago

      Idk I gave it to my sister and she had 0 complaints. I don’t think it’s perfect, but a sane default choice.

  • replicat@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    I’m the guy who actually likes and uses gnome as my daily driver.

    It’s for people who want to spend less time complaining about desktop environments and more time actually doing stuff.

  • anonfopyapper@lemmy.world
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    22 days ago

    What’s wrong with gnome?

    Literally the only foundation that made Linux usable, stable, unified and customizable.

    Yeah it is barebones and extensions can’t really fully supercustomize it, but it does its job pretty well.

    • MrSoup@lemmy.zip
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      22 days ago

      Controversial choices made by devs against most userbase mostly in the name of semplicity at the cost of usability.

      Lately they’ve updated Nautilus’s “open with” menu, which was working fine, to libadwaita and now it lacks search, so I must scroll through a long list of apps. Or other stuff like that which breaks retro-compatibility like no one cares (why do I need extensions and a custom theme by a random dude to make gtk3 not look alien next to gtk4?). Poor extensions developers must convert their extensions every six months.

      I’m still on it because I like its apps’ UX and Plasma still feels unpolished. But I think that’s just a matter of time, given how things are going on.

      • adarza@piefed.ca
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        21 days ago

        gnome dumbed itself down too far, it’s turning into the win10 or 11 of linux–with features, basic features… expected features and functions, now missing… and the bland ui that makes it difficult to even see a damn window border without customizing tf out of it. i do not subscribe to their idea of one workspace per window or application. fk that.

        the only thing that was keeping it on a few systems here was an extension. one not even made by them. i found an equivalent kwin script for plasma. starting switching stuff over the next day.

        i won’t go back. and i’ve found that gtk and libadwaita stuff actually looks better on kde, anyway. so no change in what i’m using, just what everything runs from.

        i might still put gnome on for others, if all they’re looking for is a dumbed-down, simple launcher for their browser–like an alternative to chromebook, but that’s it.

        • ZeStig@programming.dev
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          21 days ago

          Agreed. GNOME’s simply too opinionated for my taste. Imagine not having something as simple as autostart app configuration in 2026. You need a (first-party?) app for that? For basic functionality? Disgusting.

      • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
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        21 days ago

        Valid criticisms

        I’m still on it because I like its apps’ UX and Plasma still feels unpolished.

        I mean , you could add its UX as a criticism too, but it’s also the whole point of Gnome3 is to be … whatever the fuck it is they are going for. OpenSource mac+? Plasma feels unpolished because its plain and unassuming, and you form it into what you want it to be.

        Also it gets funky with multi monitors, so I have widgets getting scaled randomly on the 2d monitor, and have

        kquitapp6 plasmashell && kstart plasmashell

        bound to an alias

    • rozodru@piefed.world
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      21 days ago

      you’re at the whims of devs that DO NOT take user feedback at all. so it’s a very opinionated DE. If you’re not using GNOME the way the devs intend you to use it, then you shouldn’t be using it according to them. so it kinda goes against the grain of Linux as a whole which is all about a custom user experience. GNOME says no to that idea.

      • Semperverus@lemmy.world
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        21 days ago

        None of this would be bad if the devs also didn’t think that they should be the default Linux desktop. It’s one thing having a constrictive desktop environment that forces you into its way of doing things. I can see that actually being useful in a corporate setting. But to borderline-force that on everyone by way of defaultism, especially those who don’t know better, is where it crosses a line.

        • Leon@pawb.social
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          21 days ago

          I wouldn’t blame GNOME for being the default environment. They’re the default because GNOME is stable, and their apps have a coherent design language. It’s a very approachable platform. Their app names are boring, but they’re self-explanatory.

          • Calendar
          • Calculator
          • Files
          • Image Viewer
          • Web

          KDE on the other hand is still decently unstable. Last time I had KDE crash on me when doing nothing but opening the panel edit view was literally last week. The application UX is a bit all over the place, and a lot of them feel like they were “made by developers.” The naming scheme is the olden cutesy KDE/Linux naming scheme, which is charming but feels pretty alien when you’re new to it.

          • Merkuro
          • KCalc
          • Dolphin
          • Gwenview
          • Konqueror
          • Calfpupa [she/her]@lemmy.ml
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            21 days ago

            It crashed when you were editing a panel? I literally don’t remember the last time KDE crashed on me, and I’m even on an NVIDIA GPU.

            • DiabolicalBird@lemmy.ca
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              21 days ago

              That has literally always been the default KDE experience for me. I find KDE to be a constantly buggy unstable mess. I’m glad it seems to work for everyone else, but it clearly doesn’t like me and the feeling is mutual now.

              • BlindPenguin@lemmy.world
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                21 days ago

                Which version did you test last? 4 was horribly bad, 5 got a little better, but i feel like with 6 they got it under control now. At least on openSuse.

                • DiabolicalBird@lemmy.ca
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                  21 days ago

                  I’ve tried 5 and 6. It’s got a bit better but I still have big gripes with it. My fiance uses KDE on their desktop and I’ve had to help troubleshoot why the sound didn’t work half the time… turns out it was defaulting a submenu of a submenu in the sound settings to one that doesn’t output sound. There were 5 options for the one device and only one of them worked (no I don’t remember specifically which menu or which one worked off the top of my head, it’s been a few months since I changed that default)… I’ve yet to have this problem on any other desktop environment.

                  Between shit like that and panel editing crashing the desktop I’ve wrote off KDE, I’ve never had a stable experience with it and I’m tired of trying to fix what should work out of the box. GNOME, for all its faults, works out of the box without much hassle.

            • Leon@pawb.social
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              21 days ago

              Yeah. It’s done it across installs. I installed KDE on my desktop last week because GNOME had some fucked idea of clipboard handling causing a software I use to crash if I try to copy/paste in it.

              My desktop runs Tumbleweed, my personal laptop runs Arch, and my work laptop runs NixOS. Desktop ran an NVidia card up until end of April since I got fucking sick of NVidia and their shitty drivers, it’s now an AMD card.

              The laptops both run Intel.

              Modern KDE is stabler than things were back in KDE4, for sure, but it’s hardly stable or snappy.

            • Leon@pawb.social
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              21 days ago

              If the OS comes with that only, then sure I can see how someone might use it. This is hardly a common occurrence though.

    • exu@feditown.comOP
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      21 days ago

      The project is filled with “my way or the highway” types. They’ve generally held back Wayland development by not implementing a bunch of APIs everybody else wanted. GTK especially with libadwaita is very hostile to theming, leading to worse experiences on other desktops.

    • Limitless_screaming@kbin.earth
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      21 days ago

      Gnome is great.

      Most Linux users can’t deal with every single project not prioritizing customization. Gnome having a unique workflow (which is a great one) is unbearable for some reason.

      I am not gonna place the full blame on the Linux community though. Gnome started out way more customizable, so maybe that suddenly getting pulled from underneath Gnome users so inconsiderately gave it a bad reputation.

      Then they went and did absurd things with libadwaita to not only stop supporting customization, but actively interfere with people’s choices of customizing Gnome and libadwaita apps so apps ~“are viewed and used as intended by their developers, and people don’t accidentally break apps and complain to the devs” (i.e. Bullshit).

      Literally the only foundation that made Linux usable, stable, unified and customizable.

      I really can’t see how. It’s popular and user friendly, but I can’t seriously give it that much importance.

      For me at least: It just serves to show that Linux UIs can be clean, consistent, and user friendly. Which might pull in funding from companies and governments looking for a good UI to mass deploy.

      But if it didn’t exist, Plasma would’ve eventually filled that vacuum.

      • anonfopyapper@lemmy.world
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        21 days ago

        WDYM Libadwaita is not customizable? Libadwaita is the most customizable UI lib I would say. You literally fan just change every part of any app through css and call it a day.

        Unlike QT slop - literally fuck ton of inconsistency. And if you don’t like classic Breeze - good luck. Because Kirigami makes it impossible to customize QT apps at all.

        • diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de
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          21 days ago

          Ah yes, comparing shit to shit. Although there’s basically no other choice anymore…

          Anyways, I once tried removing the profile pictures in Dino. That’s it. Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions. After poking around, found that GTK literally has devtools like a web browser, albeit a bit more annoying to use. Found that there’s is a “hidden” checkbox, if I check that it hides all profile pictures. Great, I thought. Then tried CSS:

          display: none !important; // nah, that would be too naive
          hidden: 1; // nope
          opacity: 0; // doesn't remove from layout
          width: 0px; // nope
          

          Gave up, found the relevant docs after going through a bunch of useless ones, and all of the rules fit on one page. None of them remove a fucking element. And that’s because none of these are meant for the user (have you met the average Gn*me user?). And basically all of them have native counterparts anyway, so they are just an illusion of choice to the developers, too.

        • Limitless_screaming@kbin.earth
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          21 days ago

          WDYM Libadwaita is not customizable? Libadwaita is the most customizable UI lib I would say. You literally can just change every part of any app through css and call it a day.

          I haven’t tried doing it in a while, but I remember it being very difficult to change themes beyond tint and colors, with lots of apps having custom colors not in the pallet used in the “gtk.css” file.

    • deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz
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      21 days ago

      I really like using gnome DE. No software is perfect, and no user interface will suit everyone’s user case though.

      The gnome project however has some members that are quite opinionated to the point of being hostile to any criticism or even just opposing opinions.

    • Allero@lemmy.today
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      21 days ago

      Just as you mentioned, GNOME is not very welcoming to deep customization. You either use it the dev-intended way, or you don’t use it at all.

      If you like the default GNOME way of doing things, it’s alright. If you don’t - no amount of extensions will help.

      And it all would be fine if GNOME wouldn’t be the default on quite a few distros, including, most importantly, Ubuntu. New users come from Windows, hear the old advice to just “go Ubuntu” and meet an absolutely horrible and unintuitive experience unlike everything they ever touched. This alone made Linux some bad rep.

      • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de
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        21 days ago

        If you like the default GNOME way of doing things, it’s alright. If you don’t - no amount of extensions will help.

        Not to mention Gnome is monolithic, so any bug will immediately crash the whole desktop. Other than basically any other desktop compositor, window manager and desktop environment are tightly intertwined, so any extension (which still monkey-patch code directly into gnome-shell) can utterly break the whole thing to the point you don’t have a graphical interface anymore.

        Compared to KDE, Cinnamon and others (who can have their whole desktop crash without taking any applications with it as long as the window manager etc. and drivers remain unaffected, usually trying to restart the DE and spawn e.g. Dr Konqi) Gnome loves to be unstable because of this. If Gnome crashes it takes everything with a GUI with it.

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          21 days ago

          Been using gnome for years, literally cannot remember a single time the entirety of gnome crashed.

          I’ve used gnome tweaks for a long time as well.

          Whereas everytime I’ve tried to use a custom KDE theme of some kind, some part of it is broken in some fun new extremely specific way that I did not know KDE could be broken in.

    • redsand@infosec.pub
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      21 days ago

      Barebones 🤣 🤣

      Not even a little. GTFO. Flux is barebones, LXDE and LXQT, maybe XFCE but gnome? 😂 bloated DE for touchscreens

  • megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    21 days ago

    Oh, you didn’t want to be disoriented by all the apps flying apart in every direction when ever you wanted to use the task bar? Oh you wanted a system tray not hidden behind a menu?

    Oh, well you can just use a plug in … just pray we don’t update and break all the plug ins anytime soon.

    • eleefece@lemmy.world
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      21 days ago

      It’s a Pokémon, and in the game, the creatures you don’t intent to use are stored in a PC

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        21 days ago

        Oh no.

        That’s … that’s too humanoid.

        I’m sorry you were made this way Braixen, the internet is not safe for you.

            • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
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              20 days ago

              Lucario. Even mentioned on their Wikipedia page:

              Patricia Hernandez, in an examination of the furry fandom, stated Lucario was the most popular Pokémon for the subset dedicated to the franchise’s characters.[45] Meanwhile, the Pokémon has also been cited as one of the most frequently utilized in erotic works by the fandom and furry pornography,[46] with a June 2023 study of such content on Rule 34 websites, such as e621, Rule 34.xxx, and Sankaku Channel, noting a significantly higher volume of material compared to characters from most other franchises, and the highest of characters from the Pokémon franchise as a whole.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucario

                • arrow74@lemmy.zip
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                  21 days ago

                  I was never a fan of counting those from games that haven’t released yet. When we can see their pokedex entries they count.

                  But they do technically exist even if we don’t have any other info yet. And the r34 community probably doesn’t care either

        • DoubleDongle@lemmy.world
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          21 days ago

          Most of the starters for like the last four generations are basically fursonas. It’s tragic. I’ve been a Pokemon fan since the nineties but I’m losing interest.

          • arrow74@lemmy.zip
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            21 days ago

            What made me lose interest is how dead the games feel. I’m impressed how they made the world more open and somehow made it feel so empty. Towns have barely any personality, and the routes are just designed to wonder around aimlessly in.

            Don’t even get me started on the permanent xp share, constant hand holding, and lack of any real puzzles.

            • thehatfox@lemmy.world
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              21 days ago

              The older games still hold up at least. I’ve been playing through Emerald again and it’s been a lot of fun.

              There’s also quite a few good ROM hacks out there too.

            • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              21 days ago

              I still think Gold/Silver/Crystal was the actual peak in terms of world design/mon design/storyline/characters, but I’m 100% willing to admit that could be my own particular age bracket of nostalgia talking.

              I do like some of the additional/revised gameplay mechanics from later games… team battles, weather, held items, that kind of stuff makes the games meaningfully more complex, as well as more detail and structure given to how breeding and heritability actually work.

              But a lot of the more… closer to current day stuff bssically just seems entirely like a gimmick that isn’t very well systemically thought out.

    • Blaster M@lemmy.world
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      21 days ago

      Pokemon X/Y fire type starter. Starts as a Fennekin, becomes a Braixen, then final evo is Delphox, Fire/Psychic type.

  • brzrd@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    Coming from MacOS into Linux and landing on Debian/Gnome encouraged me into the world of keyboard-driven navigation.

    I got into customising keybindings and moved to a split programmable mech keyboard not too long after. Three years ago I made the switch to Sway and now on Niri (all transitions switched off) on my laptop. My desktop workstation still is on Gnome and I switch between the two machines (with full keyboard-driven navigation) seamlessly.

    Yes, some extensions do break on updates but I use extensions very minimally and they get patched relatively quickly. For the experience Gnome provides, I dont mind the couple of days that “blur my shell” is broken. The DE remains stable and the keyboard-driven workflow is fast.

    Now that I daily drive a WM (on my laptop) I am thankful I started on Gnome upon landing in Linux. It still remains the best keyboard-driven DE out of the box for Linux first-timers. Perhaps Cosmic will be the other DE in a few years.

    I hope Gnome sticks to its phislosphy as it truly provides something unique, stable and a great entry point into the world of keyboard-driven workflows out of the box.

    • radamant@lemmy.world
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      21 days ago

      I don’t really see how GNOME is any more keyboard focused than, say, KDE. If anything, other DEs give you much more freedom for a keyboard workflow.

      • Bassman1805@lemmy.world
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        21 days ago

        I think their point was that MacOS -> GNOME was a another transition than a diffetent desktop environment would have been, which led to them naturally discovering more keyboard-oriented workflows. Not that GNOME is any more keyboard oriented than other DEs.

    • Dharma Curious (he/him)@slrpnk.net
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      21 days ago

      I took sort of the opposite route. Lifelong windows user. Tried Linux out several times from like 08-12/13. Moved to Linux full time, and landed on Fedora, and absolutely loved it because of Gnome. It was different enough from Windows that it felt like a fresh start. Have been daily driving it since then.

      Two weeks ago I got my first ever apple device because I wanted something genuine reliable for school that didn’t have any weird hiccups, and I just could not stomach the idea of going back to windows. It’s similar enough to gnome that I am adjusting pretty well. Still have fedora on my desktop and backup laptop, though

  • HexesofVexes@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    Lack of desktop shortcuts by default: pretty much why I always switch to cinnamon.

    That said, it’s not inherently bad, it’s just not inherently good.