(If you know where I stole this from, I love you.)
I like Gnome’s apps, and I think I would install Gnome on any non-techie user’s computer.
But for myself ? I want all the options ! So I use KDE. Probably going to switch to a tiling WM, I’d like my whole desktop experience use
tmuxshortcuts, basically.Laughing in Sway
I tried gnome once at the start of my Linux adventures and I couldn’t figure out how to do most stuff as it seems really counter intuitive to me. I tried extensions to fix it and they just didn’t work or broke and trying to install the extensions was a problem for me too. Idk it’s just seems broken to me in a lot of ways
Then I tried another distro with basic life and it was easy and I didnt need to install anything extra because it was already all there.
Also why the fuck does gnome and Ubuntu have a app drawer take up the whole fucking screen. I’m on a computer not a tablet or phone. I just need a start menu like kde has. Its simple small and easily accessible when other apps are open
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! 😁
GNOME was so great… Then GNOME 3 came out and it feels like it’s been designed by a person with severe brain damage.
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
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.
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?
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.
XFCE erryday.
This but for me it is KDE.
Yep, me too. But I really like KDE apps
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.
That’s nice.
I will continue to voice my opposition to poorly designed products.
I don’t like it when people pronounce it with a hard G
But it’s there!
This is the main reason I stopped using it
I can only ever pronounce it is ‘Guh-nome’
I blame Linux Unplugged podcast tbh.
Which one’s the hard g? If that’s the one that sounds like j or “g as in giraffe”, then I’ve never heard anyone pronounce it like that. Jnome? Doesn’t really roll off the tongue very well.
like gif
Jnome
Criminal
I suspect that @TemplaerDude@sh.itjust.works really meant to say “with a non-silent ‘G’”.
The word is typically pronounced (“There are gnomes in the forest!”) with a silent ‘g’.
I think as a GNU project, Gnome is an exception. That might be a bit of a hypercorrection though.
I started my Linux journey about 5 years ago on mint with the cinnamon DE. It’s not the fanciest but it got the job done, no real complaints.
Recently I made the change to debian without too much thought on the DE and I was presented with gnome. Took me about 5 minutes before I was looking up alternatives.
Now on KDE plasma, and out of the 3 I’ve tried it’s definitely my favourite.
Plasma has improved A LOT in the past year. Like a year ago I hated it. now? I daily drive it. I hate to use this phrase but everything just works.
I was kinda disappointed with the 6.6 release as I really just want dedicated virtual desktops per monitor but their compromise actually isn’t that bad. I just had to turn off animation for changing workspaces and it’s fine. Even tiling works A LOT better on Plasma than it used to and dare I saw kinda works better/is more smooth than Sway and the like and I’m not even using krohnkite. you can quickly toggle the splits for windows and even do vim style navigation between windows. you can even do vim navigation with windows that aren’t tiled.
Plus the stuff they have packaged in is just better than most alternatives out there. I love Konsole. it has everything I need. and Kate is also a fantastic IDE you can REALLY customize that is slept on by many people. Dolphin is great too. It’s nice having a DE that just has all the stuff you need right out of the box and you don’t really have to change any of the defaults.
Dolphin is surprisingly powerful. I was using a tool (SshPilot) to handle my remote connections and it had an option to browse a remote computer’s filesystem. I was curious what that would look like and it just used my local Dolphin windows and opened up my remote computer and easily browse the files there. I’m so used to using an external program like FileZilla for stuff like that.
Yeah I agree. GNOME 3 is hideous, completely unusable. I don’t know why they had to ruin the perfection of GNOME 2.
You have a right to that opinion but Gnome 4(0) was released a year and a half ago, and we’re on 49 now. Also, I think it’s beautiful and elegant.
Kde is so ugly and buggy, requiring tons of setup n knowhow to fix. GNOME feels limiting and oversimplified, but honestly 9 out of 10 times its fine… even if its setting menu infuriates on the regular.
Im old and i dont having 100 hrs to rice shit anymore
KDE is way less buggy than it used to be. I still prefer gnome but I don’t mind KDE from s stability perspective.
Kde is so ugly and buggy, requiring tons of setup n knowhow to fix.
Surely you confuse Plasma and Gnome. To get a sane setup on Gnome, you need to install Refine to enable the minimize button and then install Gnome Extension Manager and enable Dash to Panel or Dash to Dock.
That’s an insane amount of setup work for someone who doesn’t know about those things.
People always rave about dash to panel/dock and I just… don’t get it?
Genuinely though, what is the purpose of the taskbar except to potentially you with notifications and take up valuable screen estate?
If I need to switch apps, I’m either opening the overview/mission control, switching workspaces, or the app is already on the screen for multitasking purposes.
Even on macOS I set the dock to autohide, and near exclusively just use swipe gestures, keyboard shortcuts, or spotlight.
But alas, maybe it’s just one of those things that just not for me.
…if you want
For the max/min buttons you can just turn them on in gnome tweaks
For the max/min buttons you can just turn them on in gnome tweaks
Ah yes, using a different non-standard tool makes so much of a difference.
It isn’t “non standard.” It is literally s part of gnome.
Haters gonna hate I guess
I’m pretty sure you can live without the minimize button. I’ve used Gnome for 3 years and I’ve never felt the need to minimize a window. Even now after I switched to KDE Plasma a few days ago, I still don’t minimize windows.
I’m pretty sure you can live without the minimize button.
I’m volunteering in a repair café where older people bring their Windows 10 computers and seek help migrating to Linux because their PC told them that Win11 isn’t compatible.
I make recommendations based on each person, trying to realize what they wish for first if they have an idea what they want. A few months ago there was an >70y/o man. Let’s be realistic here, at this age it might well be the last PC he ever owns. So I set him up with Alma Linux (extra long support cycle) and made its Gnome desktop as Windows-like as possible. He’s not getting pressured into unfamiliar UX metaphors and no way I’m pushing software from EPEL or anything that onto him. I enabled Flathub and temporarily installed aforementioned tools to make the necessary tweaks, then uninstalled these tools again, and installed a few of Gnome’s games, Celluloid, and Chrome off Flathub.
For the rest of the day he ate cookies and drank coffee and seemed pretty happy with that setup. We invited him to come back, should he have any further questions. Haven’t seen him again.
Going to Refine instead of the age old Gnome Tweaks is an interesting way to tell how long someone has been familiar with Gnome.
That being said if you use Gnome how they want you to, you don’t need those extensions.
That way isn’t for everyone as it’s very different from what many used to but when you do get used to it those extensions will feel unnecessary
What is the last KDE you tried? Plasma is SO good, right out of the box.
I like gnome too. Its simple and works. The only extension I use is a weather widget. People who need a million extensions are going against the grain of the design.
The only bug I ever see is Dolphin having a delayed startuo, and I have a bunch of file shares mounted which NFS might be causing delays. KDE is awesome, and it’s Tumbleweed so not even stable KDE.
That being said I put my family on Cinnamon.
Cinnamon is pretty solid. I can’t wait for Wayland support.
It sounds like it has experimental support as of six months ago.
https://itsfoss.gitlab.io/post/cinnamon-60-release-debuts-experimental-wayland-support/
Cinnamon 6.0: A Bold Leap Forward with Experimental Wayland Support
Last update – 2025-08-12
I haven’t run into any bugs but also I’m not the most intensive user so maybe I just don’t run into them.
My main issue when I was using GNOME is that it needed a run ton of extensions to be truly useful, and most broke after a new release.
I’m using KDE basically out of the box, nothing bothers me enough to try to fix it.
Yes, GNOME 3+ is completely unusable. It looks like it’s been designed for a tablet.
Plus, I can’t stand client side window decorations.
I’m using KDE basically out of the box, nothing bothers me enough to try to fix it.
KDE : Plasma is the sleekest desktop we’ve come up with yet!
Just put the taskbar where I want it and shut up.
I liked Gnome back when Ubuntu was brown.
The Gnome 2 days 👍
After Gnome shit the bed with Gnome 3 and beyond, MATE continued everything great about 2 and continues its legacy.
I genuinely hope history remembers the GNOME desktop as “it was good, and then they started making some really stupid decisions!”
Why would they ruin their very good software with so many stupid decisions?
Yeah mate, it was the best
So today I made a VM of Debian that has all the DE’s as a matter of experiment to try them all out back to back to get an idea of what each one feels like. And right out of the gate gnome feels, a bit too abstract? You don’t get the sense that one screen is the default homescreen over another.
It looks nice but it feels weirdly organised. (Which I’m sure I could get used too, but you know preferences)
