Gnome devs : we broke the toilet extension. Your pokemons have nowhere to shit and piss.
Pokemon trainers : why the fuck is the toilet an extension. Shouldn’t it be part of the DE?
Gnome devs : we believe the toilet feature is unnecessary, so it wasn’t and will never be implemented.
Note : I’ve barely used gnome in my life so it’s based on memes I’ve seen about gnome.
The only thing you got wrong is that the toilet extension would be a third-party thing, and Gnome devs would actively insult anyone who dared be upset they broke it.
Long time Gnome user here: I like the general Gnome simplicity of use and workflow and got used to it, but I’m really tired of having to install extensions for very basic things, and of it messing all my extensions on each version upgrade, so I have to reinstall everything. I started experimenting with KDE, and looking forward to cosmic.
It’s close to alpha! I don’t think it’ll be in a good enough state for me (Nvidia GPU), but maybe someday.
I’ve been daily driving the pre-alpha since January, it’s definitely got a bit of jank, but it’s in really good shape. The alpha should be pretty usable, and I think by the beta it should be pretty much good to go.
I tend to flip flop, I like some things in GNOME better, but the lack of customization always brings me back to KDE after a while (Plasma, whatever)
When I first started on Linux with Fedora probably a little over 15 years ago, I used gnome just because it was different. At some point I played with Enlightenment, and now I use KDE. It was different when I was more interested in screwing around with my system. Now that I use it for work, I just need everything to be as reliable, persistent, and easy as possible. I haven’t used gnome in many years, but I hear these stories all the time and I just don’t want to deal with something that’ll wrench my workflow when I have other shit to do and no time to play diagnostics.
Do you know how vim has distributions like lunarvim, lazvim, nvchad, etc.? Simply installing something like lazyvim can quickly and easily convert vim from a text editor to a full blown IDE.
I think Gnome needs something like this. A curated set of plugins that are easy to install and maintain compatibility with different versions of Gnome - something that would deal with the API churn in Gnome while maintaining a stable, usable desktop environment.
I don’t know if this is feasible, because I haven’t used Gnome since 2.x, but I think it would really help make it an actual full blown DE.
The problem is the Gnome team doesn’t give a flying rat’s ass about maintaining a stable api. I’ve never bothered with extensions because even the most basic stuff only works for one or two versions. The neovim team is pretty committed to backwards compatibility and following standards for interoperability like LSP these days, so it’s much easier for third parties to maintain a large set of extended functionality at this point. If they acted like the gnome team, your status bar plugin would break every other update.
I use several, but the ones that I consider to be basic functions are caffeine, tray icons, places status indicator, removable drive menu and extended volume indicator. That last one is a nice example of my frustration, because it can’t be installed on the current gnome version anymore, and having to open settings to switch my audio output is terrible. Every distro upgrade have been the same experience, and I lose some functionality
It’s more like, there is one way to go to the toilet but it involves going into a small porcelain cup. They refuse to admit that’s not practical, or that it doesn’t work for everybody, or allow people to use anything else. You will use the little porcelain cup no matter how absurd it is and that’s it.
Wrong. If an extension for your need isn’t enough, you can very simply just use another DE. No one is entitled to random free custom development work
No one is entitled to random free custom development work.
Meaning gnome devs themselves are not entitled to the free custom development work of the third party extension devs, and therefore gnome is actively taking advantage of the third party developers(Third-party developers feel undervalued & exploited, potentially leading to burnout and abandonment of projects) while all round making it harder for them to maintain the extensions(GNOME’s decision not to provide a stable API for extensions makes it challenging for third-party developers to maintain their work across GNOME versions).
This is where KDE Community is different, they actively support, communicate, collaborate, etc. with 3rd party devs to build a strong relationship & a strong ecosystem.
In fact, Gnome devs are all around abrasive to the entire Linux ecosystem, including but not limited to the Wayland development team & the development teams of other desktop environments(GNOME’s design decisions, such as only supporting CSD & lobbying Wayland to mandate CSD & the controversy over the accent color protocol, have led to conflicts with the entire Linux ecosystem), their own user base(GNOME’s communication style is dismissive & unresponsive to community feedback), application developers(GNOME’s decisions sometimes force other projects to adapt or create workarounds, as seen with the server-side decoration controversy, further complicating development efforts), third party developers, and even amongst themselves(There are reports of conflicts even within the GNOME development team, suggesting internal tensions).
Note : I’ve barely used gnome in my life so it’s based on memes I’ve saw about gnome
and it shows
2 other responses I got confirmed that such thing happens and you say otherwise. Doesn’t Gnome breaks third party extensions that provides users basic functionality that should be in gnome in the first place but the devs don’t want to implement? Is the meme wrong?
Not that guy but phrases like “basic functionality” are just hard to pin down. What you need for your workflow and can’t live without is probably irrelevant fluff to a whole other class of folks.
I haven’t run into anything I need a third-party extension for yet, so I guess it works for some of us, although admittedly I do very few things on that machine so I could easily be missing something vital for most people.
Is the meme wrong?
Yes, it is.
basic functionality that should be in gnome in the first place
Who gets to decide what’s “basic” functionality? Each desktop’s team has their vision for what they want to implement. Something that might be basic to one person might not be in someone else’s vision or…
the devs don’t want to implement
…is being worked on but needs design. GNOME is design-oriented. It doesn’t matter how much you scream that something needs implementing if no one designs how that implementation will work and why it should be implemented in the first place. It’s not about “not wanting”, it’s about making sure that when something is implemented, that it’ll work well both now and in the future.
it’s based on memes
So you’re basing an opinion on the world’s dumbest, least accurate form of communication
I mean, dude got it pretty spot on, so can we really criticize the accuracy?
As I said, I briefly used gnome in the far past and just remember being weirded out by the design choices that felt very “Apple like” . So them pulling an “Apple” and doing the “we know better than the user” doesn’t feel out of place.
This comment implies that Microsoft design choices are better which is hilarious
Reminds me of twitch plays pokemon, putting a pokemon in the pc was akin to a death sentence since they often ‘accidentally’ released them later
Not just a death sentence for that Pokémon, approaching the PC was a potential game over!
I love the Gnome workflow, but holy shit, I get the hate. Why doesn’t it support a lockscreen that’s not gdm?
I actually think general Gnome workflow is pretty alright (even if I prefer other things), but yeah, Gnome devs seem to like. Actively hate their users?
Yeah, like I’m all in favor of having an opinionated design, but their dominance makes their bad decisions actively harm every other de. Stuff like refusing to compromise on cross-desktop protocols
Their “dominance” is the choice of the distributions. Gnome is opinionated, and I respect that they follow their vision. To me this is free software working as intended, people are free to fork Gnome if they want something that the devs don’t want. And apparently, many distributions think Gnome should be the default. Maybe it shouldn’t, but that’s up to the distros to decide.
Wayland expects you to use the desktop for everything including locking. What’s wrong with the lock screen? It seems fine.
I’ve quite enjoyed gnome so far. What are your complaints with it? Granted I don’t think I have actually used another DE but I genuinely don’t run into issues with gnome and the design is good enough imo.
What’s your preferred DE and why?
My complaint with Gnome is just one, but it is overbearing: Gnome devs want to decide what is best for you, which stinks and goes against the very fundament of open software. But would not per se be a problem – If they hadn’t also decided that a bunch of things that are considered basic features that every other DE and even other OSes have implemented for the past 20 years are, in fact, unnecessary.
Consider the humble System Tray.
Gnome removed the System Tray in favour of a “Control Center”. And the Control Center works really well – For inbuilt Gnome stuff and applications that were written for Gnome. But stuff that is DE agnostic, or god forbid, ported over from another OS? Some of them expect a tray to be there. Have functionality that doesn’t work without one. Or do work but are janky. Gnome doesn’t offer a system tray. You have to install a third party extension, which would also be fine… Except every time Gnome updates every other third party extension breaks.
And like, sure, it’s not Gnome Devs’ job to ensure the operability of third party addons, but that you need them to begin with is a failure. Gnome’s attitude towards everything seems to be “$#¨$ you, like just actually go &%$# yourself. You do things our way or you use something else. We have decided these things are useless, if you think they are necessary you are a $&@# and %$#$ you and the horse you rode in on”
As for my personal favourite DE? KDE Plasma. It’s not something I’d ever recommend to a newcomer, but I like it precisely because of how many moving parts it has. I can make my system look, feel, and act just the way I like it. It’s like the polar opposite of Gnome really.
Gnome devs want to decide what is best for you
Rebuttal: I’m extremely fickle, so someone else making choices for me is what I need. In KDE I spent wasted days customizing and just gave up in the end. It’s the same idea as using prettier instead of using your own lint rules: you stop wasting time and just do the thing you’re there to do.
In general, for configs (linting, neovim, etc), I prefer taking something really good and tweaking the parts I dislike—which is the model GNOME uses. Probabilistically, it’s exponentially likely that your preferences are only a little bit away from someone else—just use their thing and spend 15 minutes tweaking them.
See, while I understand that the “the system should be invisible and get out of the way so people can do things with their computers” philosophy isn’t for me, I entirely understand it as not only valid, but preferred by most people. –
– It’s just that Gnome’s approach to “getting out of the way” is at best counterproductive? I used Gnome for like 3 months in 2022, figured I’d give it a try, I’m always down to try new stuff. And I felt like I was just constantly fighting against it, having to do configuration stuff and install third-party addons not as a funtime activity because I like to make my computer look prettier, but because if I didn’t, shit just refused to work. It was only much later that I learned that the reason I had to keep wrestling Gnome is because the peeps behind it had actively decided that the things I needed to do were stupid and didn’t need doing.
You’ll see me praising Cinnamon in a different comment. Cinnamon, a cousin of Gnome’s born of Gnome 2, is what I’d call a DE that gets out of the way. It doesn’t have all the moving parts that KDE does, and that is to its credit. Because it has everything it needs to have and no more but also no less.
Oh?! Those app icons not appearing or working properly every once and a while are a gnome problem? Genuinely just thought I was doing something wrong.
I am not necessarily new to linux as I have distro hopped extensively so I might give KDE plasma a shot as I have heard good things but I am certainly not an expert when It comes to linux. I have only learned enough to keep my games running and my desktop environment clean. Sometimes I will run into an issue I cant fix and just reinstall the OS or try another one lmao.
I’ve recently grown quite interested in customizing my DE but was struggling to understand how people do it. Not used to messing with config files and I downloaded themes but didn’t know how to install them. It often feels like I simply expected to know a lot of linux knowledge so steps often go unexplained and since I learned how to use linux primarly independantly and through necessary maintenance, there’s a lot of of stuff I simply never learned because I did not need to.
Also what is the difference between a system tray and a control center?
Also what is the difference between a system tray and a control center?
Functionally, there isn’t one. Both serve the same ultimate purpose: To be an area where background services and system functionality can be accessed quickly and easily, while staying out of the way of whatever you’re doing in the foreground.
The tray is just an older, arguably more primitive metaphor for the same thing: “Just give every service and app its own icon, and make it so that icon can be clicked to access its options and features”. It’s simple, but it works.
The control center is more elegant, like, really, it is. It saves screen real estate and such. Giving you a little scrollable window where every controllable thing has its own little area. But that is contingent on the application itself implementing that functionality. When an application expects an old-fashioned tray, Gnome’s control center just tells that app to go $&#* itself, when they could, if they wanted to, just add a corner on the control center for “legacy apps”. But they don’t wanna, because they think they know better than everyone else.
Why would‘t you recommend plasma to a beginner? For me it seemed like the out-of-the-box experience is really nice.
As I said – Same reason I love it.
That system control panel app with all its billions of options and everything being customizable and change-able is very good if you are a user who a. WANTS to customize everything b. Either knows how or is willing to learn.
Most beginners aren’t after that. They want something that is somewhat familiar and that works well. And while, sure, Plasma’s defaults are pretty good… I can totally see a newbie user opening up KCM and immediately becoming overwhelmed. Another user here even mentioned how much time they wasted because all those choices actually got in the way of them getting stuff done
In my humble opinion, the system tray is a crutch anyway. But sadly a needed crutch for “legacy” support.
What does an application need with a tiny icon persistent on screen? Aren’t notifications enough to notify the user that something has happened? Why can’t it just run in background, and when the user needs it open it up from the taskbar/dock?
Oh no, I entirely agree with the system tray being a leftover from an older era. The Control Center is actually super elegant. But it doesn’t do to come up with a nicer, more elegant solution while telling all legacy support to go &*&$ itself in the same breath because it’s no longer your problem.
That’s some Apple bollocks, and if I wanted to deal with Apple’s shit I’d get a Mac.
Up to 2.x, GNOME used what was basically the MacOS philosophy: make things easy and simple and intuitive, but if the user wants finer control and power features, make sure it’s still possible somehow. GNOME 3 and later pretty much adopted the philosophy that there’s the GNOME path of simplicity and streamlining, and power user functionality is going to be removed from the core and relegated to extensions. And, of course, GNOME started requiring boatloads of memory to run, which to me didn’t go hand in hand with “simplicity”.
I eventually settled on using XFCE, because it didn’t have the bloat and still had enough customisability. Really good environment for old and underperforming systems. If I’m using a modern high performance system, I’m actually pretty impressed by what KDE Plasma is doing these days.
