Personally I feel that KDE is what GNOME wanted to be but can’t. Not just the DE itself but the KDE applications too, just look at Krita for example compared to GIMP. Somehow KDE could accomplish much more and feels more mature and robust too.
I loved GNOME2 back then but feels like something went wrong with GNOME3 regarding the whole
project and how users reacted to
the different UI. I’d say the classic Windows NT era UI (95, 98, 2000, Xp) was peak design so I’m glad KDE stick to that more or less and made it even better and modern.
FWIW technically the programs have different purposes, even if they also have a lot of overlapping functionality: Krita is primarily a digital painting application, which you can also use to do some general image editing while GIMP is primarily an image editing application which you can also use to do some digital painting. However if you compare the focus of each application to the equivalent of the other you'll see that Krita's image editing functionality - especially on things outside digital painting - is lacking while GIMP is stronger there and at the same time GIMP's digital painting functionality much more limited when compared to Krita's.
I've been doing some texture painting recently in Krita and i find it to lack things like various filters. It does have the GMIC plugin which has its own filters but those are way slower than "native" Krita plugins and not as integrated (which makes sense).
GIMP has more ways to adjust the colors of an image - an entire menu of the stuff actually. Something i often need is adjusting the brightness and contrast of an image, but there isn't such a thing in Krita (well, there is in GMIC, but it has its own issues).
GIMP can work with indexed images directly and has decent functionality for them - Krita can only export indexed images and even that has very little control. You can apply a palette as a filter and when exporting the image you can have it save it as an indexed image "if it can be done" (meaning it wont be forced) and that if the exporter supports it. This also means that it wont preserve the palette indices since it doesn't know about them.
And the selection stuff mentioned by kuschku. In fact IMO selections and copy/paste work in weird ways in Krita.
There are more things that i notice when using Krita (and is what i tend to use these days), but i can't think of them right now. At the end of the day there are ways around things so the only thing that remains is my impression that is weaker on stuff outside "2D digital painting" (where it is very strong).
> GIMP has more ways to adjust the colors of an image - an entire menu of the stuff actually. Something i often need is adjusting the brightness and contrast of an image, but there isn't such a thing in Krita (well, there is in GMIC, but it has its own issues).
Krita also has an entire menu of ways to adjust colours, and can do them in high bit depth as non-destructive Filter Masks by default:
There is no dedicated "Brightness/Contrast" adjustment anymore, because, as the linked page notes, that functionality is just a specialized subset of the Color Adjustment Curves/Levels.
> Krita also has an entire menu of ways to adjust colours,
Yes it does, but it does not have all the tools that Gimp provides.
> and can do them in high bit depth as non-destructive Filter Masks by default
I need to "destructively" modify images more often than non-destructively.
> There is no dedicated "Brightness/Contrast" adjustment anymore, because, as the linked page notes, that functionality is just a specialized subset of the Color Adjustment Curves/Levels.
You can most likely get some similar result if you play around with the curves but it is certainly not as simple or easy as having a dedicated brightness/contrast filter like you can find in other image editing applications. Having that specialization might feel unnecessary for developers who are used to trying to make things more generic, but from a UX perspective it can be very preferable (if your goal is to make an image editing application - from the perspective of a 2D digital painting application, this sort of specialization may indeed feel like UI bloat).
As i mentioned in my original message it isn't so much that you can't do things in Krita, it is more that the stuff that exist are often clunkier and the more you need outside "2D digital painting", the more limitations and clunkiness you face.
Moving selections with handles after the fact. Precise selection positioning in general.
And where gimp has an always visible panel for filters, krita has always visible panels for brushes.
It'd be awesome if krita gained more such functionality, but considering krita's recent expansion into vector images, these features are likely on the horizon anyway.
IMO Krita is still miles ahead with robust support for NDE via filter masks, better layer grouping, and proper support for colour spaces and high bit depth. It's had all of these features for years, while GIMP always squeezed everything into an lossy 8-bit RGB raster and is just barely catching up now. Even the individual image-focused tools, like a single Transform tool with Warp and Liquify modes, or the Fill tool with adaptive expansion, seem much better thought out in Krita than in GIMP.
Plus UI-wise I've always found GIMP to be quite obtuse/rigid/clunky. About the only thing that GIMP is good at is when you just want to move a raster grid made out of pixels around while very aware that it's a raster grid made of pixels, like cropping or lining up images.
That actually mirrors my experience perfectly. But nonetheless, the selection and move UI/UX for moving pixel grids and the tooling for manipulating pixels individually is the only feature that forces me to leave Krita and start GIMP every once in a while. I've moved the entire rest of my workflow to Krita many years ago.
Never heard of Krita, just downloaded it. It starts up way slower than Gimp and the UI looks non-native with fonts that aren't the same as the rest of my system. Bleh. It's probably busy spinning up some mcop's, dcop's, more cops, and other bloat. Qt/KDE ecosystem apps are slow and memory-hogging compared to their GTK counterparts.
On my computer (on which i'm not even using KDE as my DE, i use plain Xorg with Window Maker - and the system isn't even a high end one, it is a cheap PC i bought 5-6 years ago) Krita and GIMP start up pretty much the same time, which is around a second.
> the UI looks non-native with fonts that aren't the same as the rest of my system
Non-native compared to what? GIMP is only "native" on GNOME (though with it still being on Gtk2 it may feel off even on GNOME) and like any non-GNOME app, Krita would obviously not look "native" to it. But this is the case on pretty much most desktop applications these days on pretty much any desktop OS, the only OS where you may get some semblance of uniformity is macOS (but that comes with its own can of worms).
> spinning up some mcop's, dcop's, more cops
The last time KDE had such things were in KDE3, the last version of which was released 15 years ago.
With a reasonable amount of effort you can get Qt apps to look good on GNOME. The same often can't be said about GNOME apps on KDE due to recent pushes of libadwaita, among other things, which greatly hinder the ability for a user to apply system themes.
The simple 2-bit explanation is KDE is following Windows trends, Gnome is following Mac trends. Even the screenshot widgets are both following the closed-source versions (recent Gnome screenshot widget is exactly the new MacOS screenshot widget)
I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches" distro, but ships with a DE that will annoy nerds much more than KDE does. My Linux experience got so much better under KDE. I respect what Gnome does a lot but I feel at home in KDE land.
IMHO the difference is that KDE took the classic Windows desktop as starting point and has developed it into something that's now actually better than the Win10/11 desktop. GNOME OTH might be trying to imitate macOS but if that's actually the case they are doing a very poor job (I spend most of my time on a Mac, but have recently switched from GNOME to KDE on my Linux laptop because after updating to Ubuntu 24 I was finally fed up with GNOME's UX only ever getting worse, never improving).
PS: switching from GNOME to a KDE desktop session was absolutely trivial and quick on Ubuntu btw.
> IMHO the difference is that KDE took the classic Windows desktop as starting point and has developed it into something that's now actually better than the Win10/11 desktop.
In some areas KDE has also taken inspiration from macOS, and imo significantly improved over the original. The best example in my view is the Present Windows desktop effect, which is fundamentally a take on Exposé/Mission Control but massively outdoes those equivalents in usability by adding fuzzy filtering as you type to select windows. A less appealing version of that (Contexts) is something I have to pay money to a proprietary app developer for on macOS.
Ignoring all the other bad stuff with Windows 11, one thing that made me switch to Linux was the ugly "modern" design. iirc, someone on HN said that Windows designers don't even use Windows, they use Mac.
But then I switched to Linux and a lot of apps, specially gnome and gnome-inspired apps, have such terrible design as well. I'm going to spare you the details because I could rant about it for hours.
IMHO The pinacle of the Windows desktop was Windows 2000. Windows XP was ok except for the default bubble gum theme. We don't talk about Windows Vista and Windows 8. Windows 7 was sort-of ok. Windows 10 is was trying to salvage some of the Windows 8 mess with little success. Can't comment on Windows 11 because I'll stick with Windows 10 as long as possible ;)
I agree with this more when you include how the then current versions of MS Office felt to use.
Ribbons might have a place at the absolute entry level of usability, but they'll never replace a well designed menu system that includes keyboard shortcut documentation in the UI within a super information dense presentation.
I hate the way menu bar is detached from the window/app that it applies to in macOS, but over time I've learned to grudgingly appreciate one thing about this design: it forces the apps to have a menu bar, because if you don't, it is such a visual sore point. So even when designers go nuts with UX layout, which seems to be so common these days, they still have to provide access to various things in the menu bar in a way that is mostly consistent across apps, and in any case is easier to find things in (esp. thanks to menu bar search as standard feature).
Who are you targeting as the main user of this software? Most users do not depend on keyboard shortcuts but rather repeatable actions they can use the mouse for. The ribbon only annoys power users which is a number much much smaller than 50% of all users. Plus keyboard shortcuts still exist with the ribbon system.
As someone who has spent a lot of time with “regular users”, no body is complaining about the ribbon…
> Plus keyboard shortcuts still exist with the ribbon system.
So this objection is completely manufactured?
> The ribbon only annoys power users which is a number much much smaller than 50% of all users.
It's 0% of the users who are new to the software, and 90% of the users who have used the software for some time. The UI shouldn't be optimized for people who are only going to use the software a few times unless the software is only meant to be used a few times.
But in the case of office software, what you want is affordances that can be eliminated at the user's own pace while they get to know the software over years or decades. Things like indicating the keyboard shortcut next to the menu entry, which is standard for most UI toolkits. Or things like allowing the "ribbon" to be disabled, which I would be really surprised if you could come up with a reasonable opposition to.
It also annoys infrequent users, because you need to remember into which ribbon they stuffed what you want to do and what icon it uses. With a classical menu bar, the organization tends to be more intuitive (in my experience, at least) and you can skim the different menu items to find what you need.
That seems to depend on the specific version of Office, if the screenshots I looked at are to be believed. Office 2016, for example, doesn't seem to have it.
Edit: Maybe this depends on settings rather than versions? Upon further investigation, I've found some screenshots of Word/PowerPoint 2016 that have a search bar and some that don't.
This almost makes me want to try a Mac. Everyone is copying them, they must be pretty good, right?
I just miss it when my apps had main menus, and dialog windows instead of transitions, and it didn't feel like every window was a browser even when they weren't electron apps... and I miss the window borders, and the colored icons, and when themes weren't just light or dark and...
You'll be disappointed. Even Apple isn't adhering to its own Human Interface Guidelines anymore. It might be the least bad option of the current desktop environments, but that doesn't mean much.
As sibling comment says, you'll be disappointed - and worse, unlike on Windows or Linux there will be no way to change things you don't like. With Apple, it's their way or the highway. For example, they just don't do themes at all, and have slowly deprecated or removed even the basic customization features they used to do well (like changing the icon for a folder).
I recently started using a Mac at work and Gnome aping MacOS is the only thing that makes sense.
The applications selector, the settings drop-downs... spatial Nautilus... it didn't just start with Gnome 3. These are all poorly-implemented, half-baked versions of MacOS features. It has been going on for years.
I mean, the thin scroll bars for $deity's sake! On MacOS this makes sense because the trackpad and trackpad/mouse work, and work very well. On Gnome, it makes no sense at all since you can't hit them with the mouse pointer.
As a decade old macOS user, I agree. I don’t want to use macOS after Gnome. I like the new one. It’s 45 now, but I think the major update was either 44 or 43.
Yep, GNOME’s closest proprietary analogue is iPadOS, not macOS. GNOME omits all sorts of little power user features in comparison and takes the whole minimalism thing much further than macOS ever did (often too far IMHO).
This applies to Pantheon too, even if it’s prettier. There unfortunately isn’t a Mac-like DE.
Unity was till 2017, it states. Hmm, what does Ubuntu use now? It’s not the Gnome I use on Fedora. I don’t like (and use) Ubuntu, so I was under impression that it uses Unity to this day.
Ubuntu uses Gnome as the default install, however it has official "flavours" that you can choose from, such as KDE (the Kubuntu flavour), Unity, and others.
They stopped using Unity years ago, but it came back recently as a flavour. You can throw it into a VM and see how it is if you're exploring.
>Gnome's future looks even more Phone/Tablet oriented [link]
Well, that looks very opinionated to me. And I have an impression that opinion is from someone quite far from being competent on UI matters. I see it — the background kill switch — as a great simplification and I use it all the time. I absolutely hate the mess of background apps in tray, be it macOS or Windows. Here, it’s way simpler.
> I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches" distro
Is it though? I mean, it is advertised by magazines and shills as such, but it really is not in practice, never has been. Back in the days, Mandriva was the "no headaches" distro, since then many distros have caught up - my go-to for many years that I also successfully got non-nerds to use has been OpenSUSE.
The original name was Mandrake, precisely because it would magically autoconfigure all your hardware and software - well before Ubuntu existed.
The issue Mandrake/Mandriva always had, was that they would go a bit overboard with the approach, ending up with a system that could feel a bit sluggish - because it had all sorts of stuff preinstalled "just in case". It was also a bit of a separate kingdom - used RPM but wasn't really compatible with the wider array of RedHat packages.
The Ubuntu innovation was that they hit a better middle ground: they were fundamentally Debian-compatible, and their autoconfiguration worked well (particularly with 3d cards, at the start) but also gave you a fairly fast desktop.
In the early days of my Linux use I was on Mandrake 7.2 and loved it. All the "just in case" random packages were very entertaining and educational to me, although they were probably a distraction from whatever I was meant to be doing!
Still, the experience seems to have served me well in the end. I do miss that feeling of discovering all the weird themes and window managers they packaged by default, I don't get the same vibes of "any UI is possible" these days (even though the UX is probably much better by conventional criteria).
As the sibling comment says, was relatively popular here in Europe. It was my first GNU/Linux disto. I had problems installing Debian in a laptop with a nasty Wifi PCMCIA card, Mandrake was able to make it work.
Me too! Count me in! Mandriva was my first ever Linux distro! It was so long ago that I forgot it happened. I came to think that was Ubuntu, but it came after Mandriva and after Ubuntu I was on Debian, of course. Now it’s Arch on my laptop and Fedora on my desktops.
OpenSuse is fantastic. It’s very easy to set up and nice to use out of the box. It’s also fairly close to the bleeding edge and at the same time very stable. I am quite happy with it.
IMHO the best update strategy I've seen is the FreeBSD/NetBSD quarterly update, with "base" part of the system not updating. OpenSUSE is too frequent to my taste.
The one I usually install to normal users who do not know computers well is KDE Neon. But yeah with recent very positive experiences with openSUSE Tumbleweed, I am also thinking about using oST instead.
I think you have this backwards. KDE has been ahead of windows since the Windows Vista era. KDE4 and Plasma (KDE5) are extremely good and have been borrowed from liberally by the commercial desktops for quite some time.
> The simple 2-bit explanation is KDE is following Windows trends, Gnome is following Mac trends.
I am a heavy Mac user at home (for about 20 years), and a heavy Linux (and to a lesser extent Windows) user at work, and I don’t see that at all. Gnome is infuriating even for a Mac user. I don’t like KDE either, so I use XFCE, but I am absolutely not at home in Gnome.
I feel that this perception that Gnome is Mac-like is because the Gnome devs have strong opinions and don’t tend to compromise. But as a piece of software and desktop environment, Gnome is not more “Mac-inspired” than KDE.
> The simple 2-bit explanation is KDE is following Windows trends, Gnome is following Mac trends.
I find it more that Gnome is following Android/iOS trends. They're trying to be the mobile DE, but Linux (aside from Android) on the mobile phone was DOA.
Saying gnome is following MacOS just says you haven't used gnome since ages, give gnome 45 a spin and tell me how it's following macOS, it's better than macOS will ever be.
I was on Gnome on my laptop until January 2024 (was running KDE on the desktop). I have gotten a Mac laptop for reasons and... I stand by my judgement.
I think you could say Gnome is better than MacOS's DE, or that it's worse (to be clear, I don't think it's worse really), but my point was more that the design philosophies are close along so many axes
If GNOME would be following Mac trends, we would get more Vala and less JavaScript, and proper developer tools instead of writing XML based layouts by hand.
KDE’s underlying GUI framework is Qt which is backed by a successful corporation and is used by lots of high-end professional desktop apps. That goes a long way to explain why Krita feels more right than GIMP.
Simplifying Krita vs GIMP as a difference between application frameworks is reductionist. Krita has much better connection with actual users and their needs, in the first place. Same with Kate and many other KDE apps which became fairly competent in their niches in recent years.
KDE ecosystem in general has a working user feedback loop, something that is historically hard to come by in FOSS world.
Yes, that’s absolutely what makes the difference in the end.
But if you’re going to build an app for professional content creators, it definitely helps to be using the framework that powers Autodesk Maya and many other tools that they’re already familiar with. A lot of non-obvious product needs on the framework level for this niche have already been solved.
GNOME just never had that kind of solution pull. It’s always been more of a research project.
Yes availability of technical solutions will dictate what the clients of the software can do here. You can have great connections with the users but if the core libraries you use doesn't help you to deliver the features you promised, they will leave for other solutions that actually deliver in shorter time while you struggle with GTK. This is exactly what is going on with GIMP.
GTK basically either doesn't support or make it really hard to create certain workflows outside very simple applications with limited things yo click. Also it is a C library with very leaky abstractions including gtkmm. So developing complex applications suck and waste a lot of developer time
Qt is C++ on steroids. It adds a bunch of features for GUI development, comes with a great library and many tools for testing, design and internationalization. It is overall nicer and IMO simpler to develop with. So you can go from a simple image viewer to a one with okay editing features and the difficulty doesn't skyrocket.
Another aspect is Windows support. GTK 3+ doesn't support Windows. It looks like it does but due to GNOME locking down their overall system design, the integration suffers. The UI looks off due to GNOME's insistence in client side decorated windows. Projects like Krita have lots of Windows and Mac users and Qt is the only low level cross platform UI library that actually delivers.
> But if you’re going to build an app for professional content creators, it definitely helps to be using the framework that powers Autodesk Maya and many other tools that they’re already familiar with. A lot of non-obvious product needs on the framework level for this niche have already been solved.
There are tons of professional and highly successful apps for content creators that use custom made (and often shitty/mediocre) GUI frameworks. Whatever difference using Qt makes, it's negligible. Actual features are what sell the product.
> But if you’re going to build an app for professional content creators, it definitely helps to be using the framework that powers Autodesk Maya and many other tools that they’re already familiar with.
Qt isn't that sort of framework though, it is just a GUI toolkit[0] and there is nothing special about it that makes it better than Gtk for an application like Krita.
The reason Krita is so successful is because of what orbital-decay wrote, they connect and listen to the users, not because of Qt. Obviously Krita is built on the KDE frameworks and the KDE frameworks are built on Qt, so Krita relies a ton on Qt to the point where if you consider on replacing it you might as well just rewrite the program from scratch. But Krita could have been written on, say, Java Swing, wxWidgets, Gtk or whatever other mature GUI framework and it'd still be as successful.
After all keep in mind that many other popular digital content creation tools use custom toolkits instead of Qt (e.g. Blender which is way more popular than Krita).
[0] ok, it has more functionality than GUI, but that's the main functionality and everything else can be found in many other libraries
In my experience it's not that simple. I certainly don't believe Krita written in Java Swing would be as successful.
There's a lot of complexity in GUI frameworks, and they are not interchangeable because they end up making different design choices. An application like Maya with very complex user-manipulated data structures will expose weaknesses in the framework, and the fixes and design improvements end up in the framework. A competing framework whose primary users are lightweight consumer-oriented apps doesn't get those benefits.
> In my experience it's not that simple. I certainly don't believe Krita written in Java Swing would be as successful.
I disagree here, i'm certain it would be as successful because the GUI framework is not the reason for Krita's success, it is the functionality it provides and how the developers interact with the community. The GUI framework does not have any image manipulation specific functionality (all of that is implemented by the Krita developers) and the community interaction isn't even a technical thing in the first place.
> There's a lot of complexity in GUI frameworks, and they are not interchangeable because they end up making different design choices.
I did not claim that they are interchangeable (though they can be, depending on the program's design), i even explicitly wrote that taking Qt out of Krita would mean almost rewriting the entire program as it relies heavily on it.
What i claimed was that Qt is not the reason for Krita's success and it could have the same success with other mature toolkits. There is nothing special about Qt aside from being around for long enough time to have its functionality "battle tested". This is not unique to Qt though.
> An application like Maya with very complex user-manipulated data structures will expose weaknesses in the framework, and the fixes and design improvements end up in the framework.
This is the case with any toolkit or really any library that has a lot of applications written against it, assuming the developers do not ignore all bug reports and issues the users of their libraries report.
Also since you brought up Maya specifically, Maya used to be based on the Motif toolkit until Maya 2010 (it was changed to Qt in Maya 2011), which by the same logic would mean that up until 2011, using Motif would be great for professional content creation applications since Maya used it too.
You forget about the desktop integration. At the company I work for we also selected Qt, why, because it has very good integration with many desktops. GTK is terrible in this regard (even support for other desktop on GNU/Linux apart from GNOME is not the best, let alone other OSes). And yes also Qt offers a lot more and is also more intuitive to work with and man the documentation it has, just superb. So yes, listening to user feedback is the most important but the role of a great toolkit to build on is also very important.
> You forget about the desktop integration [...] the documentation it has, just superb. So yes, listening to user feedback is the most important but the role of a great toolkit to build on is also very important.
I did not forget it, Qt has great integration and documentation but this was not a comparison of the specific features Qt and some other toolkit like Gtk may have. My claim was that Qt isn't something special that would make Krita successful while using anything else would make it less successful.
I didn't bring those things up because they weren't really relevant for my claim. Also FWIW desktop integration for Krita isn't as important as it'd be for some other types of applications - consider that Krita even comes out of the box with its own themes that it uses instead of trying to "blend in" the underlying desktop looks.
In terms of what Krita does, there isn't any functionality that it uses from Qt that couldn't be found in other toolkits like Gtk - or other libraries. It wouldn't be the same way and certainly not with the same code, but Krita could have been written using a different GUI library and framework and even in a different language and still had the same success because the GUI framework it uses is not why it is successful: it is the functionality the program provides (which was written by the Krita developers themselves) and the communication the developers have with the users (which isn't even something technical).
Qt is very special because it has excellent, "vector" fractional scaling (in a way, similar to Windows), compared to Gtk which has awful "bitmap" fractional scaling (akin to MacOS).
> Qt is very special because it has excellent, "vector" fractional scaling (in a way, similar to Windows), compared to Gtk which has awful "bitmap" fractional scaling (akin to MacOS).
This isn't unique to Qt though, other widget toolkits can provide that functionality. In fact LCL/Lazarus provides such fractional scaling even for Gtk itself by doing the scaling "manually" when using the Gtk backend.
I came back to KDE after more than 15 years away and the improvement in Kate is astounding. It has features I would never have expected from the basic text editor.
It was such a pity about Amarok :(
That whole "2.0" debacle put me off the entire KDE ecosystem for years. It's great to see them back on track. But there are still no decent music libraries / players on Linux.
+1 for strawberry, coming from Windows and foobar2000, this is the only music player on Linux really up to the task of playing huge music libraries and doing it well.
Checkout Quod Libet. Better than foobar, which I used through wine for ages. It's just about the only GTK app on my KDE boxen and I gladly make the exception.
Well I've been using Linux exclusively for almost 20 years, and the only music player I'm happy with is MusicBee, which is exclusively Windows only. It used to be a nightmare getting it to run on Linux/wine, and it had a number of annoying bugs, but it's pretty solid now if you've got the very latest wine and a slightly older MusicBee.
Yes, Qt Group is profitable. It’s publicly listed and has a market cap of around $2 billion. So not very big compared to a lot of enterprise software vendors, but could be an interesting acquisition target at this price.
For a couple of years Qt was owned by Nokia, then spun off after their Microsoft OS pivot. Today I’m guessing an acquirer might be in the embedded/automotive space instead where Qt is apparently doing quite well.
GNOME doesn't seem ideologically similar to KDE at all though, it's very hardcoded with hardly anything is adjustable. KDE is like the opposite of that, it can mimic most Windows features as well, e.g. quicklaunch, non-grouped taskbar windows with titles.
This philosophy emerged later, when GNOME tried to differentiate. In the first few versions it was as flexible as KDE, it had fewer trinkets only because they came later and had to catch-up. It was only with version 3 that they went "full Apple", when they adopted a somewhat-dictatorial style of development.
I wonder how much of that dictatorial nature comes from more and more of the developers getting hired by Red Hat, who basically decides everything related to systemd/gnome/freedesktop these days...
Gnome has a completely different workflow than KDE. Gnome is the reason why I use Linux. If I had to use KDE I would stay with Windows, the workflow has the same logic, is almost the same, except that with Windows I have no restrictions with applications.
Can you explain that? How is the workflow like Windows?
All I can see is some superficially Windows like defaults (good for newbies) in the initial look.
KDE has a lot of stuff very different from Windows - or at least Windows at the time I switched. Transparent sftp in all applications, highly customisable (I currently use window tiling, have a small icon only task switcher I hard use, window titles in the panel, I use multiple desktops, KRunner to launch/switch apps.....), very different file managers from windows, a excellent text editor that integrates nicely with everything else.
I agree, especially when it comes to window management and virtual desktops. I have been running Linux desktop since the late 90s and used A LOT of different desktops and window managers. I remember when gnome 2 came out and everyone hated it! (sound familiar?)
For work, I have my desktop running gnome and I have a macbook that I also use when traveling or at the office. I find my productivity on mac os drops with its absolutely terrible window management and terrible virtual desktop implementation. I instead run fedora in a UTM VM fullscreen and only use mac as a "host" for the VM.
Gnome (with version 3) required a change in how you use it as a desktop. In gnome 2 days, I used to have a grid of virtual desktops and maybe always assigned email to 1, chat to 2, etc. The task bar was heavily used and important.
But with Gnome > 3, I really love the dynamic virtual desktops. Every task I am working gets is own virtual desktop. As I finish a task and close windows with that task, that virtual desktop goes away. If I have a long running multi-day task, that virtual desktop with windows associated with it stay open for that whole duration. Only things related to that task are on the virtual desktop. I might have 25 browser tabs open in total, but 3 of them are tied to a specific task on the firefox window on desktop 2, 5 are tied to another firefox window on desktop 5 and so on.
Everything is _very_ keyboard driven, and I don't ever touch a mouse to interact with gnome itself.
This makes task switching really nice. There is no need for a tab bar with 50 items on it, or a browser window with 50+ tabs open.
One thing I do miss from some of the older window managers, is the ability for the window manager to do grouping/tabbing. I'd prefer if now application implemented tabs, and instead the window manager did it.
It's great that it works for your workflow. The problem is that GNOME is very opinionated in that the workflows they enable are the right workflows for everyone, and resist any configurability that would actually make it usable for the rest of us.
Of course, one can always use a different DE, but there's always friction in not going with what the distro you're using picked as their default (and tends to support better in practice). I think a lot of GNOME hate is coming from the users who feel that a DE that does not adequately reflect their workflow is being pushed on them so aggressively by their distros.
There is likely no desktop environment that's more customisable while at the same time being full batteries included as KDE is. And I've probably tried them sll: Gnome, XFCE, Enlightenment, Cinnamon, Mate, i3wm...
If there's a flow you've grown accustomed to, you can most probably replicate that in KDE.
I use Gnome (and Sway, depending on which computer I'm on). I use Gnome because it works great with wayland, and I just need to get work done, and Gnome does a pretty alright job of staying out of the way. KDE's integration with Wayland feels too clunky for me at this point. Plus I get rendering artifacts on the edge of the screen when I use plasma with screen scaling.
I believe improving Wayland support was one of the major goals of Plasma 6. So if it was just the Wayland integration putting you off, then maybe consider trying Plasma again soon.
I experience some random visual bugs occasionally with Wayland, but yes generally it's decent. But I could understand if someone would want a more stable experience.
Isn't it great, that unlike Windows or Mac, we have a choice! We don't have to try to create something for the lowest common denominator of user, and we can find something that works really well for us, individually.
I like its simplicity and the straight forward workflow it provides. Years ago, I used to use KDE and enjoyed it but these days, I want something that is functional while being vanilla and standard as possible and personally, that's what GNOME gives me.
Fair enough. I guess I have a hard time understanding why you wouldn't be interested to make the workflow fit better for yourself on a device you spend hours per day using.
It's just a personal thing. I try to stick to using tools that provide me the best defaults + being open source. I don't want to spend time customizing my desktop or getting overwhelmed by the amount of different choices I have available. Don't get me wrong, KDE is a beautiful and great project, it's just that, a very personal thing.
I can't agree with this more and that's the beauty of KDE. If I'm sitting down using this thing 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, little niceties and optimizations go a long way to making me happy and productive. And it doesn't take very long to make these little tweaks.
You install a distro that includes Gnome. Did your distro choose not to package a taskbar extension? That’s a good hint your distro is not intended to be an end user distro.
Well it's not a hyperbole, my productivity would suffer immensely if I had to use GNOME. And since GNOME doesn't offer much customisation, I couldn't make it work better for me, which is why I use Plasma. That doesn't mean I hate GNOME or something and I'm glad it exists for the people who do like its approach.
In what ways does Gnome hamper your productivity? Are you really using the DE a lot?
Most of my day is spent in applications. I launch an application and that's where I'm spending my time. I'm not using the desktop environment all that much. I really don't find much difference working in Windows, macOS, KDE or Gnome or even iPadOS as far as interacting with the graphical environment goes.
Yes, absolutely. Perhaps not directly with the DE itself, but the DE affects how I work.
On Plasma, I have it set up so I have all title bars hidden and I use custom keybinds to close, minimize and maximize windows, which saves screen space and reduces clutter. On GNOME you cannot minimize windows at all if I remember correctly.
I have virtual desktops disabled and only use one desktop to manage all of my windows, while GNOME fundamentally works around using multiple virtual desktops as far as I know.
GNOME doesn't have a system tray, which I find essential. For example, I can see just by looking if Discord has an unread notification. Or I can close OBS to the system tray without quiting the application, which reduces visual clutter. I know you can add this with an extension, but I'm just referring to vanilla GNOME.
I often use KRunner to temporarily write something while still seeing the contents of my screen, while GNOME's equivalent is full screen I believe.
I'm sure there are many other ways, but these are the ones I can quickly think of.
> On GNOME you cannot minimize windows at all if I remember correctly.
This is incorrect. You can minimize windows on Gnome, but the button to do it is hidden by default. It can be re-enabled in Gnome Tweaks, and there is also a keyboard shortcut (Super+H) for minimizing.
Gnome is however indeed fairly workspace-centric.
As for customization, out of the box Gnome is quite rigid, but its extension ecosystem far surpasses that of KDE. You can use extensions on Gnome to for example get a dock or system tray back.
Oh, I didn't know that shortcut for minimizing. Is there a reason the button is hidden by default?
I never really understood how to efficiently use virtual desktops or what their benefits are compared to one desktop. Would you mind to explain?
Well, I would imagine that is because you generally only need extensions on KDE for niche things, while GNOME needs extensions for more 'basic' things. Obviously you don't need an extension for a system tray if one already exists by default.
> Is there a reason the button is hidden by default?
Because GNOME developers mindlessly pursue "minimalism" with religious zealotry, finding an outlet for their frustration of not being good enough to work for the Church of Apple.
I think I see one difference - I'm not trying to use each environment the same. My iPad wants everything to be full screen, so that's how I use it (although I have been playing with Stage Manager). Windows has good support for tiling now, so I use that. On Gnome I lean into the workspace stuff. KDE I don't know as well, so I use the mouse for just about everything.
I enjoy learning the ins and outs of the different environments and frankly I wish the differences ran even deeper. I often think about how fun it would be if Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, BeOS, SGI IRIX, OS/2, Sun CDE, and all the other systems were still being developed. But then the Electron / web app people would probably still try to pave over everything cool and unique on each system to run one mediocre app everywhere.
I understand that GNOME has a clear way how it wants you to use the desktop, but I don't like that way for the reasons I described. And it's not just a 'different' way, I feel like I lose functionality and flexibility in a lot of regards. Although, I guess it's hard to say for sure since I never used GNOME for an extended period of time.
That's the beauty of different systems. You always lose functionality no matter which way you switch. A Windows user might miss PowerShell + COM on Linux. A Linux user would miss having access to the filesystem on iOS. An iOS user misses the ubiquitous URL scheme for sharing code and data when they switch to Windows or Linux. I still miss Rexx and the object-oriented workplace shell of OS/2.
I'm sure if you gave GNOME an extended trial, you would adapt and find some things you actually prefer.
> This type of hyperbole is what feeds the DE wars.
You not liking something is not the same as it not being "usable." You simply don't like it as much.
Your comment would be a lot less interesting if it were written without hyperbole. It would simply be "I don't like GNOME as much as KDE." And no one would really care about that, it wouldn't be a notable comment.
You're the only one who takes this 'war' seriously. The rest of us here are adults who can appreciate all desktop environments, even if we don't personally like to use them.
My entire point is that both desktops can be appreciated for what they are. I can use KDE or GNOME, I just prefer GNOME. I would never call KDE unusable, because it works just fine for those who like it.
People who go around saying they "can't use GNOME" because it's "not customizable" without ever even trying would be the ones that are not appreciating all desktops, like an adult.
No one here said that GNOME shouldn't be appreciated. Just because I said GNOME is unusable for me personally doesn't mean I can't appreciate it.
I have tried GNOME before, thanks for your assumption, so I know for a fact it's less customisable than Plasma. But less customisation doesn't equal less value anyways, so I don't even know what your point is.
> except that with Windows I have no restrictions with applications.
what you do get with windows is a UI that changes, resets, and ignores your previous customizations with every os update, which you cannot stop/prevent. even group policy hacks and regedits wont always save you. LTSC is apparently a thing but you cannot pay anyone money to actually get that license as an individual user.
dark patterns to prevent users from creating offline, local-only accounts. you have to yank the ethernet cable now during initial setup to get the option not to log in to your ms cloud account? (or some insane nonsense like that)
plus more cloud services that i didnt ask for with each update, more things bloating ram and disk/cpu on startup, more telemetry. and ads. always. more. ads. ads in the browser, ads in the start menu, ads in the widgets.
windows decided one day to auto-update and fuck up my linux dual boot setup.
after more than two decades of windows following DOS, i couldnt do it any more with this omnipresent Windows SaaS shit.
tried Mint and Manjaro for a while, then switched to EndeavourOS + KDE/Plasma and never looked back. everything is just faster on linux and nothing changes out from under me in the past 3 years of daily rolling updates.
I honestly love the variety of options, everyone can find something suitable for themselves!
Personally, XFCE is a good fit for me often (especially on older devices), or maybe something like Cinnamon since it mostly gets out of the way and lets me work. Then again, I also enjoyed Unity when it was the default in Ubuntu, unlike a lot of folks hah.
KDE has spoiled me. I installed a Gnome distribution a short while back, but used it for a couple of hours and missed KDE so much that I wiped the hard drive and went back to Manjaro and KDE.
I think this is the reason Linux hasn't penetrated the desktop more than it has. “Just reinstall” is too often the solution to issues.
Starting over will often throw away hours of someone’s time. This can be catastrophic for a non-technical user.
I wish the Linux desktop was implemented more like a user extension on top of a rock solid base server layer (eg hypervisor). Maybe such a setup exists, but I’m unaware of it.
I was not familiar with Silverblue. It looks very promising. The idea of creating a fundamental, shared base system should make troubleshooting significantly easier — possibly an exponential reduction in the possible installed permutations. Thanks for the suggestion!
Switching desktop environments on Linux is absolutely trivial and doesn't require a reinstall though (at least in my experience of switching from GNOME to KDE on Ubuntu, which took a couple of minutes to pull down the KDE packages and then logging out and picking Plasma from a dropdown in the login screen - and if I feel like it I can switch back to GNOME anytime).
It's not trivial. Just installing KDE packages on a GNOME install will work and is quite easy, but will lead to some mix / subtle setting issues, it's less clean than just a brand new install.
Installing and running KDE will mess up GTK settings in GNOME for instance. You might end up with the Breeze GTK theme in the GNOME session. Which works, but this is most likely not wanted (even though GNOME looks great with the Breeze theme).
I'd not advise regular users to do this without a warning.
I haven't seen this on my Linux laptop, but TBH some UI elements in GNOME look so weird in Ubuntu 24 that I'm not sure if it's broken or intended (but already did before installing KDE).
Trivial to who? A seasoned Linux nerd? Maybe. A regular, non-tech person? Nope. And that is why there is no year of the linux desktop. And if you expect a regular, non-tech person to be able to master the terminal and type in commands you're delusional.
Trivial in the sense of googling "how to install KDE on Ubuntu", picking a result that looks somewhat recent, and following those steps. It ends up being a handful terminal commands which shouldn't be too hard for anybody who has used a keyboard before. That's how I did it at least. There might be more UI centric options.
Also, trying to chase the elusive 'casual user' is what caused all the GNOME UX mess in the first place I guess. I'm not an 'archetypical' Linux nerd, I hate wasting time with fixing stuff that should "just work", but I'm also expecting a computer to be a professional tool which I can customize to my needs (within reason at least).
Windows is not better at this. Plenty of troubleshooting advice says "Now open the registry editor and..." or "Now open this .ini file and..." or "Now open cmd in admin mode and..."
The ease of the GUI ends when a serious system-level issue arises. This has never not been the case, it's just a matter of how much the documentation expects you to know what's going on, and how much that impacts the first-run experience. If the first-run is good enough, "reinstall" becomes the go-to fix.
I wouldn't expect a non-tech person to even understand the difference between an operating system and a desktop environment and why you can switch the latter while keeping the former. Nor would I expect them to care.
That's just not true at all. The reason Linux hasn't penetrated the desktop is because it's not installed by default. Even if that isn't the reason, the GPs preference for reinstalling is certainly not. Switching DEs doesn't require reinstalling the OS, it requires searching your distros app store for KDE, and then logging out and selecting "KDE" when you log in again.
You could even switch between them each time you log in, depending on your mood that day.
No, Linux has poor isolation between the base system and application and third-pardty software and poor backwards compatibility (FreeBSD is slightly better in that respect). The only OSS Posix system that getting it right seems to be Haiku.
This is not how people want it though. The want to be able to install any version of any software old or new irrespectively of the base system. Flatpack is close though.
It's funny that you say that, since that was the solution to Windows issues for... decades? Not sure if that's still the case, as I haven't touched it in forever.
Regardless, not sure where you've gotten that impression of Linux. The only times I've reinstalled is when I've gotten a new laptop, and in those cases I just copy my home directory over to the new laptop and everything just works.
The GP's example of needing to reinstall because they wanted to change desktop environments is nonsensical; I don't think anyone even remotely knowledgeable would recommend a reinstall in that case. Just a trip to the package manager app and a restart.
I think there are quite a few reasons why the Linux desktop isn't more common, but "need to reinstall to fix issues" certainly isn't one of them.
> The GP's example of needing to reinstall because they wanted to change desktop environments is nonsensical
I agree that trying out a new desktop environment by selecting a distro package would not normally require a reinstall.
However, in general installing and removing packages (not specifically a desktop manager), especially custom ones with conflicting dependencies can lead to things being broken without a clear direction forward.
To paraphrase Tolstoy, each broken system tends to be broken in its own way — which makes it hard to find help. Maybe wifi, sound, or BlueTooth get inexplicably flaky. Or power management. It is not hard for me to imagine a situation where a user just gives up and reinstalls.
Reading up on Silverblue (which someone else mentioned) and other technologies like Nix give me hope that things are improving.
why wipe out the hard drive, tho? You can usually just switch DEs just fine, this isn't windows :) long gone are the days where we would have 10 different DEs/WMs installed
Will package managers remove all traces of the old DE? Back in the day, `apt remove kde-desktop` would not reliably reverse the effects of `apt install kde-desktop`.
You can certainly remove packages that were installed as dependencies, even if `apt remove` doesn't do this by default. I think it's `apt autoremove` or `apt purge` (although I haven't used apt in a long time). All of the package managers I've used have a way to do this.
On the other hand, for the average user I don't know why you'd bother. It's not like it's interfering with other stuff you want to do, unless you are extremely tight on hard drive space.
apt doesn't remove the settings in your home directory. So you need to nuke them and reconfigure the entire desktop and switching DEs definitely break stuff due to file type handling and default apps. With Xorg there were other things like styles that got permanently broken unless you hunt for every file that has been changed.
I borked an installation because it had two desktop environments, and even when it works there always seem to be more odd issues than with a clean install.
If you have the time to debug these and straighten them out, it's fine, but given how simple a clean install is these days that's often the easier path.
I'm extremely happy with a keyboard focused interface like Gnome is. I also like Gnome for giving me sensible defaults and for staying out of my way.
The whole "desktop metaphor" with icons littering the display never made sense to me, so I really appreciated the new take that Gnome tried and keeps exploring.
Krita may have started out as a digital painting tool, but today it is also a pretty good picture editing tool, and certainly easier to use than GIMP for many common photo editing tasks.
It's still the only open source image program I know that will not only let me print, but also show where the image will be on the page, and let me move it and scale it up/down. Seems like overkill, but I keep it installed for that reason.
As a KDE developer, I think Gimp is pretty great and has made massive progress in the upcoming 3.0 release (also on things only Krita could do so far, like reasonable colorspace-independence, also UI-wise). Obviously we're very proud of the Krita team. I use both regularly for different tasks, and that they have slightly different objectives and mission statements has been great for open source content authoring.
Sort of. It was part of GNU, now it's sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, but I don't think it is considered a "GNOME App".
As per https://discourse.gnome.org/t/relation-between-gimp-and-gnom...: "The GNOME Foundation provides the GNU Image Manipulation Program community and developers with services like fiscal sponsorship, technical infrastructure, promotion, and copyright assignment."
However, it's not considered a GNOME "Core App" or even a "Circle App" (see https://apps.gnome.org/) and I believe that it doesn't attempt to follow the GNOME guidelines or have any GNOME designers/developers working on it.
GNOME originally stood for GNU Network Object Model Environment, so both G's are in some pedantic sense the same.
I don't think there's a very close relationship between GNOME and GIMP, but do keep in mind that GTK, the 'defining' part of GNOME, originated in GIMP (Gimp ToolKit!)
Gnome's toolkit, gtk, originated as the toolkit the gimp folks wrote to get off of Motif a long time ago. Since then the Gs have had reassigned meanings.
aside from the usual "to each their own," i can't help but feel that kde nags you down with mostly inconsequential options meanwhile failing to nail the basics such as the basic aesthetic or performance. and, ironically, gnome being the solid blank slate it is makes it perfect for customisation. since gtk4 my application has been anything but black and white, and it has always been easier to make qt follow gtk theme than the other way around.
granted, some default gnome behaviour does annoy me, especially the new nautilus. nautilus simply doesn't show me anything useful in a dual window setup as it tries to cram every column of the list view, and the sidebar refuses to go away in my middling-dpi laptop monitor. still i can't live without type to search (somehow missing in nemo).
Horses for courses. I loved KDE 2 and KDE 3 and even contributed minor patches to it (using CVS. .. shivers) Back then there was no contest IMO on what is the best Linux DE. KDE 4 was an unmitigated disaster of course, which pushed me to look at Gnome. I then discovered the Gnome 3 workflow (as intended by upstream, not as implemented in distributions such as Ubuntu), and absolutely fell in love.
Nowadays Gnome is absolutely my favourite environment, followed by macOS, with KDE and Win 11 way behind.
I’m curious as well, as I missed quite many Gnomes. I used it back in Gnome-2 days, and now it’s 45. I think I accidentally tried it a couple of years back (43, if I’m not wrong) and I like it so much that I use it till this day. Combining with Swaywm on my laptop, but sometimes I think that I like Gnome even more. Which is quite a statement! As I really love Sway and thought that’s the final thing I’ll ever use as a DE.
I don't know, I'm not really impressed by their mail-client or their calendar software. Lots of room for improvement, but then again there's already Thunderbird.
Meh, GNOME has 1/10th of the features of KDE, but it's much more stable and consistent.
I've used KDE for the past year, and it's just too much, too many options, and if you stray out of the happy path, you encounter plenty of bugs. Then what's the point of offering so many options. I'm back to GNOME.
KDE enjoys a lot of reputation from people that believe the Windows-style UI paradigm to be the best. That's arguable. I would certainly install KDE to a user new to Linux, but I have been running Linux long enough not to get lost if I don't have a taskbar or desktop icons.
GNOME could be so much better, sure, but I prefer 2 options that work (4 code paths to test), than 10 that don't really work all that well (1024 code paths to test).
My dream DE has the simplicity and design of GNOME with the completeness of QT. GTK is a dead-end, but at least it's written in C, so it is future-proof compatible with better languages such as Rust, instead of being stuck with C++ until the heat death of the universe.
> if you stray out of the happy path, you encounter plenty of bugs
But to me the happy path (the defaults) out-of-the-box on KDE are just better. The console and text editor are legitimately 10x better than GNOME's. The settings app, disk manager, the open/save dialogs, and -- especially -- the file manager.
I do most of my work in VS Code and web browsers, so I am not even a heavy user of the apps that come with the desktop environment, but the quality of those ancillary tools really dictates the quality of life in a GUI environment.
I ended up using GNOME a bunch in the last year because I have to use Wayland (X11 doesn't support my monitor setup) but remote desktop is an important tool in my day-to-day, and for a while only GNOME had a decent RDP story (for accessing the Linux desktop environment from Windows or Mac) on Wayland.
I think that is no longer the case, though, with krdp[1] — seems to have not made it into Plasma 6 after all, but it does work pretty well so far — so I am so excited for KDE 6 that I enabled the testing repos so I could install it on my Arch Linux workstation right away, without waiting for the official packages.
Definitely true (and I do install Konsole on GNOME if I have to use GNOME) but probably not super common.
Most people, myself included, are gonna install the DE and its apps by choosing it in the OS installer (or at least with a single command, a la "pacman -S plasma-meta kde-applications-meta sddm").
Stability is a mixed bag on GNOME. It's been a couple years but I was surprised last time I used GNOME to have Mutter crash back to gdm randomly while drawing due to a bug in graphics tablet code. I typically use SwayWM and while the graphics tablet support is nothing to write home about... It's very uncommon for it to segfault for me. My sessions in Sway tend to last months long, normally interrupted by rebooting for kernel updates or something like that. I do like that it can be extended with JS but that also ran me into all sorts of weird problems, more than it used to when GNOME was newer; I just want basic features like tray icons/app indicators...
(P.S.: I think I am probably the main user of graphics tablets in SwayWM, but if anyone had been using it, I'm sorry for the tool buttons being buggy in 1.8. It was my bug and it should be fixed in 1.9, fingers crossed, it looks like 1.9 will be hitting nixos-unstable later today for me to check.)
I have to periodically restart my session if I'm using Gnome with Wayland, as memory use keeps growing. With the X11 version, you could alt + f2, then "r" to restart gnome-shell. This is, for some reason, not possible when using Wayland.
That's because what is restarting, if I understand correctly, is Mutter. And under X11, Mutter is effectively an X11 client. But, under Wayland, Mutter is the compositor... it of course does still do compositing under X11, but under Wayland the compositor is also the display server. So you can't restart it without disconnecting all of the clients... kind of.
Crash recovery and graceful restarts of the compositor are things that should be possible and are being worked on, and ideally this will allow for well-written Wayland compositors to tolerate a variety of issues that would've been hard to on X11, but for now, Wayland compositors mostly can't be restarted. This is also why GNOME doesn't want too much complex stuff going on directly in the compositor, and can explain some other architectural decisions about GNOME Wayland that are otherwise peculiar.
I suspect that it's the appindicator extension that I am using which causes the problem, but I've not proven this. I'm still salty that they removed appindicator support to begin with, though.
To be completely pedantic, I don't believe the Wayland protocol itself actually dictates a design like this: you can separate the Wayland server from the compositor and display server bits if you want. I am not aware of many implementations of this, though; the best example is probably still Arcan.
That said, the very vast majority of Wayland compositors, including Mutter, Weston and everything using wlroots, is implemented without separation between the display server, compositor, etc. so in practice this is still mostly true, it just needn't remain true into the future.
You're right, of course, and I should've been more precise about that given I have looked at doing exactly that myself (main thing stopping me: I was able to switch to my own X11 window manager within a day - it was painful but worked; meanwhile I'd locked up my machine's display hard within 5 minutes of running some DRI/GBM test code and had to reboot)
I do think, ironically, that the future of Wayland will involve making it more X-like - adding WM support, maybe stripping back the exceedingly overcomplicated protocol (my window manager is smaller than most Wayland example clients..)
And thanks to the extensibility of the Wayland protocol, you can layer any X functionality right back in...
That's why I'm happy the KDE developers and others have acknowledged this is actually a problem and are creating solutions for it, unlike many GNOME developers who say "it's your fault it crashed!"
Yeah similar experience here, At work we are forced to use a distro with GNOME (well at least it is GNU/Linux and not that Microsoft bloated spyware) and yeah I have plenty of crashes in GNOME. No crashes at home with KDE Plasma on openSUSE Tumbleweed. It has been rock stable.
My personal KDE looks and operates nothing like Windows and more copies the MacOS workflow (although I am not a Mac user at all). GNOME is not that much customizable and it is the main reason I stick to KDE. Also, quite stable. I do rarely have any issues to be honest and it usually is Latte that has bugs but it is in the state maintaining limbo for a while now.
I know HN users hate modern UI trends. But for the record, GNOME actually has professional UI designers (Red Hat employees or volunteers) designing their UI.
Yet it's horrible to use and really wasteful. Huge window handles that make no sense on a desktop without touch, unnecessary extra clicks by hiding things in hamburger menus. Again something handy on a mobile, not a desktop. Almost no customisation.
I recently bought a low-end ASUS Tablet PC with a rather nice 13" OLED screen (Vivobook Slate 13 T3300), and exorcised Windows 11 S from inside it the moment I got it. I then installed the latest Fedora on it, and chose the GNOME spin, because of the supposed touch UI readiness.
I must say, I am not impressed by the UX of the whole setup... which is a shame, since they iirc slaughtered the perfectly good GNOME 2.x UI to cater to those devices specifically around a decade ago - and for what? If this is all that's there to reap, it's been a bad trade-off.
Looking forward to trying Plasma Mobile; maybe it can improve on the status quo.
> which is a shame, since they iirc slaughtered the perfectly good GNOME 2.x UI to cater to those devices speifically around a decade ago - and for what? If this is all that's there to reap, it's been a bad trade-off.
It was the fad of that time, when Microsoft also introduced Windows 8 and the "Modern UI" Metro.
But at least they came to their senses, also because no devs bothered to adopt it :) and they still didn't manage to sell any Windows tablets.
I like to keep the Windows install around on small partition as I find at least on Thinkpads the Vantage app on Windows often has firmware and bios updates more available/earlier than on linux but ymmv. Plus is there for random need for windows-only app but maybe not as important.
> they iirc slaughtered the perfectly good GNOME 2.x UI to cater to those devices specifically around a decade ago - and for what?
There was a recent article on here that explained GNOME 2.x was windows-like enough that there was fear Microsoft would come after Linux distributions with patent lawsuits, hence the departure from that style of UI in the next version. KDE on the other hand was made with a patent sharing agreement in place.
Ah that explains a lot. Especially the feel I've always had about it being "change for the sake of change". There was a time when I actually tried to use it for real, I bought a used Surface Pro 3 and traveled with it, so the touch-based UI actually made sense. I wonder if that fear was realistic though. Though I have to admit MS at that time (under Ballmer) was really hostile to Linux.
Edit: The point made in that article seems to be disproven though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39493246 . Even Miguel de Icaza said it's nonsense. Can't get more authoritative on Gnome than that.
But it was just too weird with the workspaces on the fly, the huge window decorations (despite touch I would mainly use the pen anyway) and the lack of a real launcher. I used it for about 3 months and got rid of it. It just rubbed me the wrong way constantly and I really couldn't stand the designers' attitude, every time I wanted to change something I ended up googling it and finding some excuse from the devs on why they wouldn't account for it (usually along the lines of "you shouldn't want/need that").
What didn't help was that Linux on the Surface Pro 3 was a huge PITA also. Often the keyboard wouldn't work after having been disconnected, or the pen would stop working, or it would turn on in my bag for some weird reason and be boiling hot, or it would fail to pick up the ethernet of the dock etc. Most of these issues were solved by a reboot but I ended up rebooting a lot to solve all these stupid random problems and I really got sick of that.
But the "Weirdness" of Gnome 3 didn't help. I have a lot of opinions on how stuff must work and tried modifying gnome with plugins to make it work that way, and that led to a lot of issues when updates came out and the plugins weren't updated. Opinionated software just isn't for me. I want options. Lots and lots of options :)
Eventually I moved back to a desktop and gave KDE another try (the last time was in the KDE 4 period and I didn't like it) and it felt like a breath of fresh air. Everything I wanted to change about the default UI had an option in there somewhere to do it. It felt like the developers were reading my mind and pre-empted every wish :3 I've always cherished software packages like that.
And it only kept getting better and better with things like accent colours in the anniversary update. I use a lot of my own theming as well for both my DE and web apps and KDE is really great for that. I was actually planning to make a real theme myself but it's so configurable now that I can really make it pretty much like I want with just some configuration clicks.
I donate monthly to KDE now just because I want them to continue this great work and philosophy.
And you can easily make KDE title bars even smaller by changing the title text size, and use global menu and hide title bar in maximized windows. Massively better use of screen real estate than GNOME. Imo much more "professional" and productive vs GNOME's cartoonish touch screen UI.
Nice.. definitely a bit chonky but distinctive. I like the yellow. Hadn't thought of doing that but I probably would prefer something besides the default blue.
And I don't use laptops, only desktops. Good point also as I have much more screen real estate available. For example I use a 3x3 grid of 9 virtual desktops (with the numpad as a quick-switching pad), something that on Gnome isn't possible without a whole bunch of addons that break with every update :) Because it doesn't allow for virtual desktops in a grid matrix by default and I don't think it's got direct access hotkeys to them either. I really love that I can just configure all that in KDE without having any kind of addon or modification (and many other things I change too).
I'm just not one of those "just use it like it's intended" people. I have my own ideas on how my computer should work. But yes not everyone is me.
When someone says a design is harder to use, you don't get to say "no it isn't because Fitts' Law". If it's harder for someone to use, those are the facts on the ground. You need to adjust your theories to fit the facts, not try to say the facts aren't true so they fit your theories.
The larger target here is the window, so according to this law you should move a window by grabbing the window itself (with either holding alt triggering a widow move mode or something else) rather than wasting space with a bigger, but still much smaller handle
Yes, The team behind Ximian, before being acquired by SUSE, was involved in early efforts to improve the usability of desktop Linux for end users. They conducted usability studies and published videos of these sessions to highlight where users encountered difficulties. These efforts were part of a broader initiative within the GNOME project to enhance user experience and make the GNOME desktop environment more intuitive and accessible to a wider audience.
FWIW, we've also had professional usability experts involved with KDE many times over the years. E.g. the OpenUsability initiative, which KDE helped set up, was run by HCI professionals and conducted a fair number of user studies, produced research docs, and so on.
The difference perhaps is that OpenUsability didn't limit itself to working only on KDE (and also helped out, e.g. LibreOffice), that's why it somehow didn't get booked as a KDE thing and didn't become a similar anecdote people cite now.
Gnome 2 was indeed pretty ok though not very comfortable for lack of configurability. Gnome 3 is really the problem which is why there's so many that replicate gnome 2, like cinnamon and mate.
Gnome 3 is really like KDE 4, too much messing around for the sake of it.
But another thing I really like about KDE is that there's not a giant behind it like redhat, they're free from commercial motives to make their own choices.
They do, but their resources are fairly limited so the methodology is abysmal. See https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/2021/02/15/shell-ux-change... for an example. They don't so much test with end users as gather anecdotes (and then largely ignore test results that contradict their existing design guidelines anyway).
them being professionals does not imply they're doing a good job. Lots of dumpster fires, across a broad range of industries, were designed by professionals.
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I loved GNOME2 back then but feels like something went wrong with GNOME3 regarding the whole project and how users reacted to the different UI. I’d say the classic Windows NT era UI (95, 98, 2000, Xp) was peak design so I’m glad KDE stick to that more or less and made it even better and modern.