GNOME 3 is truly phenomenal, not enough people give it credit for being a nearly perfect touchscreen OS with powerful desktop options front-and-center. By comparison, the new GNOME 40 release feels like a lazy attempt at trying to be MacOS, which is definitely not what GNOME meant to me. Now that the majority of extensions are broken again, it's even harder to tune it for my personal workflow. I had to ditch it for KDE, unfortunately. I hope they head in a more interface-agnostic approach, for the future.
> Now that the majority of extensions are broken again, it's even harder to tune it for my personal workflow. I had to ditch it for KDE, unfortunately.
This is what pushed me to KDE from GNOME after spending more than a decade hating it. Turns out that I love Plasma Desktop. My tolerance for being unable to use my desktop at all because GNOME developers decided to break their extension API again is gone.
I was pushed to Plasma after the 40 update too, and I've been really happy with how things are turning up these days. Great features are being added in weekly, they actually address bugs instead of tagging decades-old problems as wontfix, and it's way more flexible than GNOME. I can create more elaborate desktops with bog-standard Plasma than is possible with modded GNOME, and I can trust they'll work more reliably than an out-of-the-box GNOME install. Unfortunately, it's still not a great option for tablet/touchscreen PCs, but I can see a lot of progress coming down the pipeline with Wayland. Overall though, it's quite lovely. I can near-perfectly recreate Mojave with extra bells and whistles, plus perpetual 32-bit support and long-term support.
I want Plasma to be good. I'm frustrated at kwin's breakage and lag on Nvidia (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=443951 fixed), the years-old data-corruption heisenbugs I've encountered (kxmlgui toolbar corruption: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=395497) and the instability of some apps (plasmashell crashes occasionally, plasma-systemmonitor crashes quite often when processes terminate in tree view). And it's difficult to fix these bugs because many KDE apps suffer from complexity in apps and libraries (any app involving both QML and C++ code), often accompanied by legacy code sometimes misusing inheritance (kxmlgui) and misused or no longer understood (kxmlgui, libksysguard), or churning and replacing mature code with untested rewrites (plasma-systemmonitor).
I'm trying Xfce on my desktop now (after using it a bit on my laptop). It's a refreshing experience so far, with a panel written in a compiled language rather than QML/JS with unreliable GPU acceleration, and it seems relatively stable so far. They've added window snapping with Super+Arrow or mouse dragging, and the docklike plugin (https://gitlab.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-docklike-plugin) is a good replacement for KDE or Windows 7+'s icon-pinning-based taskbar.
There are some issues (like the long-standing https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/libxfce4ui/-/issues/1, which I hope can be fixed but don't know for sure). But I feel Xfce is much more stable to begin with (in my experience so far, at least), meaning that fixing them is less urgent. I hope the codebase is understandable enough for me to work on it (I think Xfce apps are written in C, which I can read but I'm not super fluent in writing).
I also don't know if Xfce will survive in a future Wayland-based world.
"I can near-perfectly recreate Mojave with extra bells and whistles"
I think the GP comment addressed that, e.g. "don't compare it to macOS". In my experience, GNOME is best if you don't try to fight with it and don't try to install a bunch of extensions. You have to adapt your personal workflow to it, not the other way around. If you come in expecting to use a macOS workflow exactly as it is then yeah, you would be disappointed, I think that's a case of missed expectations.
Don't cast aspersions. I did have a setup that I enjoyed with GNOME, but then when 40 came it was broken. I'm complimenting KDE for it's flexibility, which is something GNOME objectively lacks.
And please stop responding to my comments. You've already shown yourself to be incapable of discussing problems with me in earnest, I have no intention of replying if you're just going to point the blame back at me without addressing the ways GNOME can improve.
The thing is, I agree with you mostly, KDE is much better if you want to do a "build your own desktop" type of things. I don't know that GNOME really has any interest in filling that niche when KDE already does it so well. For me at least, I don't think I would try to fight that uphill battle trying to add that to GNOME, it would be a lot easier just to contribute to KDE. I'm making an honest effort to reply to you in earnest. I don't think it is fair to the reader for me not to respond if I have an answer to some of the frustrations you have expressed. On another site I would say just block me, but on here you may have to ignore my comments if you don't want to continue the conversation.
My point is: If you relied a lot of extensions, it seems likely that was the source of your troubles. We can discuss how to improve the extensions, if that's what you're interested in. Or we can discuss KDE, whatever you want.
I have explained why I can't do that, I also think that stopping would be against the HN guidelines:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Even as we disagree, I'm making an honest effort to make my comments more thoughtful and substantive, I ask that you please extend the same courtesy. If you think there is something incorrect with my comments then the best way to deal with that would be to present more information that could change my mind, not shut the discussion down.
Edit: And I have not pointed the blame back at you. I mentioned what the source of your problems likely was, that doesn't mean it's anyone's fault. If you want to discuss real solutions then let's do that, but please let's do it objectively and without casting blame.
I've already made my point: GNOME used to be my favorite desktop, now it is my least favorite. Over the past 4 comments I've suggested several reasons for why this might be, none of them hateful towards the GNOME project in any way. The only antagonist has been you, the person insisting that the issue is with me, not the desktop: that somehow, by removing features and breaking functionality that worked fine, it's my fault for not assimilating into your common idea of a desktop. As I can see by scrolling through your comment history, it looks like a lot of people share my sentiment. I will give you one final explanation before completely forgetting about you altogether. I'm done entertaining your time-wasting, gas-lighting nonsense, and I'm not going to let you play Mr. High-road to help you feel better about patronizing someone on Hacker News.
- GNOME's philosophy and leadership is overtly, undeniably authoritarian. They lock people out of using apps by refusing to distribute via any method other than Flatpak, they lock down their desktop to make it harder for modders to do what they want, and they completely ignore their power-users who prefer more options and functionality. On top of that, their "my way or the highway" approach is completely user hostile, further evidenced by arguments like this, where you refuse to take notes and offer genuine solutions for the needs of the user. For everything that GNOME copies from Apple, "you're holding it wrong" should have been left on the cutting room floor.
- GNOME's featureset is encroaching on basic system functionality, which has not only proven to be a pain in the ass, but it's actually counter-intuitive to basic UNIX functionality. Efforts like dconf have legitimately done nothing for this community, yet their dumpster-fire glow can be seen for miles. As a developer, trying to conform to the GNOME spec is pointlessly complicated and ultimately meaningless. I still write everything with GTK3 and zero GNOME conformance just as a middle finger to the direction they're headed in. Plus, GNOME's dependencies are bloated, only exacerbated by projects like Flatpak that containerize and further bloat the runtime. There have been a plethora of font-related issues since pango was 86'd, and no shortage of graphical issues on both Wayland and x11. It's crazy to me that the GNOME desktop has had one of the ugliest transitions to a window server they've been advocating for years.
- GNOME has just been regressing. Tools that used to work, like Glade, now do not. Extension stability has gotten worse, which is a shame since extensions are undeniably a part of GNOME. You can tell me that they're unsupported, you can shout at me for using them, but if your users have to create their own custom modding options for your desktop, is that not a signal that you're feature-incomplete? How do you look at that and interpret it as everyone else's fault, because they were never supported in the first place. Same goes for user themes, shell patches and tweak tools. They are all a testament to the fact that people want to extend GNOME, so your next logical step should not be blocking them out. At this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if you told me QT apps were unsupported because they're "not a part of the overall GNOME vision."
- GNOME's got people like you. What do I mean by that? It's not an insult, but I feel like if I don't explain this to you I'll be persecuted until the end of time. When interacting with the community, your job is not to refute other people's complaints. Your job is to listen, and see where people disagree with your philosophy. You cannot pretend like there aren't pain-points in GNOME, so trying to delegitimize other people's experiences will only frustrate them and drive them away. THIS is how people really start to despise the GNOME desktop. If I level a complaint about KDE, XFCE, or hell, even the goddamn Elementary desktop, I generally get a thoughtful response with someone showing me how to resolve the issue, or pointing to an upstream patch that fixes it. Apparently, some people care about maintaining a usable desktop. You can call things like thumbnails in the filepicker inconsequential, but don't come crying to me when you can't understand why people have an irrational hatred of your desktop. The issue starts with attitude, and the culture of GNOME is quite obviously not improving. No amount of CoC pull requests can fix that, especially when project leaders are flying off the handle at System76 for trying to improve on their desktop. It's a horrible look.
I really hope you reply with a long-winded essay in the name of saving face. I really hope you ignore everything I've written like you ignored my simple request for you to stop. At this point, I feel like my assumptions have been reinforced: I still have yet to meet a GNOME developer who was not insistent on being right and harassing people with legitimate criticism. You've seen my comments: I've spent far too much effort trying to be constructive, when all I'd be told in the end is that it's my fault for not using it right. Why bother? Why even have these discussions if we're just going to end them with a pointless us-vs-them fight where you ultimately tell me to stop using GNOME if I disagree. The least you could do is point me in the direction of someone who's capable of making change, because fighting like this wastes both of our time. Yet, you hunt me down on every comment as if my opinion is haram, and needs to be struck down with links to desktop's philosophy or whatever. I don't care. I simply need a computer that does the job: GNOME doesn't do it anymore.
So, all your assumptions about me are completely wrong, and you've also posted a number of things that are incorrect. Please avoid making assumptions about other people that you don't know, it's extremely rude. You are grouping me in with other people that I don't agree with and it's not fair to me. I am not a GNOME developer nor am I insisting that the issue is with you, nor am I hunting you down. I am simply commenting on HN threads about my interests, as are you. We happen to be both be interested in this, is it fair for either one of us to try and shut the other out of the discussion? I don't think it is. If somebody else made a similar comment as you I would also comment on that as I have done in several other comments here. I am not interested in refuting your complaints, nor am I interested in delegitimizing pain points in GNOME, I could list a number of my own pain points if you wanted me to.
Also I could actually go through each one of your issues and mention what you may have missed, or ways that one of us could help improve or fix things, and I can actually point you in the direction of people who can make change. You've mentioned some real pain points and you deserve an answer for those, if that's what you really want. But you have to stop attacking me here, and I would need assurance from you that you would actually read them. I would also really appreciate an apology for all the false things you just said about me, that hurts my feelings. I'm a real person, I get upset, so please just remember that. It's not fair to take out your frustrations with some other developers on me. Edit: If you want me to start, I'll apologize first. I'm sorry that my previous comments were taken badly. I didn't mean them that way.
Anyway I was thinking about this and I decided I want to respond to some of your comments to correct some of the wrong information in them. This isn't for me, it's for the reader who might get the wrong idea, and it's for you in case you change your mind and decide you want to discuss this. If you don't want to believe me and you still think I'm doing this just to be a smug jerk and make myself look good, well, I'll say it right out. I don't matter, I'm not a person of importance, I'm not here to promote my projects or my company or my blog or my twitter or anything. I only comment here to help people and help resolve the technical issues. That's it. I don't care how you think this makes GNOME look because I don't represent that project, if you take my comments as some kind of slight against something else unrelated to what I'm saying then that's on you. It's none of my business if you've got an axe to grind, I can only try to mitigate the damage. I'm going to avoid the personal stuff because I think I already responded to those.
"GNOME's philosophy and leadership is overtly, undeniably authoritarian."
This is totally wrong, GNOME explicitly doesn't have any BDFL or CTO or anything like that. It's more of an old school open source community like that. KDE is structured much the same way. The way it works is that the maintainers of each individual project are pretty much empowered to do whatever they want. Yes, this means they have authority of their individual projects. No, it does not mean they are enforcing that authority on you or they will never collaborate with anyone. A consensus has to be reached, if you don't want to deal with that then you still can do whatever you like with the project and the code, that's the point of open source. You could later collaborate with upstream or spend your volunteer time however you like really, what you can't do is boss anyone else around and tell them what to do with their volunteer time. As you've noticed, they probably won't take kindly to that. And I've personally experienced that on every project when you reach their limit: for example if you went to KDE and said "I don't like this, rewrite it in Java and make it more like GNOME" they probably wouldn't be too keen to take that suggestion. So I don't think you're being charitable when you try to label GNOME in this way.
"They lock people out of using apps by refusing to distribute via any method other than Flatpak"
This is totally wrong, pretty much every distro I've seen is shipping GNOME apps. I think there is a misconception here that GNOME (or KDE, or any desktop really) has anything to do with distro packages. They never have, that's up to the distro to handle. You can help out here by doing the packaging for your distro, if the app is open source then nobody can lock you out from doing that.
"they lock down their desktop to make it harder for modders to do what they want"
This makes no sense to me, the code is all open source. For me it has been fairly trivial to modify any GNOME app. You may want to try GNOME Builder which is purposefully designed to streamline the process.
"and they completely ignore their power-users who prefer more options and functionality."
I don't think those users are being ignored, if they were then extensions wouldn't exist at all. Are there issues with extensions? Yes, but that's a different conversation which I'll mention later.
"On top of that, their 'my way or the highway' approach is completely user hostile, further evidenced by arguments like this, where you refuse to take notes and offer genuine solutions for the needs of the user."
You are ignoring my comments. I've actually suggested multiple times that we could discuss genuine solutions, I just did in the post you replied to.
"GNOME's featureset is encroaching on basic system functionality, which has not only proven to be a pain in the ass, but it's actually counter-intuitive to basic UNIX functionality. Efforts like dconf have legitimately done nothing for this community, yet their dumpster-fire glow can be seen for miles"
This doesn't really make sense to me and I don't understand what you mean counter-intuitive to basic unix functionality. Dconf is just a file in your home directory. It can be controlled by command line tools and environment variables just like anything else in Unix/Linux. Also you do not even have to use Dconf, you can change the configuration backend although it may take some work. If someone is interested I can suggest ways to do this.
"I still write everything with GTK3 and zero GNOME conformance just as a middle finger to the direction they're headed in."
From my own experience I would advise not to do this. It's making things more difficult for yourself for bad reasons. I've tried to develop projects out of spite before and it didn't get far, it just hurt me, it hurt my users and it wasted everyone's time. It's best to use whatever makes you the most productive and don't worry about what others are doing.
"GNOME's dependencies are bloated, only exacerbated by projects like Flatpak that containerize and further bloat the runtime"
I can't agree with this, one of the reasons I think Flatpak has taken off is because it minimizes the runtime. The Flatpak SDK is actually smaller than my distro's GNOME packages. Yes GNOME does have a lot of libraries if you look at all of them but so does KDE, that's the price you pay for having a lot of features. And I think all those libraries have been a boon to app developers, they seem to really like using them.
"It's crazy to me that the GNOME desktop has had one of the ugliest transitions to a window server they've been advocating for years."
Yeah me too but the work is hard. Sadly X11 has caused some very real and serious technical debt that everyone is still paying down. Also I don't know what you mean Pango was 86'd. Pango is still around.
"GNOME has just been regressing. Tools that used to work, like Glade, now do not."
I assure you, nobody is particularly happy that Glade doesn't work anymore. The project has suffered from a serious lack of contributors and there is only one or two people working on the replacement. The GUI building functionality in GTK4 is actually a massive improvement but that's also made it technically difficult to bring a new GUI builder over to it. If somebody wanted to help out with it I'm sure that would be appreciated.
"Extension stability has gotten worse, which is a shame since extensions are undeniably a part of GNOME. You can tell me that they're unsupported, you can shout at me for using them"
This again is not helpful. I assure you nobody is happy that extensions are unstable, and nobody is happy to be making users upset every release when their extensions break. I'm not shouting at you for using them but you deserve to know: they're still unstable for very real reasons and you are making things more difficult for yourself by trying to push back against this rather than just acknowledging the limitations of the system and working within them. It's non-trivial to take an extension and make it supported. People are doing ongoing work on resolving this but it's a very hard problem, I think they're still looking for help too. I can suggest ways to help out here.
"but if your users have to create their own custom modding options for your desktop, is that not a signal that you're feature-incomplete?"
You could look at it this way but IMO the problem with this line of thinking is that some extensions conflict with each other. You can look in the extension list right now and see multiple extensions that just aren't compatible and will never work with each other because they fundamentally change the GUI in different ways. Just look at how many custom dock extensions there are for example. You could say "well just build in a dock and make it customizable" but that wouldn't make everybody happy either because the extensions allow a lot more customization than would be possible with just a built-in dock. So in that way it's not really possible to ever make it feature complete, some people are always going to disagree about how this goes. Plasma has the same issue and they sort of deal with it by having a large choice of Plasma Widgets, it would be nice if GNOME had something like that but it's difficult because GNOME is architected somewhat differently than Plasma and extensions are technically more powerful than Plasma Widgets.
"Same goes for user themes, shell patches and tweak tools. They are all a testament to the fact that people want to extend GNOME, so your next logical step should not be blocking them out."
I don't know what is meant here by blocking them out. All these tools still exist. And theming has seen improvements, GNOME 42 is finally getting a real dark mode and not a hack like the old dark theme setting is. Yes, they're finally catching up to KDE here after years. The changes there should benefit user themes, although user themes will always probably be unsupported and risk breakage because fundamentally they are doing things that the app developer didn't intend and didn't test for. That's not app developers doing it to be hostile, it's an actual technical limitation with themes: if you reskin an app then you have infinite choices of colors/icons/shapes/etc that you could plug in and it's not realistic for app developers to test for and anticipate every single possible combination that everyone is going to want to use. Yes I understand that it's frustrating these things are not supported and can break sometimes but the reason it is like that is because of lack of resources. If there was a lot more people working on themes and testing them and fixing the issues then maybe it would go faster and some more theming options could become officially supported. But in order to do that and have it work then people are going to have to compromise here and only focus on a few things at a time, like I said it's not going to be technically possible to support infinite combinations of themes and have all of them work well.
"If I level a complaint about KDE, XFCE, or hell, even the goddamn Elementary desktop, I generally get a thoughtful response with someone showing me how to resolve the issue, or pointing to an upstream patch that fixes it"
I don't think I can point you towards working upstream patches but I can point you towards people that are thinking about the issues and working on them. I referred to this before but part of the problem here is that the things you're asking for are technically challenging, it's not a matter of just here's a 100 line patch and it's fixed. These are conversations and projects that need to happen over long periods of time with collaboration from many people. And when many of them are volunteers that are only available sporadically then it can be tough to get them all aligned in a timely manner.
"You can call things like thumbnails in the filepicker inconsequential"
I have never said it's inconsequential, in fact my feeling is the opposite. It should be fixed but that is another thing that's not technically easy to do. There actually is a much longer technical conversation we could have here about this but it's not possible to have it when someone is just bringing it up as a talking point against GNOME.
"The issue starts with attitude, and the culture of GNOME is quite obviously not improving. No amount of CoC pull requests can fix that, especially when project leaders are flying off the handle at System76 for trying to improve on their desktop."
Please don't assume the opinions of one or two developers is shared by everyone. I wasn't happy with how the System76 situation was handled and I've actually been trying to help reduce the heat, and I know that some GNOME developers also weren't happy with it either and wish it could have gone down better. But I am not a project leader so maybe that doesn't matter to you.
"Why even have these discussions if we're just going to end them with a pointless us-vs-them fight where you ultimately tell me to stop using GNOME if I disagree."
I don't understand what this has to do with GNOME. If you use KDE and you find you really don't like it, then you'll stop using it and use something else. If you use Windows 11 and you find you really don't like it, then you'll stop using it and use something else. And so on. Or would you force yourself to use them and be miserable? I wouldn't want you to do that. I'm not telling you this like it's a fight, every one of us has a real choice to make about what our preferences are and it's a personal decision that nobody else can make for us. If something is going to take years to fix then I'm trying to do the responsible thing and tell you that you'll have to either change your expectations, or you'll have to go spend your time elsewhere because waiting is not going to be worth it. Yeah I understand that's not what you want to hear but I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that everything is fine and it's going to be finished tomorrow. You are going to have to exercise some patience here. That's just me being honest and not trying to bullshit you.
And I want to reiterate, I have no personal attachment to GNOME. I think it's good at some things. KDE is also good. I've praised KDE several times in this comment thread. If you really like KDE then that's what you should use. I'm very happy to recommend it. It has helped me when GNOME was not able to do some things I wanted, and GNOME has helped me when KDE was not able to do some other things I wanted. I don't think it's feasible to expect them both to do all the same things, they are two different projects with two different goals.
GNOME has a major governance problem; the devs don't seem to care about anyone else in the GNOME ecosystem. Thumbnails in the file picker is such an egregious example it's become a huge joke in the linux community.
It amazes me that GNOME is still the default DE on so many distros, especially as KDE has so many sane defaults and makes for a smoother transition for users coming from Windows.
I see many comments to this effect, but I think it's a misconception. I really doubt changing the governance is going to get issues like thumbnails fixed. From my perspective, what is actually missing is a lack of money and/or qualified volunteers.
Maybe if they'd quit genuflecting to boondoggles like OPW to the point of bankruptcy they'd have more money? And even better, maybe more people would donate?
I don't understand how this is related, the FAQ explains that was a one time accounting error that was resolved.
"As a result of these issues, we have only just now finalized our 2014 budget. In the meantime, we made assumptions based on previous years' incomes and expenditures, and we authorized expenditures for this year based on those assumptions. Those assumptions proved to be more optimistic than reality. In addition, while our outgoing payments to interns must be strictly timed, the incoming payments from sponsoring organizations are very fluid, thus we have had to front the costs of OPW. Fronting these costs has resulted in a budget shortfall.
"The situation has already improved as some 2014 Advisory Board fees and outstanding OPW invoices have been paid. The board expect more to be paid within the next 4 weeks. If there are no unexpected issues and no delays, the freeze should be lifted by July."
The foundation didn't go bankrupt. Also:
1. The foundation doesn't (currently) even fund any developers despite having resolved those issues, because developers are pretty expensive.
2. I wasn't referring to the foundation specifically anyway. If you don't want to support the foundation you can just donate to a developer/project individually, if they are open to it.
3. I don't think the issue can be reduced to lack of donations. Donations are good but aren't really a reliable funding source. A healthy project usually needs other funding sources than just donations.
The lack of backwards compatibility with extensions is probably my number one issue with Gnome. Every release breaks every extension. I wish they would commit to stable APIs.
I used GNOME 1.0, since the early days, even tried to contribute to Gtkmm back in the day, and now run XFCE on my travel netbook despite my usual C rants.
Because having a JavaScript driven desktop, and being forced to install extensions even for basic stuff is a no go for me, I rather use something that fully embraces C.
