I know Gnome is the default on popular distros: Fedora, Ubuntu, Rhel, Pop OS (it’s Cosmic Desktop yes but it is still based on Gnome)…etc. But Gnome just doesnt work for me. I would pick XFCE - stable and no BS.
Before Manjaro and their cetificate shenanigan, I used to use their XFCE version. At the time, it was marketed as the “Flagship Manjaro version”. I went 4 years without any problems and I did tinker a lot, just couldnt get their XFCE to break.
After a tough Arch or Gentoo installs, I just want to put XFCE on and call it a day.
What about you guys?
For those of us that expect room to breathe and make our machine work for us than the other way around, we feel like Gnome takes a lot of liberties away for the sake of “simplicity.” There is so much missing from Gnome that is present in most other DEs and even custom WM setups.
The primary contributors who work under The Gnome Foundation also come off as controlling and arrogant in a lot of cases, and refuse to take community feedback to heart, whereas KDE has literal summits to get user feedback on major core features we want to see which then later get added to their backlogs and sprints as Epics. Gnome acts a lot like Apple in the sense that they’re very much “we know what’s best for you better than you do.”
Now, the singular area I can give Gnome true props in is their accessibility functionality, but that’s primarily it. KDE’s accessibility is fairly behind by about a decade in comparison.
That’s just my take, take it as you will.
I also wouldn’t have as much of an issue with gnome for removing features if they also made the right design decision in place of those features.
They want to remove features to make things easier on them, not users.
can you exemplify a few of the things you miss?
I miss old Gnome. I wish they’d stuck with the old Gnome 2 design philosophy but breathed new modern design principals into it, instead of trying to go the Ubuntu Unity route. Maybe something like Cinnamon but even more flexible and feature-rich.
Use Mate. It is based on the old Gnome 2
I mean, we already know the solution to gnome’s crappy design decisions is to use something else.
This comment chain is specifically about criticizing gnome.
I was waiting for someone to say that.
I like that Mate is a thing, but like I said, I’m looking for something thats based on it but as if its had the same 20 years of enhancements everything else got.
The closest thing to that I’ve found is quite literally KDE. So I use KDE.
There are also plenty of features that gnome has that kde and other desktops and wms don’t have. It’s all about tradeoffs and what’s acceptable or necessary for you.