this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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I honestly can't stand GNOME and I've given it several tries to try and either appreciate it or understand why others adore it. I don't get it. Like ok I want to open an application launcher or simply see my dock. default click on those odd looking buttons that represent your workspaces but also is your launcher/dock view? ok...I just want to open firefox why do I have to see an overview of my workspaces? I don't care about that I just want to open firefox. How come I can't customize it easily? why do I need to download extensions via my web browser to do so? ok time to upgrade GNOME...wait why are ALL my extensions now broken? Let me go to the GNOME forums or discord to get help...wait why am I getting chewed out by the devs for wanting to customize my GNOME experience? ok I'm going back to KDE.
KDE has also improved A LOT in the past year. it's a damn solid DE now. I primarily use Niri on my NixOS machine but I do have KDE installed also because every now and again I like going back to it to play around with and honestly...I'm starting to prefer Konsole over other terminals.
Or just press super and type "fir" and enter
Extensions are third party, meaning if they are broken you need to complain to the extension developer. If you want to use extensions on GNOME i recommend keeping to the popular ones (dock, justperfection...) as they are regularly updated, and to hold off from upgrading GNOME asap to give the extension developers time to update.
The thing about customizing is that it's never free, someone has to write in the feature and someone has to keep it up to date, which is why GNOME delegates a lot of its customization to third parties allowing a more stable experience and faster development.
I think the problem you have with GNOME is more about you refusing to learn new ways to interact with your pc and instead trying to mold GNOME into what you think the desktop experience should be, and that's always going to be an uphill battle.