linuxmemes

Just use KDE Plasma

The other week had a GNOME dev reply to a thread of mine on mastodon stating that the users desire to select a default terminal emulator was an "edge case" and it was beneath GNOME. then all the GNOME fanboys came out to his defense.

It's an insufferable DE and community.

I like how GNOME looks and functions for the most part, but I really wish the world provide more options instead of whatever design philosophy they think needs enforced.

I don't use gnome because I don't think a desktop use interface should be designed for iPads

I think Gnome is the most beautyful Desktop out there. But it's UX drives me crazy. I tried it a few times but never could get used to it. I always needed extensions to customize it to my needs. But that's also what I want to avoid because extensions might break in the future. Therefore, Gnome is simply not the right Desktop for me.

But I'm happy for everyone who likes to use Gnome. The great thing about Linux: We have a choice!

I'm having a great time on GNOME, even without any extensions at all!

There are so many things the Linux kernel project does just right. One of them is "never break user space".
Unfortunately most projects completely fail to get why this is important.
I think one of the worst examples is the enormous setback it caused when Python was "upgraded" from 2 to 3, which meant breakage of huge amounts of libraries, that were never fixed, and was extremely detrimental to Python.

The kernel respects user-space, but actual user front ends do not!?!?!
KDE generally does the same when they upgrade to new versions of QT.

GNOME is great but people recommending it to beginners need to make it clear that there is only minor customization, and that major customization / extensions will cause headaches.

Plasma is highly customizable out of the box. It's personal preference in the end of course.

This is why I stopped using Gnome. After every update most of my extensions stopped working. Some took ages to get up to date or were abandoned. And there was no simple way to enable all extensions that the update disabled, having to manually enable them one by one. Maybe that has changed now? It's been yearsnow... Not that I would go back anyway, tiling managers is where it's at.

Dunno, I saw GNOME 3 run like molasses on my PC, went "ok, this might be lost cause", went with LXDE and then XFCE, and now I'm like "if it's a beefy proper PC I'll go with KDEPlasma and if it's, like, very obsolete system I'll, dunno, go with XFCE".

GNOME is just opinionated. I get it, it was kinda vaguely modeled after Mac OS, which is kinda an opinionated desktop environment, but the thing is, it's even more opinionated than Mac OS ever was. The thing about (early!) Mac OS X was "hey, we have this slick desktop environment but also some power user features you might want to use. But we're not forcing you to!" (Kinda like GNOME 2!) ...GNOME has been kinda sweeping those under the rug, in my opinion.

Which is why Plasma is better

We all got choices, that's what I like about Linux. KDE seems to run great for most people, for me it always seems to bug out and act super janky (the panel editor in particular would bug out and crash constantly, I could never get the damn thing to where I liked it). If it was more stable for me I'd probably use it, I love customizing my system. I've tried making it work a few times, never seems to click.

GNOME's extensions may break on updates from time to time but my day to day experience with it is much nicer. While more rigid it's a lot more polished and doesn't crash out on me just using the interface. I like the layout of it. I'm glad KDE works for so many of you guys, but I'll stick with GNOME until a better option comes around.

That said, if anyone has a better suggestion for a desktop environment I'm all ears.

It really is a shame that they force you to update to the new version. If only there was some way to continue using the existing Gnome version until the extensions have been updated by their authors.