GNOME is more keyboard-focused than KDE. It just also happens to have much better touch support.
Get this meme to /linuxsucks where it belongs.
In my experience, KDE Plasma is surprisingly actually better than Gnome for tablet use. You would think that Gnome’s more minimal and chunky UI would make it a better fit, but Plasma just has a lot more little usability QOL features.
This has been my experience as well. Fedora KDE is easier and more intuitive than Fedora GNOME on my Surface Go 2.
Did something change on the keyboard front? I love KDE but I can only use it comfortably on my Steam Deck with a horrible combination of Steam’s keyboard, Onboard and Maliit and all of them suck in their own little ways.
Not everyone is the same
Slightly off-topic, but this annoyed me during the Win 8.1/10 start screen era as well. Just because an interface is touch-friendlier doesn’t mean it can’t also be an improvement for keyboard/mouse users as well.
Then they ditched all that and made it a worse experience for everyone in Win 11, so un turn I ditched their mess and fully switched over.
Classic shell has been installed on all of my windows machines as part of my “make windows usable” loadout since i was basically forced to upgrade* from w7 to w10
Lmao that community is hilarious - it’s all the most blatantly biased low-brow cheap shots about Linux I’ve ever seen and is just being spammed by 1-2 haters all the time 🤣
And it can be even more keyboard focused with Pop Shell over the top. That adds tiling and window focus by shortcut, similar to i3-wm.
Lets not be deliberately obtuse, you’re clearly meant to be using it with your feet.
Just the left foot only
In a land where desktops can be ripped out and replace with ease - what’s the point in arguing? GNOME isn’t my thing but I’m glad it’s an option.
I gonna be absolutely honest,gnome is fantastic for laptops.
Yes, everything (really, everything) just works, even on funky hardware like those tablet-pc things.
Agree,It looks really nice on Laptops
Don’t even try to say GNOME is a touch screen design. I’ve used it with a touchscreen, it’s just bad design. What bothers me the most is that is close to being good if not for a couple of stupid decisions like having no system tray.
The system tray thing irks me to no end. Some apps still use one to control things and you have to use hacky plugins to get them to show. Other than that there’s a lot I do like about gnome. Plasma suits my needs more though. So much more you can do with it.
Yep. I don’t even want a proper system tray, just gimme a list with the apps that are still running with their windows closed. They can’t even do that.
That literally exists for Flatpaks
I know. It also exists for regular software but, as is tradition with GNOME, it uses its own stupid protocol instead of what everyone else uses so it doesn’t work for 80% of the software I use.
Ive changed my entire work flow because of this. On my laptop I use paperWM for infinite horizontal scrolling/tiling and “vertical” workspaces for organizing windows. Instead of minimizing windows, I just switch workspaces. Windows that need to be next to each other are on the same workspace, anything else is treated like a full screen app. It’s a little weird, but for productivity with a TouchPad it’s been an absolute game changer. Ican have a workspace dedicated to programming, obe thats just documents, one for each of my courses, one thats discord and music players, etc.
For a normal mouse, it’s a kafkaesque nightmare.
Same workflow here but on KDE. I even have an extension that sends any maximized screen to its own desktop and deletes the desktop when it’s closed or no longer maximized.
What is it?
Macsimize6 or something like that
GNOME looks like it is touch friendly, but try to run it on a tablet and it’s really fucking not. I had to DL a bunch of tweaks tools to make it useable at all and now the tablet breaks whenever there’s a Gnome update that the tweaks weren’t designed for.
Honestly I’d say the worst part is the osk. They need to treat it a bit more like phosh does. It’s sooooo far behind when compared to modern device osks. Sure there’s some extensions to help it out, but they don’t go far enough to make it decent on a tablet. And it feels incredibly clunky to use with gdm when signing in, where no extension can help it…
And it feels incredibly clunky to use with gdm when signing in, where no extension can help it…
That’s true. Windows also did this badly, on the same tablet, so I didn’t notice.
If KDE does better, I might switch. I think I would use my tablet un-docked more often if logging in wasn’t so clunky.
I run Gnome on Debian on a tablet, and I find it wonderful.
Of course, my only points of comparison, so far, are iOS, Android and Windows tablets. Gnome is (per my own arbitrary last use of each) quite a bit nicer than any of those, at least.
distro?
Fedora
k
Its not bad on a tablet. However I think the core design build around keyboard and mouse. (Mostly mouse/trackpad)
I absolutely love (slightly tweaked) gnome. Fight me if you want, I’m sick in bed and have time.
“Fight me if you want, I’m sick in bed and have time.”
I’m also sick and in bed, and this is such an appealing offer of a sparring match, but alas, I’ve never used Gnome
this makes you the ideal candidate for an internet argument !
Well, use the time to try it, I guess.
Man, they already said that they’re sick. Have some mercy!
Fight, fight, fight!
Yeah, it’s almost usable but I suspect most people don’t wanna deal with broken extensions every new release. Last time my extensions broke, all I had to do to fix them was changing the target version in the manifest. Clearly, there weren’t enough changes to the DE to warrant breaking them and they were just broken on purpose.
Yeah, it usually takes a week for the official versions of the extensions I use to work again after a gnome version update. It’s easily worked around, usually, but that hard break every update sucks.
I just dislike the way KDE structures it’s menus more, and while I suspect that I could tweak KDE to be something I like using, I also suspect that that would be much more annoying to fix for the next mayor Update.
I sometimes think about swapping over to i3, but I haven’t yet had the leisure to give it a try.
Do you mean the application menu? Not trying to evangelize here, it’s just that I almost never see it because Krunner is so integrated with everything in KDE that it feels like the intended way to launch stuff so I find it weird that the application menu bothers you.
If you mean the menus on the applications themselves, fair enough, I guess. I also don’t understand why they’re still just a regular app menu (File, Edit, etc…) but crammed into a single button.
Oh, yeah, that also annoyed me. I actually meant the settings menu, though. I have set up KDE for friends/family a few times, and depending on screen size and scaling, even in conditions that shouldn’t be edge cases, there where sometimes scrollbars in both directions.
I also just, kinda don’t like the vibe, I guess? That’s extremely subjective, I know, just something I noticed every time I worked with KDE.
prepare…smack!
I like gnome personally. It is all about simple inclusive design
I get distracted/overwhelmed fairly easily, so GNOME is a godsend. minimalistic top bar + on demand workspaces to throw my extra windows into = I can actually get stuff done.
That’s ok, we don’t kink shame around here.
Wh-what? Have you used GNOME before or just mad because they don’t have the shitty main menu copied from MS Windows?
I thought it was going to be a joke about Windows 8
I was expecting gnuImp.
Happy cake day
Thanks.
yw
Or 11
i like gnome, it looks good, is smooth, and does it’s job
Gnome is not really touch-centric, it’s more keyboard-crentric. Sure, the activity overview is great for touch. It’s even greater for the keyboard though. And I don’t like using the mouse a lot anyway
There’s a gnome for mobile branch that has what you’d expect from a good touch experience. Pretty sure the plan is to bring some of that work over to the main desktop branch at some point.
most of the things in gnome extensions should be built in and available from the settings. that being said there’s nothing stopping me from just using something else, hence why I use kde.
What is the difference between adding a extension and enabling a setting other than that a disabled feature is just bloat?
I mean any distro can serve the extension it wants
I don’t use GNOME, but from what I’ve read (and from experience with other software that has extensions) they often break when GNOME updates.
The features would break if they were built in.
GNOME has clear philosophy and they work for themselves, not for you so they decide what features they care to invest time and what features they don’t care about.
Having a standardised method for plugins is in my opinion good enough, nobody forces you to use extensions. And if you don’t want extensions to break, then wait till the extensions are ready prior updating GNOME.
The features would break if they were built in.
You can’t know that and I can’t imagine it would be true. If the plugins many folks find essential were incorporated into GNOME itself then they’d be updated where necessary as a matter of course in developing a new release.
GNOME has clear philosophy and they work for themselves, not for you so they decide what features they care to invest time and what features they don’t care about.
You’re not wrong! This is an arrogant and common take produced in poor taste though. A holdover from the elitism that continues to plague so many projects. Design philosophy leads UX decision making and the proper first goal for any good and functional design is user accessibility. This is not limited to accomodations we deem worthy of our attention.
Good artists set ego aside to better serve their art. Engineers must set pet peeves aside to better serve their projects. If what they find irksome gets in the way of their ability to build functionally better bridges, homes, and software then it isn’t reality which has failed to live up to the Engineer’s standards. This is where GNOME, and many other projects, fall short. Defenders standing stalwart on the technical correctness of a volunteer’s lack of obligation to those whose needs they ostensibly labor for does not induce rightness. It exposes the masturbatory nature of the facade.
Engineers have every right to bake in options catering to their pet peeves (even making them the defaults). That’s not the issue. When those opinions disallow addressing the accessibility needs of those who like and use what they’ve built there is no justification other than naked pride. This is foolish.
Having a standardised method for plugins is in my opinion good enough, nobody forces you to use extensions. And if you don’t want extensions to break, then wait till the extensions are ready prior updating GNOME.
I agree! Having a standardized method for plugins is good, however; the argument which follows misses the point. GNOME lucked into a good pole position as one of the default GNU/Linux DEs and has enjoyed the benefit of that exposure. Continuing to ignore obvious failures in method elsewhere while enshrining chosen paradigms of tool use as sacrosanct alienates users for whom those paradigms are neither resonant nor useful.
No one will force Engineers to use accessibility features they don’t need. Not needing them doesn’t justify refusing the build them. Not building them as able is an abdication of social responsibility. If an engineer does not believe they have any social responsibility then they shouldn’t participate in projects whose published design philosophy includes language such as:
Their walk isn’t matching their talk in a few areas and it is right and good to call them to task for it.
Post statement: This is coming from someone who drives Linux daily, mostly from the console, and prefers GNOME to KDE. All of the above is meant without vitriol or ire and sent in the spirit of progress and solidarity.
extensions (in my testing, typically in a VM of fedora or openSUSE) are a pain in the ass to use. it’s also difficult to find the one that I’m looking for because there’s generally several with the same name. something like a system tray (iirc the extension is “app indicators”) or having the dock always visible on the desktop (idk what the extension is called) are features that most people who don’t already use gnome rely on to some degree. these things are core functionality of most desktops precisely because most people use and like these features, and adding a few of the most popular features won’t add enough extra data to really be bloat.
quick sidenote, while typing this I realized the way I have been phrasing things may sound a little aggressive. it's not meant to, this is meant to be more of a breakdown of why I think what I do about gnome as a desktop. I'm not sure how to rephrase this to be less aggressive, so I'm leaving this bit right where I noticed it instead.I personally am very big on having all the customization I can get (kde user, obviously) but I actually did almost stick with gnome once. I tried vanilla is because orchid has just come out and while I was messing with it I found out that it had the dock extension available by default (was new to Linux at the time and didn’t know how to actually use extensions yet) and with that dock extension I didn’t mind gnome as much. the thing with gnome is that it has a lot of good ideas but it ruins a lot of them by only half-implementing what everyone else is already doing. most people would probably find it a lot more usable if it just had features that have been standard since literally the beginning of GUIs, and used to be standard in gnome.
Im not si much a customisation guy, but ended up with KDE and global apple theme, after all 🤭
But I see what GNOME is doing and support them, I think the Linux community as a whole profits from the work they do.
I agree with your opinion that, right now, it is very time consuming finding the right extensions that one need, but I think the problem is more the extension store having bad UI than extensions being bad as whole.
And what I meant is not that distributions are doing a great job right now, choosing what extensions to preinstall, more so that they are able to and that it would be a nice feature of a distro having some essential GNOME extensions preinstalled, even if default disabled.
Oh! A Gnome hate thread!
I’m in!
FUCKING GNOME>!!!111!!!ELEVEN
More like forcing no customization
You can change it up with gnome tweaks and extensions. By default you can set accent colors and the background. (Plus move apps around the dashboard)
But plugins break every update and gnome tweaks doesn’t let you change gnomes gtk theme anymore and from what I heard they added it in Gnome 3 bcs there was alot of drama
Extensions require time to be updated to support the newest gnome version. It is only any issue if you update right after the newest gnome release. It is better to stay on something stable anyway since you probably will find bugs in the latest and greatest.
As far a gnome tweaks is concerned it is still actively maintained and is needed for those who want to do more tweaking. It is important to note modern gnome is all libadwaita based which means it doesn’t use GTK themes. You can still set the theme for legacy apps but for libadwaita you need to set the colors you are looking for. The old style GTK is pretty much retired in gnome because it caused lots of inconsistent and non inclusive UI elements. Libadwaita makes everything the same and looks more modern than basically everything out there. (My opinion)
-
YEAH true I can see plugins being used on something like Debian.
-
Oh that’s why gnome tweaks got read of gtk theming I saw a forum post saying gnome devs don’t want customization especially they have this page: https://stopthemingmy.app/
I don’t want customization. The biggest users of gnome is probably enterprise Linux. In the enterprise or business space you want reliability and predictably.
Ok that would make sense why Most Enterprise oriented distros only ship Gnome
Funny enough Xfce4 is also commonly used as well.
Both gnome and xfce4 has kiosk modes and settings which allows an admin to lock the system down. Xfce4 tends to be a little more favored since it is easier to make it look like Windows.
Of course it depends on the deployment and company. Almost everyone is going to be on Windows since it is the easiest to manage from a desktop perspective. Like it or not group policy is pretty hard to compete with. I do think Wayland and XDG desktop portals will definitely help make Linux a more appealing option but at the end of the day business just want something standard and supported.
-
