A Week With GNOME As My Linux Desktop: What They Get Right & Wrong

[Passso]

You can't fix a complete lack of a cohesive experience with a config option.

That is the available point for me, others are (more or less) details.

I agree that KDE is doing "too much", too much visual, too many menus, too many customizations, too many apps etc.
And there is no "global vision" to force developers to calm down and see the result as a whole.

Anyway I love KDE for a working environment, because I need it to go fast and adapt the DE to my needs, not to adapt myself to whatever philosophy

For me Gnome is better at home, for beginners and to do basic stuff because it works and is simple, so I always recommend it when I am asked.

The only real pain I have is to work on a Windows 10 desktop, but that is out of topic.

[Passso]

Actually, it makes perfect sense! Since you have no task bar by default, it makes no sense to minimize windows. And maximize was always possible by double-clicking the window title. Thus, these buttons are a waste of space.
If you, however, feel the need for a task bar, it's easily possible to add it and to add the "missing" window buttons.

I really do not feel this as being an evolution. Globally only Unity found a good way to merge the desktop and tablet experience.

Gnome and Microsoft failed IMO, even if in both cases you have workaround, globally the experience is lowered. (KDE did not even tried )

[Passso]

You can't fix a complete lack of a cohesive experience with a config option.

You earn this point. KDE is doing "too much" and there is no cohesion. Every app must be "learned" so the time to adapt is increased.

Anyway I love it for work, because I can get the tool and the customization I need, I feel faster and free.

For home, basic stuff I prefer Gnome Unity because it just works. So I recommend them to beginners.

[blackiwid]

The title you use fits not really the content, its less a gnome review and in the introduction section you even talk about you testing fedora and not fedora in general but ok that beside just got me confused even more that is more like a gnome vs kde article and more abou kde where it needs to improve etc very kde centric gnome is only there to show whats wrong with kde.

Its k to do that I just say the content and the headline does not 100% fit together in my oppinion.

I also did not like your tone to much you kept it kind of in the green section but that is because in reality you love kde just are a bit sad in which state it is, I would not want to see a article about something you really deeply dislike, like a review of a earlier gnome version or something if your tone would got a bit worse there, than this it would be pure hating.

Then you have some statements like gnome enforces you a workflow, thats true for kde, too. Except kde enforces you to have a windows xp workflow and gnome something different, its both not very flexible, of course you can use tweak tools and settings to change that to a certain degree but not to radical.

I dont like Multimonitorsupport in gnome it was just not good enough. I think there is still no keyboard shortcut to change focus to enother desktop you can do it indirectly maybe with alt tab and when you focus the app on the other screeb but thats not good enough I tend to have at least 5 if not 10 20 apps open but I have 2 3 monitors, why would I tab to all them when there could be a non interactive single shortcut that does what I like.

I would rather use the mouse to change the screen that alt tab through 10 apps. and if that happend something really wrong happend. You never should be forced to use the mouse.

Now with my 4k Monitor I dont use a second monitor for linux anymore so that problem is at least for now gone for me.

Then you need a no titlebar extention thats there for gnome with the 50 50 layout it would then kind of work for me, now using a tilingwm.

I am not shure if I forgot a small thing, but mostly that was left what made me come back to tiling wms after retrying gnome. maximus2 is the one app and the other one was something like fasteranimations or so.

But still I think tiles concept is even on one monitor better at least in the implementation I am using I can basicly thread each half of the monitor like a seperate screen, its a bit like emacs you have buffers and windows. so you can always have the 2 windows beside each other 50% place taking even if you start the app it is automaticly 50% and on that side you had focus in gnome it will start randomly dymensiened and you have each time tile it.

then the search is better, I have a dedecated search to open windows with a list of open apps and there titles. I dont use browser tabs, so I can from another window type menu t week-with-gnome (most likely 2 to 4 letters would easily be enough) and it selects it by a substring or regex search then enter and I am here

I still find that regex search not so good than ido stuff in emacs because there it hides everything that fits not my typed in chars, thats with stumpwm, I am eager to look at guile-wm there is just no fedora package and I failed to start/install guix in a vm

[kigurai]

I really do not feel this as being an evolution. Globally only Unity found a good way to merge the desktop and tablet experience.

Gnome and Microsoft failed IMO, even if in both cases you have workaround, globally the experience is lowered. (KDE did not even tried )

It might sound like madness to remove something (minimize and taskbar) that we have used for a very long time, and take for granted.
But I can confidently say that apart from the first slightly uneasy steps with GNOME 3.0, I haven't missed either minimize or a taskbar at all.
You just do things a bit differently (not saying it is objectively better, although for me it is).

[duby229]

FWIW: As a KDE developer, I find there's a bunch of fine, valid criticism in this article, of areas where we clearly have some work to do (there's also a few things that make me go "Well, actually ...", but Luke already addressed some of those).

I enjoy making software, so I don't think flaws are a cause for despair: They're opportunities to put in some work to fix real problems, much like software development is one in general. Further, they're problems real enough for someone to notice them and point them out, which makes addressing them certainly worthwhile.

Rather than "We accept patches", then, I think the message should be (to no one in particular): If you're interested in fixing real problems and making a difference, consider signing up to be one of the team.

I just gained a lot of respect for you, not that my respect matters any. It's just that you are absolutely right.

I tend to be a critical person, sometimes in a confrontational way. And I absolutely hate it when a developer tells me that I have to fix their junk. IMO when a dev tells a critisizing user that they have to fix it themselves, that is really ignorant. It's totally anti-userbase. So the fact that you aren't insisting that end users have to fix problems themselves is a major plus.

[GreatEmerald]

What the hell, Ericg! This is not what I would have expected from you. For one, I agree with Luke_Wolf: the tone was too confrontational. You can point out the flaws without resorting to writing in all caps and language like "confusing, shocking, and non-intuitive", "mentality of apathy", "fsck" and "piece of crap". It's not even that it's there's strong wording there, but it's mostly because the whole article was just that. It's a rant, because you accented the negatives. Not "it can be improved, look how nice this looks" but rather "this is terrible, fix it".

But the worst part of the article, by far, is the headline. It's more misleading than Michael's article names. What it should have been named is "Visual issues with the KDE Applications 4 to 5 transition", or more aptly, "Overview of KDE VDG to-do list", because let's be honest, that's exactly what you covered here.

Also, you should probably go to the VDG forums and read through the posts there by the VDG staff. And look at their tone. And learn from it. The VDG forums, last I visited them, were the most warm and welcoming place I've been to for a long while. Especially shocking that the VDG, by definition, gets to deal with a lot of controversy. But they manage it really well by actively keeping the atmosphere positive and stopping flames before they start roaring. So an article like this does a real disservice to their goals.

The least you could have done is point out that everyone is welcome (and highly wanted) to submit their mockups to the VDG, and raise any such issue to the VDG, and will definitely get them fixed sooner or later. They don't ignore people and it's a real collaborative process. It's as easy, if not easier, than submitting bug reports!

I'll cover the specific issues from my perspective in a separate post.

[sjukfan]

But beyond that there are certain things that are objectively good, and objectively bad when it comes to user experience and design. Wasting whitespace? Objectively bad design. Prompting for root three times when you should only need it once?

I don't believe in objectivity when it comes to design. I only reboot once in every three months so I don't care what the login prompt look like. And others may want to be asked for the password as a reminder when they access sensitive information or run a command that might screw up the computer. Some people may love the simplicity of the clean GNOME UI, others want Awesome or some other tiling WM. And I don't really think you can use the same measurement for GNOME and Awesome because depending on what group you ask there will always be those who think it's the best/worst ever.

[sjukfan]

Meh... did the forum just eat my reply?

In short what I wrote was:
I don't believe in objectivity when it comes to design. You can't measure GNOME and Awesome after the same rules and no mater what group of users you'll ask there will always be those who think it's the best/worst experience ever.

[duby229]

Yes, defaults, and I stayed away from bashing Gnome Shell as a whole because, lets be honest, that's beating a dead horse. Everyone knows everyone's complaints about Gnome Shell. I tried to do something different by showing what Gnome does get -right-, and showing what KDE gets -wrong-.



You can't fix Muon with config tools and a view menu. You can't fix applications not creating kcm's. You can't fix the brightness and volume key pop ups. You can't fix a complete lack of a cohesive experience with a config option.

Isn't that sorta like the pot calling the kettle black? I know the intention of this article was to point out annoying things people will come across during daily usage so that's not a bad thing per say. But if you want to critisize things that can't be fixed then Gnome is by far worse. A lot worse.

edit: there is no valid way to measure desktop maketshare on linux. The only thing that anyone can do is trend watching. Trends obviously show gnome losing users fast. They probably have the lowest number of users since like 99 or 2000 or so. It -is- possible to say that is a side affect of their being more desktops to choose from. But the facts are most of them are gnome forks. You don't see KDE forks. There is no reason to do that. But every other month there is a new gnome fork. There has to be some valid reason why kde rarely gets forked, but gnome gets forked constantly. It's my opinion that people like gnome better, but hate the implementation.