Clear Linux Preparing To Move To GNOME 3.36, Dropping Their Desktop Customizations

[Hibbelharry]

It's good to have at least one desktop environment for local installs for experimenting (virtual box). GNOME is good and polished DE, and not way too complex like KDE. For real servers, I doubt anybody would have any graphical interface installed.

From my experience in the environments I participated or participate in:

The usecase of the box heavily influences if a DE is installed. I know a lot of servergrade boxes with a DE, some with just some X11 Apps and no DE, some without any. If you have single machines fulfilling a specific purpose you often have DEs installed and a graphical login. Due to being no part of special focus you often find the default DE of the chosen distro. Noone customizes the DE on those. If you scale some app into a cluster you tend to be without a DE and use some webbased orchestation tools or made-to-fit solutions.

Many GUI Apps are usable without a DE by piping them through a network link. Pure X11 Forwarding is crappy like hell, because outside of any local LAN it takes up too much bandwidth and does have too much latency to be useful, it should really be buried. Even more high bandwidth WAN links don't put those issues really away, it's just crap.

VNC is useable if VNC is not VNC: some advanced implementations using more than the standardized protocol work well enough, but thats putting "VNC" itself as a standard ashame. You need to think which VNC client was the right one to maintain the server you're focussing on.

I often use X2go (which is older nomachine stuff) to launch a xterm, allowing me to fire up some graphical tools from there at good speed. For example baobab is one of my special friends in quickly analyzing what folder on a disk suddenly exploded in size due to some malfunction.

If you need to work locally or use the BMC to offer a remote console or do have a network KVM attached: the current Aspeed BMCs do have enough power to runy any DE if you want to. The current pool of servers I maintain are mostly HPE DL380 and alikes going back to Gen5, thats early intel "Core i" technology, and you can basically bear any DE on all of those.

[Slithery]

For example baobab is one of my special friends in quickly analyzing what folder on a disk suddenly exploded in size due to some malfunction.

Use ncdu?

Personally I don't have X/Wayland installed on any of my servers.

[Creak]

You want your distro manager to take care of your favorite DE: give them $$$!

Whether you like it or not, this is how a company can continue to pay their employees for their desktop branch. The server branch is easier since companies are more willing to pay for that.

I don't use Ubuntu, but when they moved from Unity to GNOME I gave them 70 US$ (simply because I think it's a good move, and I think that 100$ in a bit more than 10 years is not that much compared to a Windows license). I would like to give to Fedora, my actual distro, but I don't see a donation link anywhere

I'll paraphrase what a few people already said here: if a company has employees dedicated to the desktop side of their distro, they need to focus on fewer things, and focusing on one DE is the most rational thing to do.

Edit: and to put money where my mouth is, I just gave 50 US$ to GNOME.

[Mark Rose]

As long as I can use KDE on my desktop, I'm fine (Gnome is frustratingly limited).

Servers and containers don't need a DE, and I was surprised Clear contained one at all, but it does make some things easier at times.

[Candy]

Same trend on most distributions these days.
RHEL deprecated alternative desktops.
CentOS drops alternative desktops.
Fedora reduces testing on alternative desktops.

It looks differently than you thing.

Fedora, RHEL and most likely CentOS are having big issues with maintainers leavong, dropping or orphaning their projects. If you pay close attention to the Fedora Devel Mailinglist, then you see nearly all 1-2 Weeks that there is an announcement of of Packages that needs new maintainers or not responding mainainers in general.

So your initial "yes the above named ones will focus on THE LINUX DESKTOP" at then end is nothing more than losing more and moe support from volunteers and maintainers who keep doing the packages. Maintainers who simply left for another operating system, different distribution or simply don't agree with the movement that one of these said distros take.

[Guest]

As long as I can use KDE on my desktop, I'm fine (Gnome is frustratingly limited).

Servers and containers don't need a DE, and I was surprised Clear contained one at all, but it does make some things easier at times.

The most of the users go with "out of the box" settings. Some amount of users would set their own shortcuts. KDE might offer a great amount of customizability, but GNOME offers much more polished and clean look out of the box. Maybe, I would trade GNOME for the Unity/Lomiri desktop. As of version 4, KDE looks as a toy (for me).

[GNOME_Shill_3.x]

As long as I can use KDE on my desktop, I'm fine (Gnome is frustratingly limited).

If you're trying to use a feature that GNOME doesn't have, then you don't need that feature. We will tell you what you need, and you will adapt your workflow, or we will banish you from our garden.

[skeevy420]

The most of the users go with "out of the box" settings. Some amount of users would set their own shortcuts. KDE might offer a great amount of customizability, but GNOME offers much more polished and clean look out of the box. Maybe, I would trade GNOME for the Unity/Lomiri desktop. As of version 4, KDE looks as a toy (for me).

That's something I have to agree with. Since coming back to KDE after using GNOME for the past few months I cannot get my fonts and scaling to look right. For the past couple days I've been trying every combination of settings I can think of and I just can't get it nailed down. I'm not the biggest fan of what they offer by default, but it's hard to deny that it does provide a nice and polished experienced, especially with 3.34 and up. Can't say I blame Clear for dropping whatever plugins they were using since they just add stuff people may or may not want as well as they add unnecessary testing and maintenance upkeep for the maintainers. I know that I'd rather have a plain GNOME experience that I can customize to my liking versus it coming with extra plugins so I see it as a win-win situation.

But I'm in a weird place today...my old go-to setup for the past 10+ years isn't working for me anymore and dammit if I'm not gonna install something GNOME-based after posting this. Just not sure what distribution to actually go with . Contrary to my previous plugin statement, considering going back to 20.04.

[finalzone]

As long as I can use KDE on my desktop, I'm fine (Gnome is frustratingly limited).

Actually, for advanced users and developers, GNOME is very flexible with GTK Inspector enabled.

Enable the shortcut:[LIST=1][*]Install dconf-editor with sudo apt-get install dconf-editor[*]Navigate to org > gtk > settings > debug[*]Set enable-inspector-keybinding to true[*]Try the shortcut.[/LIST]

[Mark Rose]

The most of the users go with "out of the box" settings. Some amount of users would set their own shortcuts. KDE might offer a great amount of customizability, but GNOME offers much more polished and clean look out of the box. Maybe, I would trade GNOME for the Unity/Lomiri desktop. As of version 4, KDE looks as a toy (for me).

I don't agree that KDE looks like a toy, but I do agree that GNOME is opinionated. It's kind of like Mac OS in that regard. Mac OS is also limited. Neither DE is for me, and that's fine. I did give GNOME a try again, a few months ago, on Clear actually. I think it was the inability to configure a two-finger touchpad touch as middle-click that drove me nuts.