GNOME's Need To Broaden Its Audience For Greater Impact & Funding

[tildearrow]

scottishduck In your opinion

with 31 people backing that opinion.

Only 3 back yours.

[leigh123linux]

bash2bash That makes no sense. Very few people use the alternative Fedora spins.

23% isn't a few https://github.com/linuxhw/Trends/tr...Dist/Fedora#de

[tildearrow]

Here is my experience with GNOME:

1. Install
2. The desktop is not intuitive
3. Get told that the good thing about GNOME is the many extensions where you can customize the desktop
to have it work more like the conventional desktop you are familiar with
4. Install the extensions, seems like alot of trouble, but whatever
5. Updates to GNOME occur
6. Extensions break
7. Get told that the extensions are not supported by GNOME, silly you
8. Rinse and repeat

In my experience with GNOME it has always been their way, they have always pushed less functionality and flexibility in their desktop. I much prefer KDE Plasma. It's not perfect, but at least the design allows you flexibility and you don't need to screw with searching for a bunch of unsupported extensions to customize it.

It appears to me that many distributions choose GNOME because of it's lack of customization and flexibility. They really don't care about the desktop, it just there as a necessary evil to support the server functions. The less functionality and flexibility, the easier it is for them to support. That is why most people who are desktop users don't care much for GNOME. It wasn't really created for them..

Here is my experience with KDE:

1. Install
2. The desktop seems to work
3. Be productive and work for a while (hours)
4. Something crashes
5. Report a bug only to find out it has been already reported
6. Repeat from 2

In my experience with KDE it sometimes feels like a minefield, where things fail/crash randomly. It feels like a complete and customizable desktop (a great concept), but frustration arrives in the form of instability. Not saying GNOME is bug-free because it is not (GNOME has a fatal flaw that sometimes prevents you from logging in from the lock screen, even with the correct password (and if you keep trying, you are locked out for 10 minutes!) and the only solution is to kill GDM, every systemd session and every D-Bus instance).

GNOME is more stable and works fine but absolutely requires extensions in order to be usable.

And regarding performance, neither is better. KDE has a lighter compositor and overall is faster but:
- Has a long story of insane stuttering (that only got fixed in Plasma 5.21)
- Sometimes it is slow, primarily blamed on Qt
- On the first run, the search bar takes too long to start on an HDD (5-10 seconds) and it eats your keyboard input while it is loading (so you can't type ahead) because it is a separate application unlike GNOME in where it is inside the shell
- The Qt/KDE file dialog is the slowest thing ever for huge directories (1000+ files) and doing anything (typing the file name and pressing OK) is near impossible because for some reason it WAITS until the file list has loaded. On the other hand the GTK file dialog does not animate the loading of a huge directory, but at least I can type the file name and press OK even before the list has loaded.

GNOME is slower but:
- Daniel van Vugt has been doing massive amounts of performance work
- You can escape it gracefully in the event of a GPU crash/reset (it happened once, and after restarting gnome-shell and starting up Orca I managed to log out)
- The compositor is fine now when compared to 2017, and it even is able to run on a Pi without problems
- Customization outside extensions barely is a thing
- Poor UX choices. Do I need to mention any more?

[ix900]

lolz at the gnome kde opinion battle.

[gbcox]

Here is my experience with KDE:

In my experience with KDE it sometimes feels like a minefield, where things fail/crash randomly. It feels like a complete and customizable desktop (a great concept), but frustration arrives in the form of instability. Not saying GNOME is bug-free because it is not (GNOME has a fatal flaw that sometimes prevents you from logging in from the lock screen, even with the correct password (and if you keep trying, you are locked out for 10 minutes!) and the only solution is to kill GDM, every systemd session and every D-Bus instance).

GNOME is more stable and works fine but absolutely requires extensions in order to be usable.

Everyone's mileage will vary of course, depending on their workflow. Myself, I'm using Plasma on F34 Wayland, and while I occasionally encounter a bug, it's nothing that I haven't been able to workaround until it is fixed - and I've been using KDE for at least 15 years. The difference of course is whether or not you prefer using something that has been designed with less functionality, that requires unsupported extensions which often break (GNOME) or something that has been designed as a complete integrated solution (KDE). All software has bugs, nothing is perfect. As far as performance and animations, I haven't noticed any such problems and I have plenty of data. If you have a machine that is experiencing problems, you can easily tweak the settings to turn off animations, etc. to improve performance. KDE allows you much more flexibility, with GNOME, it's pretty much one size fits all.

[AHOY]

Here is my experience with KDE:

1. Install
2. The desktop seems to work
3. Be productive and work for a while (hours)
4. Something crashes
5. Report a bug only to find out it has been already reported
6. Repeat from 2

In my experience with KDE it sometimes feels like a minefield, where things fail/crash randomly. It feels like a complete and customizable desktop (a great concept), but frustration arrives in the form of instability. Not saying GNOME is bug-free because it is not (GNOME has a fatal flaw that sometimes prevents you from logging in from the lock screen, even with the correct password (and if you keep trying, you are locked out for 10 minutes!) and the only solution is to kill GDM, every systemd session and every D-Bus instance).

GNOME is more stable and works fine but absolutely requires extensions in order to be usable.

And regarding performance, neither is better. KDE has a lighter compositor and overall is faster but:
- Has a long story of insane stuttering (that only got fixed in Plasma 5.21)
- Sometimes it is slow, primarily blamed on Qt
- On the first run, the search bar takes too long to start on an HDD (5-10 seconds) and it eats your keyboard input while it is loading (so you can't type ahead) because it is a separate application unlike GNOME in where it is inside the shell
- The Qt/KDE file dialog is the slowest thing ever for huge directories (1000+ files) and doing anything (typing the file name and pressing OK) is near impossible because for some reason it WAITS until the file list has loaded. On the other hand the GTK file dialog does not animate the loading of a huge directory, but at least I can type the file name and press OK even before the list has loaded.

GNOME is slower but:
- Daniel van Vugt has been doing massive amounts of performance work
- You can escape it gracefully in the event of a GPU crash/reset (it happened once, and after restarting gnome-shell and starting up Orca I managed to log out)
- The compositor is fine now when compared to 2017, and it even is able to run on a Pi without problems
- Customization outside extensions barely is a thing
- Poor UX choices. Do I need to mention any more?

I agree in parts. KDE is stable enough for me, and the best DE by miles. And the applications feel like they are made for people who do real work with their computers. They don't always have the best UX but they are slowly making everything better. Dolphin is not without flaws but it's the best non CLI file manager in the world.

I always go with the ballistic option. I use the same config files since the first KDE 5 release but I simply disable everything that can create issues. The core of my experience is a bottom panel with the bare minimum and my own custom application launcher to make sure the experience never changes (guess my bet paid off). No widgets, no baloo, no krunner (I use rofi), no activities (the bugs oh lord), only a few virtual desktops (never had any issues). I'll change to Wayland in a couple of years after the bubuntu crowd eat all the bugs.

I do the same with Windows and the same thing when I was using XFCE/GNOME 2. You could say I use the DE as a WM without having to glue together 20+ utilities. GNOME 3 doesn't work since it requires cement and brick from the start (and after every update) and the issues I had were all in the core experience. My points is threat your DE as a hostile entity and you might be happier.

[ALRBP]

skeevy420 Themes, extensions and other kind of differentiation don’t belong in core upstream modules. What you are looking for is a distribution.

A dark mode is not just a theme, it is an essential feature! Yes, it's often implemented as a theme, if a theming system is present anyway, but it is not just that. There are many dark themes, and choosing between them is not an essential feature, but providing at least one is essential. Since I started using a dark theme, I just can't stand light themes anymore! They make my eyes bleed! I can live without my beautiful dark-violet theme (Mirage on KDE) but not without a dark mode at all!

[arQon]

GNOME: We literally *do not care* what users want, at all. The only thing we care about less than their opinions are their bug reports.

Also GNOME: Why don't users like us and give us money?

Yeah, no sympathy here. You made this bed, you lie in it.

[ssokolow]

Here is my experience with KDE:

[...]

GNOME is more stable and works fine but absolutely requires extensions in order to be usable.

My experience since GNOME 2.x and KDE 3.x back in the early 2000s has been that both are very buggy and both are very stable. The developers use them in different ways, so the set of features that get debugged are fairly disjoint.

GnomeVFS was infamous for being a crashy clone of KIO for years and years, as were various other things.

KDE users would try GNOME and it would crash, so they'd use KDE which was stable. GNOME users would try KDE and it would crash, so they'd use GNOME which was stable. It was all down to different workflows and it looks like that's still the case.

I use a mostly KDE desktop as my daily driver and the only situations where I can remember anything crashing since at least 2016 is:

• K3b may crash if you leave it open for a week or two without closing and restarting it. (I tend to burn a lot of DVD+Rs in a row over the course of several days.)
• PCManFM (which is a GTK+ 2.x-based LXDE component, not a KDE component) crashes on occasion.

(And when I say "mostly KDE", in mean things like "I don't want my notepad.exe-alike to have a UI as padded out with undesired features as Kate, so I used Leafpad from LXDE and now an instance of Featherpad from LXQt with a ton of UI turned off" or "I'm not a fan of Dolphin's UI design, so I use PCManFM" or "I'm too used to Vim keybindings and my customized .vimrc to use anything but gVim for my coding".)

[Grim85]

bash2bash That makes no sense. Very few people use the alternative Fedora spins.

most people dont know they exist, because they are hidden on the project website - Matt Miller keeps promising to fix this in the next redesign