GNOME 3 Is Soon Turning Five Years Old: How Are You Liking It?

[keivan]

I was not a huge fan of Gnome 2. Gnome 3 was unbearable. I like ubuntu unity, kde 4, xfce, and lxde. Unity and Kde 4 were my primary desktops before I ditch Linux desktop for good as my primary desktop. kde 4 needed a lot of administration on gentoo, so I moved to lxde. I can't say I'm happy with lxde. I try to limit my Linux work in as much as possible, because it wasts my valuable time for administration.

[damonlynch]

As a Unity desktop user I rely on Gnome 3 applications all the time. I give my congratulations to the Gnome devs! They have done some very impressive work.

I must admit I get frustrated when I see proprietary windows applications using LGPLed Gnome technologies like GIO, simply because I have to wonder what they're giving back to the community.

[YYYY]

For me Gnome3 is the most intuitive, logical and beautiful Desktop EVER

My only fear is that they might ever change the philosophy because once you are used to the candy you get addicted.

I install it everywhere, from the most addicted Windows.. users to almost illiterate elder (literally!). And they ALL love it!

Thanks for the superior Gnome3 !

[prodigy_]

Gnome 3 is hopelessly terrible in every way and it was obvious even before the initial release. Instead of ditching it and dedicating their time to something more useful they've spent five years on adding more trash to this huge ball of garbage. Are we supposed to cheer and applaud?

[max0x7ba]

Gnome 3 was the reason I switched to KDE. And then I regretted I had not switched to KDE 10 years earlier.

The whole premise of Gnome 3 was to make it usable on tablets. They made Gnome 3 terrible on desktop (more mouse clicks, ugly design, wasted space) and still no Gnome on tablets.

From software development perspective, Gnome 3 is a pile of horrible C code. This is why they now advocate JavaScript apps - writing UIs in C is too labour intensive and too hard to get right.

[Tomin]

I think I haven't told my opinion yet. I like Gnome 3. I also don't dislike KDE, but I think that Gnome 3 is the best and most polished of these new DEs. FWIW I use both of those regularly and sometimes Xfce too.

Oh, and the feature I like the most is dynamic number of desktops. I haven't seen that in other major DEs.

[thelongdivider]

Extensions are amazing. Gnome has this going for it above all else, and with a few you can resolve most issues stated previously. A stock one for example is Window List, which makes it a single click to access a given window. Other awesome ones are Dash to Dock, Applications Menu, OpenWeather, No Topleft Hot Corner, etc. At some level the easy customization of gnome is what I really like about it.

Also, Gnome On Wayland is becoming quite amazing, and it is good to use the new protocol.

[oskar-n]

WHY would they add an additional step to access the most used feature on a desktop : switching to another window.

I kinda like GNOME 3 except for this. I use Ubuntu Unity because at least I can switch to the window I want in a single click. I do it so many times a day that two successive actions is too much. Every single commercial OS I ever known since Windows 95 has a directly accessible task bar or dock, for a good reason.

Just a visible dock/taskbar with open windows, and a good search feature. Beyond that, it honesty just has to be classy.

Gnome 3 needs to be tweaked a bit to be nice.
To get a taskbar (at least on Debian): Open "Tweak Tool" go to "Extensions" and turn on "Window List"
There are a lot of nice features to turn on with Teak Tool.

[sarmad]

I like Gnome 3 alot and I use it exclusively for both work and home. However, it's still suffering from performance and stability issues. From time to time the performance becomes sluggish and I need to restart it. It also seems to have a memory leak as its resident memory usage often hits 1GB on my 8GB machine running Fedora 23. There is definitely no way to explain 1GB for a desktop environment other than a memory leak.

[Leenooks]

I'll have to agree with others,saying that Gnome3 needs a bit of tweaking to look good.
The real question here,though,is..How much tweaking?

I find Gnome3 / gnomeshell extremely easy to tweak,very intuitive,very modern,very complete (includes it's own display manager-network manager etc) and easy to use.
Starting from square one,and just a few clicks away, you get tweak tool and extensions.
After that,the road is paved.
Gnome3 looks like a DE of 2016.
The new/upcoming Gnome Setting also looks fantastic and promising.
It always comes down to a matter of personal preference,of course.

Is it the lightest DE?
No..but my i7,8 gigs ram,ssd pc doesn't care.

Is it the most complex DE?
No..But i, the average user, don't really care. Just want the job done,with no fuss.
If i am THAT advanced,i just fire up a Terminal and nano,and i can very easily own my machine.

Does it look like winXP-xfce-cinnamon-kde (more "traditional" interfaces)?
No..That's exactly why i chose it.

To me,there's no sharp learning curve for Gnome3.
It is only the fact that someone HAS to change habbits.
This is a price that not all are eager to pay.

Has Gnome3 become a DE for the dumb?
No..i can assure you,the "dumb" lie restfully on the Hybrid-Metro Start Menu.

It is clearly a matter of preference
And for me,Gnome is a wonderful DE.
Not the best.
There is no "Best".
Just the one currently fulfilling most of my needs.