163 replies
6h24m
Personally I feel that KDE is what GNOME wanted to be but can’t. Not just the DE itself but the KDE applications too, just look at Krita for example compared to GIMP. Somehow KDE could accomplish much more and feels more mature and robust too.
I loved GNOME2 back then but feels like something went wrong with GNOME3 regarding the whole project and how users reacted to the different UI. I’d say the classic Windows NT era UI (95, 98, 2000, Xp) was peak design so I’m glad KDE stick to that more or less and made it even better and modern.
Gnome has a completely different workflow than KDE. Gnome is the reason why I use Linux. If I had to use KDE I would stay with Windows, the workflow has the same logic, is almost the same, except that with Windows I have no restrictions with applications.
Interesting. For me, Linux would be unusuable if I had to use GNOME. What do you like specifically about GNOME compared to Plasma or Windows?
I like its simplicity and the straight forward workflow it provides. Years ago, I used to use KDE and enjoyed it but these days, I want something that is functional while being vanilla and standard as possible and personally, that's what GNOME gives me.
Fair enough. I guess I have a hard time understanding why you wouldn't be interested to make the workflow fit better for yourself on a device you spend hours per day using.
I can't agree with this more and that's the beauty of KDE. If I'm sitting down using this thing 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, little niceties and optimizations go a long way to making me happy and productive. And it doesn't take very long to make these little tweaks.
Yes, this exactly. It's a small time investment that improves my experience significantly.
It's just a personal thing. I try to stick to using tools that provide me the best defaults + being open source. I don't want to spend time customizing my desktop or getting overwhelmed by the amount of different choices I have available. Don't get me wrong, KDE is a beautiful and great project, it's just that, a very personal thing.
It's so straightforward you can't even switch to another window without pressing a separate button first!
The Gnome designers have apparently discovered that taskbars are attention vampires and a detriment to users.
I don't get your point. I just use two ways:
1. With mouse -> Up left corner (a.k.a hot corner) -> Click on the window I want.
2. With keyboard -> Alt + Tab -> Select the window I want.
I find that quite straight forward. Again, it's a personal thing.
This type of hyperbole is what feeds the DE wars. GNOME is very usable, and if it's not, you don't know how to use a computer at all.
Well it's not a hyperbole, my productivity would suffer immensely if I had to use GNOME. And since GNOME doesn't offer much customisation, I couldn't make it work better for me, which is why I use Plasma. That doesn't mean I hate GNOME or something and I'm glad it exists for the people who do like its approach.
In what ways does Gnome hamper your productivity? Are you really using the DE a lot?
Most of my day is spent in applications. I launch an application and that's where I'm spending my time. I'm not using the desktop environment all that much. I really don't find much difference working in Windows, macOS, KDE or Gnome or even iPadOS as far as interacting with the graphical environment goes.
Yes, absolutely. Perhaps not directly with the DE itself, but the DE affects how I work.
On Plasma, I have it set up so I have all title bars hidden and I use custom keybinds to close, minimize and maximize windows, which saves screen space and reduces clutter. On GNOME you cannot minimize windows at all if I remember correctly.
I have virtual desktops disabled and only use one desktop to manage all of my windows, while GNOME fundamentally works around using multiple virtual desktops as far as I know.
GNOME doesn't have a system tray, which I find essential. For example, I can see just by looking if Discord has an unread notification. Or I can close OBS to the system tray without quiting the application, which reduces visual clutter. I know you can add this with an extension, but I'm just referring to vanilla GNOME.
I often use KRunner to temporarily write something while still seeing the contents of my screen, while GNOME's equivalent is full screen I believe.
I'm sure there are many other ways, but these are the ones I can quickly think of.
I think I see one difference - I'm not trying to use each environment the same. My iPad wants everything to be full screen, so that's how I use it (although I have been playing with Stage Manager). Windows has good support for tiling now, so I use that. On Gnome I lean into the workspace stuff. KDE I don't know as well, so I use the mouse for just about everything.
I enjoy learning the ins and outs of the different environments and frankly I wish the differences ran even deeper. I often think about how fun it would be if Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, BeOS, SGI IRIX, OS/2, Sun CDE, and all the other systems were still being developed. But then the Electron / web app people would probably still try to pave over everything cool and unique on each system to run one mediocre app everywhere.
This is incorrect. You can minimize windows on Gnome, but the button to do it is hidden by default. It can be re-enabled in Gnome Tweaks, and there is also a keyboard shortcut (Super+H) for minimizing.
Gnome is however indeed fairly workspace-centric.
As for customization, out of the box Gnome is quite rigid, but its extension ecosystem far surpasses that of KDE. You can use extensions on Gnome to for example get a dock or system tray back.
I use Gnome (and Sway, depending on which computer I'm on). I use Gnome because it works great with wayland, and I just need to get work done, and Gnome does a pretty alright job of staying out of the way. KDE's integration with Wayland feels too clunky for me at this point. Plus I get rendering artifacts on the edge of the screen when I use plasma with screen scaling.
I believe improving Wayland support was one of the major goals of Plasma 6. So if it was just the Wayland integration putting you off, then maybe consider trying Plasma again soon.
Plasma 5s Wayland support has been pretty good since I started using it. I started using it back in December.
Gnome just does way too many things I don't want it to do and that can't be disabled.
I experience some random visual bugs occasionally with Wayland, but yes generally it's decent. But I could understand if someone would want a more stable experience.
Yes, I don't like that about GNOME either.
Isn't it great, that unlike Windows or Mac, we have a choice! We don't have to try to create something for the lowest common denominator of user, and we can find something that works really well for us, individually.
I absolutely agree with that. I was just curious to know what he doesn't like.
I'm almost the opposite. If I had to use Linux with GNOME, I'd just use macOS instead.
The Linux desktop needs a shtick. Maybe when desktop cubes make a comeback we can make peace :)
GNOME might look a bit macOS-like from far away but it's really not when using it. I personally hate macOS but do love GNOME.
I agree, especially when it comes to window management and virtual desktops. I have been running Linux desktop since the late 90s and used A LOT of different desktops and window managers. I remember when gnome 2 came out and everyone hated it! (sound familiar?)
For work, I have my desktop running gnome and I have a macbook that I also use when traveling or at the office. I find my productivity on mac os drops with its absolutely terrible window management and terrible virtual desktop implementation. I instead run fedora in a UTM VM fullscreen and only use mac as a "host" for the VM.
Gnome (with version 3) required a change in how you use it as a desktop. In gnome 2 days, I used to have a grid of virtual desktops and maybe always assigned email to 1, chat to 2, etc. The task bar was heavily used and important.
But with Gnome > 3, I really love the dynamic virtual desktops. Every task I am working gets is own virtual desktop. As I finish a task and close windows with that task, that virtual desktop goes away. If I have a long running multi-day task, that virtual desktop with windows associated with it stay open for that whole duration. Only things related to that task are on the virtual desktop. I might have 25 browser tabs open in total, but 3 of them are tied to a specific task on the firefox window on desktop 2, 5 are tied to another firefox window on desktop 5 and so on.
Everything is _very_ keyboard driven, and I don't ever touch a mouse to interact with gnome itself.
This makes task switching really nice. There is no need for a tab bar with 50 items on it, or a browser window with 50+ tabs open.
One thing I do miss from some of the older window managers, is the ability for the window manager to do grouping/tabbing. I'd prefer if now application implemented tabs, and instead the window manager did it.
The desktop cube is back[1] in KDE Plasma 6! :-D
Oh, did you mean the other kind of desktop cube...
[1] https://kde.org/announcements/megarelease/6/cube.webm
Funnily enough, Plasma 6 brings back the cube effect[1].
[1] https://pointieststick.com/2023/10/27/these-past-2-weeks-in-...
what you do get with windows is a UI that changes, resets, and ignores your previous customizations with every os update, which you cannot stop/prevent. even group policy hacks and regedits wont always save you. LTSC is apparently a thing but you cannot pay anyone money to actually get that license as an individual user.
dark patterns to prevent users from creating offline, local-only accounts. you have to yank the ethernet cable now during initial setup to get the option not to log in to your ms cloud account? (or some insane nonsense like that)
plus more cloud services that i didnt ask for with each update, more things bloating ram and disk/cpu on startup, more telemetry. and ads. always. more. ads. ads in the browser, ads in the start menu, ads in the widgets.
windows decided one day to auto-update and fuck up my linux dual boot setup.
after more than two decades of windows following DOS, i couldnt do it any more with this omnipresent Windows SaaS shit.
tried Mint and Manjaro for a while, then switched to EndeavourOS + KDE/Plasma and never looked back. everything is just faster on linux and nothing changes out from under me in the past 3 years of daily rolling updates.
That maybe be true if Windows (and maybe KDE) 10-15 years ago, I don't think that's true anymore today. KDE has really grown into itself.
I moved from Gnome to KDE recently.
There is likely no desktop environment that's more customisable while at the same time being full batteries included as KDE is. And I've probably tried them sll: Gnome, XFCE, Enlightenment, Cinnamon, Mate, i3wm...
If there's a flow you've grown accustomed to, you can most probably replicate that in KDE.
Can you explain that? How is the workflow like Windows?
All I can see is some superficially Windows like defaults (good for newbies) in the initial look.
KDE has a lot of stuff very different from Windows - or at least Windows at the time I switched. Transparent sftp in all applications, highly customisable (I currently use window tiling, have a small icon only task switcher I hard use, window titles in the panel, I use multiple desktops, KRunner to launch/switch apps.....), very different file managers from windows, a excellent text editor that integrates nicely with everything else.
I honestly love the variety of options, everyone can find something suitable for themselves!
Personally, XFCE is a good fit for me often (especially on older devices), or maybe something like Cinnamon since it mostly gets out of the way and lets me work. Then again, I also enjoyed Unity when it was the default in Ubuntu, unlike a lot of folks hah.
The simple 2-bit explanation is KDE is following Windows trends, Gnome is following Mac trends. Even the screenshot widgets are both following the closed-source versions (recent Gnome screenshot widget is exactly the new MacOS screenshot widget)
I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches" distro, but ships with a DE that will annoy nerds much more than KDE does. My Linux experience got so much better under KDE. I respect what Gnome does a lot but I feel at home in KDE land.
Is it though? I mean, it is advertised by magazines and shills as such, but it really is not in practice, never has been. Back in the days, Mandriva was the "no headaches" distro, since then many distros have caught up - my go-to for many years that I also successfully got non-nerds to use has been OpenSUSE.
> Mandriva was the "no headaches" distro
The original name was Mandrake, precisely because it would magically autoconfigure all your hardware and software - well before Ubuntu existed.
The issue Mandrake/Mandriva always had, was that they would go a bit overboard with the approach, ending up with a system that could feel a bit sluggish - because it had all sorts of stuff preinstalled "just in case". It was also a bit of a separate kingdom - used RPM but wasn't really compatible with the wider array of RedHat packages.
The Ubuntu innovation was that they hit a better middle ground: they were fundamentally Debian-compatible, and their autoconfiguration worked well (particularly with 3d cards, at the start) but also gave you a fairly fast desktop.
These days it's all much of a muchness really.
In the early days of my Linux use I was on Mandrake 7.2 and loved it. All the "just in case" random packages were very entertaining and educational to me, although they were probably a distraction from whatever I was meant to be doing!
Still, the experience seems to have served me well in the end. I do miss that feeling of discovering all the weird themes and window managers they packaged by default, I don't get the same vibes of "any UI is possible" these days (even though the UX is probably much better by conventional criteria).
Mandrake! I'm the other guy who used it!
In 1999 I paid about $30 for a copy so I didn't have to spend weeks downloading it over 56k.
It was actually pretty popular here in Europe (I have a feeling the core devs were French, but I could be wrong).
Same! So I guess there are at least 3 of us :)
Memories…
OpenSuse is fantastic. It’s very easy to set up and nice to use out of the box. It’s also fairly close to the bleeding edge and at the same time very stable. I am quite happy with it.
IMHO the best update strategy I've seen is the FreeBSD/NetBSD quarterly update, with "base" part of the system not updating. OpenSUSE is too frequent to my taste.
The one I usually install to normal users who do not know computers well is KDE Neon. But yeah with recent very positive experiences with openSUSE Tumbleweed, I am also thinking about using oST instead.
So if I install Tumbleweed I should get this latest KDE version very soon?
IMHO the difference is that KDE took the classic Windows desktop as starting point and has developed it into something that's now actually better than the Win10/11 desktop. GNOME OTH might be trying to imitate macOS but if that's actually the case they are doing a very poor job (I spend most of my time on a Mac, but have recently switched from GNOME to KDE on my Linux laptop because after updating to Ubuntu 24 I was finally fed up with GNOME's UX only ever getting worse, never improving).
PS: switching from GNOME to a KDE desktop session was absolutely trivial and quick on Ubuntu btw.
Ignoring all the other bad stuff with Windows 11, one thing that made me switch to Linux was the ugly "modern" design. iirc, someone on HN said that Windows designers don't even use Windows, they use Mac.
But then I switched to Linux and a lot of apps, specially gnome and gnome-inspired apps, have such terrible design as well. I'm going to spare you the details because I could rant about it for hours.
GNOME apps are terrible because GTK is terrible because GNOME devs are stuck up hyperdogmatic Apple fanboys who want to pretend that Linux users are girls in Uganda on a tablet.
Also, I read somewhere how Windows's GUI design has just been one long arc of copying Mac's. Which seems weird because we're so used to thinking of them as two dipoles of design. But the Windows 11 GUI makes me see it. :D
IMHO The pinacle of the Windows desktop was Windows 2000. Windows XP was ok except for the default bubble gum theme. We don't talk about Windows Vista and Windows 8. Windows 7 was sort-of ok. Windows 10 is was trying to salvage some of the Windows 8 mess with little success. Can't comment on Windows 11 because I'll stick with Windows 10 as long as possible ;)
I agree with this more when you include how the then current versions of MS Office felt to use.
Ribbons might have a place at the absolute entry level of usability, but they'll never replace a well designed menu system that includes keyboard shortcut documentation in the UI within a super information dense presentation.
This almost makes me want to try a Mac. Everyone is copying them, they must be pretty good, right?
I just miss it when my apps had main menus, and dialog windows instead of transitions, and it didn't feel like every window was a browser even when they weren't electron apps... and I miss the window borders, and the colored icons, and when themes weren't just light or dark and...
You'll be disappointed. Even Apple isn't adhering to its own Human Interface Guidelines anymore. It might be the least bad option of the current desktop environments, but that doesn't mean much.
i think you could have communicated this more effectively without the ad hominems.
I disagree, macOS has both a system tray and a global menu, a totally foreign concept for Gnome
Gnome wants to be a touch-screen/tablet OS, and it shows with their design choices
Unity 7.0 from canonical was closer to macOS
Apple has 4 distinct OS and UX for their different form factors (watch, phone, tablet, desktop)
Gnome's future looks even more Phone/Tablet oriented: https://linuxiac.com/gnome-background-apps/
I quit the gnome ecosystem when Canonical announced killing Unity, that was my perfect Desktop Environment, it was perfect, it's sad..
Yep, GNOME’s closest proprietary analogue is iPadOS, not macOS. GNOME omits all sorts of little power user features in comparison and takes the whole minimalism thing much further than macOS ever did (often too far IMHO).
This applies to Pantheon too, even if it’s prettier. There unfortunately isn’t a Mac-like DE.
Unity is back. An enthusiast resurrected it and now it's an official Ubuntu flavour again: https://ubuntuunity.org/
I find it more that Gnome is following Android/iOS trends. They're trying to be the mobile DE, but Linux (aside from Android) on the mobile phone was DOA.
I wouldn't say GNOME 3+ is following Mac trends. GNOME 3 has been a horrible mess in my opinion, it's unusable for both Windows and macOS users.
I am a heavy Mac user at home (for about 20 years), and a heavy Linux (and to a lesser extent Windows) user at work, and I don’t see that at all. Gnome is infuriating even for a Mac user. I don’t like KDE either, so I use XFCE, but I am absolutely not at home in Gnome.
I feel that this perception that Gnome is Mac-like is because the Gnome devs have strong opinions and don’t tend to compromise. But as a piece of software and desktop environment, Gnome is not more “Mac-inspired” than KDE.
Saying gnome is following MacOS just says you haven't used gnome since ages, give gnome 45 a spin and tell me how it's following macOS, it's better than macOS will ever be.
I know HN users hate modern UI trends. But for the record, GNOME actually has professional UI designers (Red Hat employees or volunteers) designing their UI.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/os-mockups
Yet it's horrible to use and really wasteful. Huge window handles that make no sense on a desktop without touch, unnecessary extra clicks by hiding things in hamburger menus. Again something handy on a mobile, not a desktop. Almost no customisation.
It might satisfy hipster designers but not users.
I recently bought a low-end ASUS Tablet PC with a rather nice 13" OLED screen (Vivobook Slate 13 T3300), and exorcised Windows 11 S from inside it the moment I got it. I then installed the latest Fedora on it, and chose the GNOME spin, because of the supposed touch UI readiness.
I must say, I am not impressed by the UX of the whole setup... which is a shame, since they iirc slaughtered the perfectly good GNOME 2.x UI to cater to those devices specifically around a decade ago - and for what? If this is all that's there to reap, it's been a bad trade-off.
Looking forward to trying Plasma Mobile; maybe it can improve on the status quo.
It was the fad of that time, when Microsoft also introduced Windows 8 and the "Modern UI" Metro.
But at least they came to their senses, also because no devs bothered to adopt it :) and they still didn't manage to sell any Windows tablets.
That was such a branding problem for Microsoft. Microsoft supplied so many Surface tablets to the NFL and the commentators kept calling them iPads.
There was a recent article on here that explained GNOME 2.x was windows-like enough that there was fear Microsoft would come after Linux distributions with patent lawsuits, hence the departure from that style of UI in the next version. KDE on the other hand was made with a patent sharing agreement in place.
Ah that explains a lot. Especially the feel I've always had about it being "change for the sake of change". There was a time when I actually tried to use it for real, I bought a used Surface Pro 3 and traveled with it, so the touch-based UI actually made sense. I wonder if that fear was realistic though. Though I have to admit MS at that time (under Ballmer) was really hostile to Linux.
But it was just too weird with the workspaces on the fly, the huge window decorations (despite touch I would mainly use the pen anyway) and the lack of a real launcher. I used it for about 3 months and got rid of it. It just rubbed me the wrong way constantly and I really couldn't stand the designers' attitude, every time I wanted to change something I ended up googling it and finding some excuse from the devs on why they wouldn't account for it (usually along the lines of "you shouldn't want/need that").
What didn't help was that Linux on the Surface Pro 3 was a huge PITA also. Often the keyboard wouldn't work after having been disconnected, or the pen would stop working, or it would turn on in my bag for some weird reason and be boiling hot, or it would fail to pick up the ethernet of the dock etc. Most of these issues were solved by a reboot but I ended up rebooting a lot to solve all these stupid random problems and I really got sick of that.
But the "Weirdness" of Gnome 3 didn't help. I have a lot of opinions on how stuff must work and tried modifying gnome with plugins to make it work that way, and that led to a lot of issues when updates came out and the plugins weren't updated. Opinionated software just isn't for me. I want options. Lots and lots of options :)
Eventually I moved back to a desktop and gave KDE another try (the last time was in the KDE 4 period and I didn't like it) and it felt like a breath of fresh air. Everything I wanted to change about the default UI had an option in there somewhere to do it. It felt like the developers were reading my mind and pre-empted every wish :3 I've always cherished software packages like that.
And it only kept getting better and better with things like accent colours in the anniversary update. I use a lot of my own theming as well for both my DE and web apps and KDE is really great for that. I was actually planning to make a real theme myself but it's so configurable now that I can really make it pretty much like I want with just some configuration clicks.
I donate monthly to KDE now just because I want them to continue this great work and philosophy.
I like to keep the Windows install around on small partition as I find at least on Thinkpads the Vantage app on Windows often has firmware and bios updates more available/earlier than on linux but ymmv. Plus is there for random need for windows-only app but maybe not as important.
Yep, I much prefer KDE's default binding of meta+LMB/RMB anywhere on a window to move and resize it, rather than ginormous title bars.
Might not be "professional" but it sure is more productive.
I change it to alt, and then also install Alt Drag on windows devices, so I can do that everywhere!
And you can easily make KDE title bars even smaller by changing the title text size, and use global menu and hide title bar in maximized windows. Massively better use of screen real estate than GNOME. Imo much more "professional" and productive vs GNOME's cartoonish touch screen UI.
Not really. According to Fitts's Law, it would be easier to point your mouse cursor to a larger target.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fitts_Law.svg
When someone says a design is harder to use, you don't get to say "no it isn't because Fitts' Law". If it's harder for someone to use, those are the facts on the ground. You need to adjust your theories to fit the facts, not try to say the facts aren't true so they fit your theories.
That’s like, your opinion.
I do think that on a laptop, GNOME is probably the best environment to use, out of any OS.
True, it is my opinion alone.
And I don't use laptops, only desktops. Good point also as I have much more screen real estate available. For example I use a 3x3 grid of 9 virtual desktops (with the numpad as a quick-switching pad), something that on Gnome isn't possible without a whole bunch of addons that break with every update :) Because it doesn't allow for virtual desktops in a grid matrix by default and I don't think it's got direct access hotkeys to them either. I really love that I can just configure all that in KDE without having any kind of addon or modification (and many other things I change too).
I'm just not one of those "just use it like it's intended" people. I have my own ideas on how my computer should work. But yes not everyone is me.
Do they test with end users thoroughly, like Microsoft and Apple did back in the 80's and 90's?
Yes, The team behind Ximian, before being acquired by SUSE, was involved in early efforts to improve the usability of desktop Linux for end users. They conducted usability studies and published videos of these sessions to highlight where users encountered difficulties. These efforts were part of a broader initiative within the GNOME project to enhance user experience and make the GNOME desktop environment more intuitive and accessible to a wider audience.
Gnome 2 was indeed pretty ok though not very comfortable for lack of configurability. Gnome 3 is really the problem which is why there's so many that replicate gnome 2, like cinnamon and mate.
Gnome 3 is really like KDE 4, too much messing around for the sake of it.
But another thing I really like about KDE is that there's not a giant behind it like redhat, they're free from commercial motives to make their own choices.
FWIW, we've also had professional usability experts involved with KDE many times over the years. E.g. the OpenUsability initiative, which KDE helped set up, was run by HCI professionals and conducted a fair number of user studies, produced research docs, and so on.
The difference perhaps is that OpenUsability didn't limit itself to working only on KDE (and also helped out, e.g. LibreOffice), that's why it somehow didn't get booked as a KDE thing and didn't become a similar anecdote people cite now.
They do, but their resources are fairly limited so the methodology is abysmal. See https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/2021/02/15/shell-ux-change... for an example. They don't so much test with end users as gather anecdotes (and then largely ignore test results that contradict their existing design guidelines anyway).
Windows 8 was also designed by professional UI designers…
And Windows 11... web content in start menu, unproductive, extremely distracting - ugh
I think the Windows 11 UI has been augmented by professional bean counters...
This really disappoints me because their UI design is the main thing that drove me away. Too many non-discoverable gestures.
taking inspiration from MacOS i see
them being professionals does not imply they're doing a good job. Lots of dumpster fires, across a broad range of industries, were designed by professionals.
KDE has spoiled me. I installed a Gnome distribution a short while back, but used it for a couple of hours and missed KDE so much that I wiped the hard drive and went back to Manjaro and KDE.
I think this is the reason Linux hasn't penetrated the desktop more than it has. “Just reinstall” is too often the solution to issues. Starting over will often throw away hours of someone’s time. This can be catastrophic for a non-technical user. I wish the Linux desktop was implemented more like a user extension on top of a rock solid base server layer (eg hypervisor). Maybe such a setup exists, but I’m unaware of it.
Switching desktop environments on Linux is absolutely trivial and doesn't require a reinstall though (at least in my experience of switching from GNOME to KDE on Ubuntu, which took a couple of minutes to pull down the KDE packages and then logging out and picking Plasma from a dropdown in the login screen - and if I feel like it I can switch back to GNOME anytime).
Trivial to who? A seasoned Linux nerd? Maybe. A regular, non-tech person? Nope. And that is why there is no year of the linux desktop. And if you expect a regular, non-tech person to be able to master the terminal and type in commands you're delusional.
I wouldn't expect a non-tech person to even understand the difference between an operating system and a desktop environment and why you can switch the latter while keeping the former. Nor would I expect them to care.
You can install it through the Software Manager. At least on Mint that's how it is. Click, install, and I believe it tells you to logout and back in.
Trivial in the sense of googling "how to install KDE on Ubuntu", picking a result that looks somewhat recent, and following those steps. It ends up being a handful terminal commands which shouldn't be too hard for anybody who has used a keyboard before. That's how I did it at least. There might be more UI centric options.
Also, trying to chase the elusive 'casual user' is what caused all the GNOME UX mess in the first place I guess. I'm not an 'archetypical' Linux nerd, I hate wasting time with fixing stuff that should "just work", but I'm also expecting a computer to be a professional tool which I can customize to my needs (within reason at least).
It's not trivial. Just installing KDE packages on a GNOME install will work and is quite easy, but will lead to some mix / subtle setting issues, it's less clean than just a brand new install.
Installing and running KDE will mess up GTK settings in GNOME for instance. You might end up with the Breeze GTK theme in the GNOME session. Which works, but this is most likely not wanted (even though GNOME looks great with the Breeze theme).
I'd not advise regular users to do this without a warning.
I haven't seen this on my Linux laptop, but TBH some UI elements in GNOME look so weird in Ubuntu 24 that I'm not sure if it's broken or intended (but already did before installing KDE).
It's not "the solution", it is a solution.
It is the easiest solution, requires no research or technical ability, and will not have any left over cruft from the hours of customizing.
The same goes for windows, I know people who reinstall every 6 months just to keep their system clean and working optimally.
I would argue that the Linux kernel is that server layer, but let's not open that can of worms.
Maybe Fedora Silverblue is up your ally. All the apps, including the desktop environment are containers.
Or if you really want an actual hypervisor you could try Qubes, but that is not for the faint of heart.
I was not familiar with Silverblue. It looks very promising. The idea of creating a fundamental, shared base system should make troubleshooting significantly easier — possibly an exponential reduction in the possible installed permutations. Thanks for the suggestion!
Yes, the package manager is definitely not a part of the desktop.
Some say Windows + WSL2 is the most stable ABI/API for the year of Linux on desktop.
While its a joke, every joke contains some portion of a joke.
I thought the joke was the reverse? The most stable ABI for Linux is Win32 (via Wine of course).
That's what I use. I love it!
That's just not true at all. The reason Linux hasn't penetrated the desktop is because it's not installed by default. Even if that isn't the reason, the GPs preference for reinstalling is certainly not. Switching DEs doesn't require reinstalling the OS, it requires searching your distros app store for KDE, and then logging out and selecting "KDE" when you log in again.
You could even switch between them each time you log in, depending on your mood that day.
No, Linux has poor isolation between the base system and application and third-pardty software and poor backwards compatibility (FreeBSD is slightly better in that respect). The only OSS Posix system that getting it right seems to be Haiku.
If that's the case, I'm grateful for it. Why does every tool have to target every person? Maybe it's fine not to dominate every market.
“Just reinstall” is a solution in Windows world even more often.
why wipe out the hard drive, tho? You can usually just switch DEs just fine, this isn't windows :) long gone are the days where we would have 10 different DEs/WMs installed
Will package managers remove all traces of the old DE? Back in the day, `apt remove kde-desktop` would not reliably reverse the effects of `apt install kde-desktop`.
You can certainly remove packages that were installed as dependencies, even if `apt remove` doesn't do this by default. I think it's `apt autoremove` or `apt purge` (although I haven't used apt in a long time). All of the package managers I've used have a way to do this.
On the other hand, for the average user I don't know why you'd bother. It's not like it's interfering with other stuff you want to do, unless you are extremely tight on hard drive space.
apt doesn't remove the settings in your home directory. So you need to nuke them and reconfigure the entire desktop and switching DEs definitely break stuff due to file type handling and default apps. With Xorg there were other things like styles that got permanently broken unless you hunt for every file that has been changed.
The only good package manager can do it: Nix :D
Wiping and reloading my systems is likely faster than cleaning up thoroughly, but I have backups and some automation.
I borked an installation because it had two desktop environments, and even when it works there always seem to be more odd issues than with a clean install.
If you have the time to debug these and straighten them out, it's fine, but given how simple a clean install is these days that's often the easier path.
KDE’s underlying GUI framework is Qt which is backed by a successful corporation and is used by lots of high-end professional desktop apps. That goes a long way to explain why Krita feels more right than GIMP.
Simplifying Krita vs GIMP as a difference between application frameworks is reductionist. Krita has much better connection with actual users and their needs, in the first place. Same with Kate and many other KDE apps which became fairly competent in their niches in recent years.
KDE ecosystem in general has a working user feedback loop, something that is historically hard to come by in FOSS world.
Yes, that’s absolutely what makes the difference in the end.
But if you’re going to build an app for professional content creators, it definitely helps to be using the framework that powers Autodesk Maya and many other tools that they’re already familiar with. A lot of non-obvious product needs on the framework level for this niche have already been solved.
GNOME just never had that kind of solution pull. It’s always been more of a research project.
Qt isn't that sort of framework though, it is just a GUI toolkit[0] and there is nothing special about it that makes it better than Gtk for an application like Krita.
The reason Krita is so successful is because of what orbital-decay wrote, they connect and listen to the users, not because of Qt. Obviously Krita is built on the KDE frameworks and the KDE frameworks are built on Qt, so Krita relies a ton on Qt to the point where if you consider on replacing it you might as well just rewrite the program from scratch. But Krita could have been written on, say, Java Swing, wxWidgets, Gtk or whatever other mature GUI framework and it'd still be as successful.
After all keep in mind that many other popular digital content creation tools use custom toolkits instead of Qt (e.g. Blender which is way more popular than Krita).
[0] ok, it has more functionality than GUI, but that's the main functionality and everything else can be found in many other libraries
In my experience it's not that simple. I certainly don't believe Krita written in Java Swing would be as successful.
There's a lot of complexity in GUI frameworks, and they are not interchangeable because they end up making different design choices. An application like Maya with very complex user-manipulated data structures will expose weaknesses in the framework, and the fixes and design improvements end up in the framework. A competing framework whose primary users are lightweight consumer-oriented apps doesn't get those benefits.
You forget about the desktop integration. At the company I work for we also selected Qt, why, because it has very good integration with many desktops. GTK is terrible in this regard (even support for other desktop on GNU/Linux apart from GNOME is not the best, let alone other OSes). And yes also Qt offers a lot more and is also more intuitive to work with and man the documentation it has, just superb. So yes, listening to user feedback is the most important but the role of a great toolkit to build on is also very important.
Qt is very special because it has excellent, "vector" fractional scaling (in a way, similar to Windows), compared to Gtk which has awful "bitmap" fractional scaling (akin to MacOS).
Yes availability of technical solutions will dictate what the clients of the software can do here. You can have great connections with the users but if the core libraries you use doesn't help you to deliver the features you promised, they will leave for other solutions that actually deliver in shorter time while you struggle with GTK. This is exactly what is going on with GIMP.
GTK basically either doesn't support or make it really hard to create certain workflows outside very simple applications with limited things yo click. Also it is a C library with very leaky abstractions including gtkmm. So developing complex applications suck and waste a lot of developer time
Qt is C++ on steroids. It adds a bunch of features for GUI development, comes with a great library and many tools for testing, design and internationalization. It is overall nicer and IMO simpler to develop with. So you can go from a simple image viewer to a one with okay editing features and the difficulty doesn't skyrocket.
Another aspect is Windows support. GTK 3+ doesn't support Windows. It looks like it does but due to GNOME locking down their overall system design, the integration suffers. The UI looks off due to GNOME's insistence in client side decorated windows. Projects like Krita have lots of Windows and Mac users and Qt is the only low level cross platform UI library that actually delivers.
There are tons of professional and highly successful apps for content creators that use custom made (and often shitty/mediocre) GUI frameworks. Whatever difference using Qt makes, it's negligible. Actual features are what sell the product.
It was such a pity about Amarok :( That whole "2.0" debacle put me off the entire KDE ecosystem for years. It's great to see them back on track. But there are still no decent music libraries / players on Linux.
Strawberry is plenty decent for me https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/
+1 for strawberry, coming from Windows and foobar2000, this is the only music player on Linux really up to the task of playing huge music libraries and doing it well.
I came back to KDE after more than 15 years away and the improvement in Kate is astounding. It has features I would never have expected from the basic text editor.
Are they profitable these days?
That used to be their main problem, business wise. Always losing money, so making weird choices trying to stop that.
Yes, Qt Group is profitable. It’s publicly listed and has a market cap of around $2 billion. So not very big compared to a lot of enterprise software vendors, but could be an interesting acquisition target at this price.
For a couple of years Qt was owned by Nokia, then spun off after their Microsoft OS pivot. Today I’m guessing an acquirer might be in the embedded/automotive space instead where Qt is apparently doing quite well.
Meh, GNOME has 1/10th of the features of KDE, but it's much more stable and consistent.
I've used KDE for the past year, and it's just too much, too many options, and if you stray out of the happy path, you encounter plenty of bugs. Then what's the point of offering so many options. I'm back to GNOME.
KDE enjoys a lot of reputation from people that believe the Windows-style UI paradigm to be the best. That's arguable. I would certainly install KDE to a user new to Linux, but I have been running Linux long enough not to get lost if I don't have a taskbar or desktop icons.
GNOME could be so much better, sure, but I prefer 2 options that work (4 code paths to test), than 10 that don't really work all that well (1024 code paths to test).
My dream DE has the simplicity and design of GNOME with the completeness of QT. GTK is a dead-end, but at least it's written in C, so it is future-proof compatible with better languages such as Rust, instead of being stuck with C++ until the heat death of the universe.
Stability is a mixed bag on GNOME. It's been a couple years but I was surprised last time I used GNOME to have Mutter crash back to gdm randomly while drawing due to a bug in graphics tablet code. I typically use SwayWM and while the graphics tablet support is nothing to write home about... It's very uncommon for it to segfault for me. My sessions in Sway tend to last months long, normally interrupted by rebooting for kernel updates or something like that. I do like that it can be extended with JS but that also ran me into all sorts of weird problems, more than it used to when GNOME was newer; I just want basic features like tray icons/app indicators...
(P.S.: I think I am probably the main user of graphics tablets in SwayWM, but if anyone had been using it, I'm sorry for the tool buttons being buggy in 1.8. It was my bug and it should be fixed in 1.9, fingers crossed, it looks like 1.9 will be hitting nixos-unstable later today for me to check.)
I have to periodically restart my session if I'm using Gnome with Wayland, as memory use keeps growing. With the X11 version, you could alt + f2, then "r" to restart gnome-shell. This is, for some reason, not possible when using Wayland.
That's because under Wayland there's no separation between display server and window manager.
To be completely pedantic, I don't believe the Wayland protocol itself actually dictates a design like this: you can separate the Wayland server from the compositor and display server bits if you want. I am not aware of many implementations of this, though; the best example is probably still Arcan.
That said, the very vast majority of Wayland compositors, including Mutter, Weston and everything using wlroots, is implemented without separation between the display server, compositor, etc. so in practice this is still mostly true, it just needn't remain true into the future.
That's because what is restarting, if I understand correctly, is Mutter. And under X11, Mutter is effectively an X11 client. But, under Wayland, Mutter is the compositor... it of course does still do compositing under X11, but under Wayland the compositor is also the display server. So you can't restart it without disconnecting all of the clients... kind of.
Crash recovery and graceful restarts of the compositor are things that should be possible and are being worked on, and ideally this will allow for well-written Wayland compositors to tolerate a variety of issues that would've been hard to on X11, but for now, Wayland compositors mostly can't be restarted. This is also why GNOME doesn't want too much complex stuff going on directly in the compositor, and can explain some other architectural decisions about GNOME Wayland that are otherwise peculiar.
That makes sense.
I suspect that it's the appindicator extension that I am using which causes the problem, but I've not proven this. I'm still salty that they removed appindicator support to begin with, though.
But to me the happy path (the defaults) out-of-the-box on KDE are just better. The console and text editor are legitimately 10x better than GNOME's. The settings app, disk manager, the open/save dialogs, and -- especially -- the file manager.
I do most of my work in VS Code and web browsers, so I am not even a heavy user of the apps that come with the desktop environment, but the quality of those ancillary tools really dictates the quality of life in a GUI environment.
I ended up using GNOME a bunch in the last year because I have to use Wayland (X11 doesn't support my monitor setup) but remote desktop is an important tool in my day-to-day, and for a while only GNOME had a decent RDP story (for accessing the Linux desktop environment from Windows or Mac) on Wayland.
I think that is no longer the case, though, with krdp[1] — seems to have not made it into Plasma 6 after all, but it does work pretty well so far — so I am so excited for KDE 6 that I enabled the testing repos so I could install it on my Arch Linux workstation right away, without waiting for the official packages.
[1]: https://debugpointnews.com/krdp-wayland/
Well, the applications are not the same as the desktop environment. You can install Konsole, Dolphin, etc on gnome as well.
Definitely true (and I do install Konsole on GNOME if I have to use GNOME) but probably not super common.
Most people, myself included, are gonna install the DE and its apps by choosing it in the OS installer (or at least with a single command, a la "pacman -S plasma-meta kde-applications-meta sddm").
Just a single data point, but I had GNOME hanging and crashing in clean Ubuntu and Fedora installs as recently as 2022.
I've migrated to Mint and haven't tried KDE for the last 10 years, but I would have a hard time calling GNOME stable.
On the other hand, I haven't had GNOME crash in years. KDE 3 or 4 times in the past year.
YMMV
Yeah similar experience here, At work we are forced to use a distro with GNOME (well at least it is GNU/Linux and not that Microsoft bloated spyware) and yeah I have plenty of crashes in GNOME. No crashes at home with KDE Plasma on openSUSE Tumbleweed. It has been rock stable.
My personal KDE looks and operates nothing like Windows and more copies the MacOS workflow (although I am not a Mac user at all). GNOME is not that much customizable and it is the main reason I stick to KDE. Also, quite stable. I do rarely have any issues to be honest and it usually is Latte that has bugs but it is in the state maintaining limbo for a while now.
Is GIMP even associated with GNOME? The G stands for GNU, not GNOME.
Yes https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp
That doesn't actually mean much. See the sibling comment.
Gnome's toolkit, gtk, originated as the toolkit the gimp folks wrote to get off of Motif a long time ago. Since then the Gs have had reassigned meanings.
Sort of. It was part of GNU, now it's sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, but I don't think it is considered a "GNOME App".
As per https://discourse.gnome.org/t/relation-between-gimp-and-gnom...: "The GNOME Foundation provides the GNU Image Manipulation Program community and developers with services like fiscal sponsorship, technical infrastructure, promotion, and copyright assignment."
However, it's not considered a GNOME "Core App" or even a "Circle App" (see https://apps.gnome.org/) and I believe that it doesn't attempt to follow the GNOME guidelines or have any GNOME designers/developers working on it.
GNOME originally stood for GNU Network Object Model Environment, so both G's are in some pedantic sense the same.
I don't think there's a very close relationship between GNOME and GIMP, but do keep in mind that GTK, the 'defining' part of GNOME, originated in GIMP (Gimp ToolKit!)
They're not really comparable. GIMP is for picture editing, Krita is for painting.
Regardless of that, not being able to select multiple layers at once (in GIMP) is downright inexcusable.
It's still the only open source image program I know that will not only let me print, but also show where the image will be on the page, and let me move it and scale it up/down. Seems like overkill, but I keep it installed for that reason.
As a KDE developer, I think Gimp is pretty great and has made massive progress in the upcoming 3.0 release (also on things only Krita could do so far, like reasonable colorspace-independence, also UI-wise). Obviously we're very proud of the Krita team. I use both regularly for different tasks, and that they have slightly different objectives and mission statements has been great for open source content authoring.
Krita may have started out as a digital painting tool, but today it is also a pretty good picture editing tool, and certainly easier to use than GIMP for many common photo editing tasks.
FWIW technically the programs have different purposes, even if they also have a lot of overlapping functionality: Krita is primarily a digital painting application, which you can also use to do some general image editing while GIMP is primarily an image editing application which you can also use to do some digital painting. However if you compare the focus of each application to the equivalent of the other you'll see that Krita's image editing functionality - especially on things outside digital painting - is lacking while GIMP is stronger there and at the same time GIMP's digital painting functionality much more limited when compared to Krita's.
"Krita's image editing functionality ..is lacking"
What is missing, compared to gimp?
Moving selections with handles after the fact. Precise selection positioning in general.
And where gimp has an always visible panel for filters, krita has always visible panels for brushes.
It'd be awesome if krita gained more such functionality, but considering krita's recent expansion into vector images, these features are likely on the horizon anyway.
Fwiw I don't think selection positioning is that precise in gimp either. It's nothing compared to, like, a cad kernel.
> KDE is what GNOME wanted to be
Lol, from a historical perspective this is quite literally true: GNOME was born to be a GPL clone of KDE, back when QT had a gnarly license.
GNOME doesn't seem ideologically similar to KDE at all though, it's very hardcoded with hardly anything is adjustable. KDE is like the opposite of that, it can mimic most Windows features as well, e.g. quicklaunch, non-grouped taskbar windows with titles.
This philosophy emerged later, when GNOME tried to differentiate. In the first few versions it was as flexible as KDE, it had fewer trinkets only because they came later and had to catch-up. It was only with version 3 that they went "full Apple", when they adopted a somewhat-dictatorial style of development.
Horses for courses. I loved KDE 2 and KDE 3 and even contributed minor patches to it (using CVS. .. shivers) Back then there was no contest IMO on what is the best Linux DE. KDE 4 was an unmitigated disaster of course, which pushed me to look at Gnome. I then discovered the Gnome 3 workflow (as intended by upstream, not as implemented in distributions such as Ubuntu), and absolutely fell in love.
Nowadays Gnome is absolutely my favourite environment, followed by macOS, with KDE and Win 11 way behind.
Can you link to a description of this intended workflow?
I don't know, I'm not really impressed by their mail-client or their calendar software. Lots of room for improvement, but then again there's already Thunderbird.
So don't use those two programs? KDE is an entire DE and ecosystem; I don't see how you can fault it for two programs that you don't like.
This GNOME3 bashing feels gratuitous. I like both KDE abd GNOME, in their own ways.
That's basically why I stick to KDE. Feels like the natural evolution of the pre-vista windows ui.
I'm extremely happy with a keyboard focused interface like Gnome is. I also like Gnome for giving me sensible defaults and for staying out of my way.
The whole "desktop metaphor" with icons littering the display never made sense to me, so I really appreciated the new take that Gnome tried and keeps exploring.