The only thing you got wrong is that the toilet extension would be a third-party thing, and Gnome devs would actively insult anyone who dared be upset they broke it.
2 other responses I got confirmed that such thing happens and you say otherwise. Doesn’t Gnome breaks third party extensions that provides users basic functionality that should be in gnome in the first place but the devs don’t want to implement? Is the meme wrong?
Not that guy but phrases like “basic functionality” are just hard to pin down. What you need for your workflow and can’t live without is probably irrelevant fluff to a whole other class of folks.
I haven’t run into anything I need a third-party extension for yet, so I guess it works for some of us, although admittedly I do very few things on that machine so I could easily be missing something vital for most people.
The fucking system tray. Which literally every other DE and mainstream OS out there supports because some apps depend on it and break if it doesn’t exist.
Last I checked GNOME devs said “no, we will never support it, because we’ve DePRecATeD the tray in GTK”.
It’s functionality so basic I have 3-6 apps which depend on it at any time on my work machine. Anyone saying it doesn’t fall under “basic functionality” is either a GNOME dev or a troll.
Swear I’m neither of those things, but you’re talking about the system tray as in that little bucket of icons that sits in the lower-right of a taskbar usually?
This seems like it’d fall pretty neatly in the “you use it, so you think it’s required basic functionally; other people don’t, so they don’t care about it” realm. I do not miss the bucket. It doesn’t seem like awesome functionality (to me) to have to access application features through a bucket of tiny icons instead of the application itself and to be unable to access those features in the application.
I can see how frustrating it’d be if there’s something you like to use or have to use that only works if it can be in a system tray, but it’s not a ubiquitous feature requirement across all applications, so maybe GNOME is for people that don’t care for apps that require this and all the other mainstream OS options are for folks that do? Man that’s an annoying sentence to read; no wonder people get so angry about what seems like pointless minutiae.
I assume I dislike it because my work machine (windows, no choice there) always has about 30 things in its pointless icon bucket that can’t be closed by a basic user and do nothing beyond cluttering the taskbar and getting in the way. I get nothing out of a bucket of icons that exist only to silently scream “I’m running in the background still! Just in case anyone cares!” Not having to see that crap on my personal machine is a relief rather than a frustration for me.
It’s not as bad nowadays that apps yielded to GNOME’s bullshit. Back when GTK2 apps were still common… Urgh. Plenty of apps were broken without it for no good reason.
I like opinionated UX - I use sway - but GNOME’s approach is incompatible with “general use” and only works (for now) because of canonical’s weight and ability to impose their vision as the only vision.
Also they didn’t replace the tray with a better way to manage background apps, so they can suck a dick on the UX front.
Ah okay I would likely have missed those days since until this year I kept hoping windows wouldn’t completely shit the bed for my gaming PC.
I’ll have to take a look sway; think I’m still figuring out what I like best and GNOME felt familiar to the MacBook I like using for productivity (although now that I think about it, even Apple has a system-tray-like thing on the top of the screen). KDE was also fine but if I have a choice I usually like picking something with a spotlight-search equivalent; GNOME’s just looks more like spotlight so it activates the dumb part of my brain that likes familiarity.
Thanks for sticking with me through this conversation. Sometimes it’s hard to convey over text that I’m more ignorant than asshole on most Linux things.
I wouldn’t recommend sway to someone who isn’t actively looking for a tiling WM, I would recommend finding a good spotlight equivalent to use on KDE as that will still be less customization work than it would require on barebones sway (which is hardly usable).
basic functionality that should be in gnome in the first place
Who gets to decide what’s “basic” functionality? Each desktop’s team has their vision for what they want to implement. Something that might be basic to one person might not be in someone else’s vision or…
the devs don’t want to implement
…is being worked on but needs design. GNOME is design-oriented. It doesn’t matter how much you scream that something needs implementing if no one designs how that implementation will work and why it should be implemented in the first place. It’s not about “not wanting”, it’s about making sure that when something is implemented, that it’ll work well both now and in the future.
Their whole attitude towards development is similar, down to not working with other dekstops and insisting on doing things the way that works best for them regardless if it’s worse for the linux ecosystem overall.
Long time Gnome user here: I like the general Gnome simplicity of use and workflow and got used to it, but I’m really tired of having to install extensions for very basic things, and of it messing all my extensions on each version upgrade, so I have to reinstall everything. I started experimenting with KDE, and looking forward to cosmic.
I use several, but the ones that I consider to be basic functions are caffeine, tray icons, places status indicator, removable drive menu and extended volume indicator. That last one is a nice example of my frustration, because it can’t be installed on the current gnome version anymore, and having to open settings to switch my audio output is terrible. Every distro upgrade have been the same experience, and I lose some functionality
You forgot multi-monitor support. The extension broke for me a couple of years back and the author became AWOL. My workaround is to open the clock app on my secondary monitor when gaming in order to track time now that I can’t see the clock in the taskbar.
Do you know how vim has distributions like lunarvim, lazvim, nvchad, etc.? Simply installing something like lazyvim can quickly and easily convert vim from a text editor to a full blown IDE.
I think Gnome needs something like this. A curated set of plugins that are easy to install and maintain compatibility with different versions of Gnome - something that would deal with the API churn in Gnome while maintaining a stable, usable desktop environment.
I don’t know if this is feasible, because I haven’t used Gnome since 2.x, but I think it would really help make it an actual full blown DE.
The problem is the Gnome team doesn’t give a flying rat’s ass about maintaining a stable api. I’ve never bothered with extensions because even the most basic stuff only works for one or two versions. The neovim team is pretty committed to backwards compatibility and following standards for interoperability like LSP these days, so it’s much easier for third parties to maintain a large set of extended functionality at this point. If they acted like the gnome team, your status bar plugin would break every other update.
Yeah, KDE’s basically at the point you don’t need GNOME imo, it’s so customizable you can make it basically look/function the same as GNOME without having to put up with GNOME’s dumber decisions
I’ve been daily driving the pre-alpha since January, it’s definitely got a bit of jank, but it’s in really good shape. The alpha should be pretty usable, and I think by the beta it should be pretty much good to go.
I’ve heard that the brand new Nvidia 555 drivers actually work with Wayland. I was ready to switch my gaming laptop to Linux but I may wait a few weeks for the driver to release out of beta. (Arch users shut up, lol.)
When I first started on Linux with Fedora probably a little over 15 years ago, I used gnome just because it was different. At some point I played with Enlightenment, and now I use KDE. It was different when I was more interested in screwing around with my system. Now that I use it for work, I just need everything to be as reliable, persistent, and easy as possible. I haven’t used gnome in many years, but I hear these stories all the time and I just don’t want to deal with something that’ll wrench my workflow when I have other shit to do and no time to play diagnostics.
It’s more like, there is one way to go to the toilet but it involves going into a small porcelain cup. They refuse to admit that’s not practical, or that it doesn’t work for everybody, or allow people to use anything else. You will use the little porcelain cup no matter how absurd it is and that’s it.
No one is entitled to random free custom development work.
Meaning gnome devs themselves are not entitled to the free custom development work of the third party extension devs, and therefore gnome is actively taking advantage of the third party developers(Third-party developers feel undervalued & exploited, potentially leading to burnout and abandonment of projects) while all round making it harder for them to maintain the extensions(GNOME’s decision not to provide a stable API for extensions makes it challenging for third-party developers to maintain their work across GNOME versions).
This is where KDE Community is different, they actively support, communicate, collaborate, etc. with 3rd party devs to build a strong relationship & a strong ecosystem.
In fact, Gnome devs are all around abrasive to the entire Linux ecosystem, including but not limited to the Wayland development team & the development teams of other desktop environments(GNOME’s design decisions, such as only supporting CSD & lobbying Wayland to mandate CSD & the controversy over the accent color protocol, have led to conflicts with the entire Linux ecosystem), their own user base(GNOME’s communication style is dismissive & unresponsive to community feedback), application developers(GNOME’s decisions sometimes force other projects to adapt or create workarounds, as seen with the server-side decoration controversy, further complicating development efforts), third party developers, and even amongst themselves(There are reports of conflicts even within the GNOME development team, suggesting internal tensions).
Gnome will die the second Cosmic (Epoch) DE gets remotely close to 1:1 parity. It will be more stable, it’ll be more feature complete & support modern features, it’ll have a similar level of polish, a similar yet way more flexible design language and the devs will actively work with the Linux ecosystem & so on.
At that point the only people left over for Gnome, are those stuck on x11, and die hard shills/fanboys. Many developers are very much sick of Gnomes shit already and only put up with it because it’s popular.
Perhaps or perhaps not. Every new desk top was going to be better than Gnome when introduced. I remember having such high hopes for Elementary back in the day too. It was so elegant and smooth to use.
As I said, I briefly used gnome in the far past and just remember being weirded out by the design choices that felt very “Apple like” . So them pulling an “Apple” and doing the “we know better than the user” doesn’t feel out of place.
Microsoft at least isn’t trying to be a walked garden (at least, they didn’t used to)
It’s not much, but the bar to be “better than Apple” from that perspective ain’t exactly high
(Also, since they didn’t mention Microsoft at all or make some statement about how Apple was the worst, I don’t see how it even implies that… If you inferred that, I think that’s on you)
Apple is garbage but they have made some good design decisions. Microsoft rarely has. And no it’s not “on me”. Anyone using Mac windows and Linux over the years would see that most Linux DEs copy a lot from either MS or Apple, most outside of gnome primary mimicking windows.
Anyone using Mac windows and Linux over the years would see that most Linux DEs copy a lot from either MS or Apple, most outside of gnome primary mimicking windows.
So you literally just know gnome and kde plasma. That’s cute.
I don’t get this comment. Gnome is not trying to make a walled garden, and Microsoft has taken every chance they get at making walled gardens (Windows phone, windows 8 arm, various proprietary file formats and protocols), they just haven’t been very successful at it.
Gnome devs : we broke the toilet extension. Your pokemons have nowhere to shit and piss.
Pokemon trainers : why the fuck is the toilet an extension. Shouldn’t it be part of the DE?
Gnome devs : we believe the toilet feature is unnecessary, so it wasn’t and will never be implemented.
Note : I’ve barely used gnome in my life so it’s based on memes I’ve seen about gnome.
The only thing you got wrong is that the toilet extension would be a third-party thing, and Gnome devs would actively insult anyone who dared be upset they broke it.
I was gonna say that it was a third party extension, but then I thought that gnomes users would infer that pretty easily.
and it shows
2 other responses I got confirmed that such thing happens and you say otherwise. Doesn’t Gnome breaks third party extensions that provides users basic functionality that should be in gnome in the first place but the devs don’t want to implement? Is the meme wrong?
Not that guy but phrases like “basic functionality” are just hard to pin down. What you need for your workflow and can’t live without is probably irrelevant fluff to a whole other class of folks.
I haven’t run into anything I need a third-party extension for yet, so I guess it works for some of us, although admittedly I do very few things on that machine so I could easily be missing something vital for most people.
GNOME works the best when not used. Got it.
The fucking system tray. Which literally every other DE and mainstream OS out there supports because some apps depend on it and break if it doesn’t exist.
Last I checked GNOME devs said “no, we will never support it, because we’ve DePRecATeD the tray in GTK”.
It’s functionality so basic I have 3-6 apps which depend on it at any time on my work machine. Anyone saying it doesn’t fall under “basic functionality” is either a GNOME dev or a troll.
Swear I’m neither of those things, but you’re talking about the system tray as in that little bucket of icons that sits in the lower-right of a taskbar usually?
This seems like it’d fall pretty neatly in the “you use it, so you think it’s required basic functionally; other people don’t, so they don’t care about it” realm. I do not miss the bucket. It doesn’t seem like awesome functionality (to me) to have to access application features through a bucket of tiny icons instead of the application itself and to be unable to access those features in the application.
I can see how frustrating it’d be if there’s something you like to use or have to use that only works if it can be in a system tray, but it’s not a ubiquitous feature requirement across all applications, so maybe GNOME is for people that don’t care for apps that require this and all the other mainstream OS options are for folks that do? Man that’s an annoying sentence to read; no wonder people get so angry about what seems like pointless minutiae.
I assume I dislike it because my work machine (windows, no choice there) always has about 30 things in its pointless icon bucket that can’t be closed by a basic user and do nothing beyond cluttering the taskbar and getting in the way. I get nothing out of a bucket of icons that exist only to silently scream “I’m running in the background still! Just in case anyone cares!” Not having to see that crap on my personal machine is a relief rather than a frustration for me.
It’s not as bad nowadays that apps yielded to GNOME’s bullshit. Back when GTK2 apps were still common… Urgh. Plenty of apps were broken without it for no good reason.
I like opinionated UX - I use sway - but GNOME’s approach is incompatible with “general use” and only works (for now) because of canonical’s weight and ability to impose their vision as the only vision.
Also they didn’t replace the tray with a better way to manage background apps, so they can suck a dick on the UX front.
Ah okay I would likely have missed those days since until this year I kept hoping windows wouldn’t completely shit the bed for my gaming PC.
I’ll have to take a look sway; think I’m still figuring out what I like best and GNOME felt familiar to the MacBook I like using for productivity (although now that I think about it, even Apple has a system-tray-like thing on the top of the screen). KDE was also fine but if I have a choice I usually like picking something with a spotlight-search equivalent; GNOME’s just looks more like spotlight so it activates the dumb part of my brain that likes familiarity.
Thanks for sticking with me through this conversation. Sometimes it’s hard to convey over text that I’m more ignorant than asshole on most Linux things.
I wouldn’t recommend sway to someone who isn’t actively looking for a tiling WM, I would recommend finding a good spotlight equivalent to use on KDE as that will still be less customization work than it would require on barebones sway (which is hardly usable).
Yes, it is.
Who gets to decide what’s “basic” functionality? Each desktop’s team has their vision for what they want to implement. Something that might be basic to one person might not be in someone else’s vision or…
…is being worked on but needs design. GNOME is design-oriented. It doesn’t matter how much you scream that something needs implementing if no one designs how that implementation will work and why it should be implemented in the first place. It’s not about “not wanting”, it’s about making sure that when something is implemented, that it’ll work well both now and in the future.
Gnome, the Apple of Linux
I can’t think of a single thing about gnome that remotely resembles apple, outside of some UI patterns…
Their whole attitude towards development is similar, down to not working with other dekstops and insisting on doing things the way that works best for them regardless if it’s worse for the linux ecosystem overall.
Long time Gnome user here: I like the general Gnome simplicity of use and workflow and got used to it, but I’m really tired of having to install extensions for very basic things, and of it messing all my extensions on each version upgrade, so I have to reinstall everything. I started experimenting with KDE, and looking forward to cosmic.
Can I ask what extensions you are using in gnome?
I use several, but the ones that I consider to be basic functions are caffeine, tray icons, places status indicator, removable drive menu and extended volume indicator. That last one is a nice example of my frustration, because it can’t be installed on the current gnome version anymore, and having to open settings to switch my audio output is terrible. Every distro upgrade have been the same experience, and I lose some functionality
You forgot multi-monitor support. The extension broke for me a couple of years back and the author became AWOL. My workaround is to open the clock app on my secondary monitor when gaming in order to track time now that I can’t see the clock in the taskbar.
Do you know how vim has distributions like lunarvim, lazvim, nvchad, etc.? Simply installing something like lazyvim can quickly and easily convert vim from a text editor to a full blown IDE.
I think Gnome needs something like this. A curated set of plugins that are easy to install and maintain compatibility with different versions of Gnome - something that would deal with the API churn in Gnome while maintaining a stable, usable desktop environment.
I don’t know if this is feasible, because I haven’t used Gnome since 2.x, but I think it would really help make it an actual full blown DE.
The problem is the Gnome team doesn’t give a flying rat’s ass about maintaining a stable api. I’ve never bothered with extensions because even the most basic stuff only works for one or two versions. The neovim team is pretty committed to backwards compatibility and following standards for interoperability like LSP these days, so it’s much easier for third parties to maintain a large set of extended functionality at this point. If they acted like the gnome team, your status bar plugin would break every other update.
Yeah, KDE’s basically at the point you don’t need GNOME imo, it’s so customizable you can make it basically look/function the same as GNOME without having to put up with GNOME’s dumber decisions
It’s close to alpha! I don’t think it’ll be in a good enough state for me (Nvidia GPU), but maybe someday.
I’ve been daily driving the pre-alpha since January, it’s definitely got a bit of jank, but it’s in really good shape. The alpha should be pretty usable, and I think by the beta it should be pretty much good to go.
Just as soon as Nvidia stops hating Wayland… 👉 👈 any day now…
I’ve heard that the brand new Nvidia 555 drivers actually work with Wayland. I was ready to switch my gaming laptop to Linux but I may wait a few weeks for the driver to release out of beta. (Arch users shut up, lol.)
their last gpu were working good, from nvddia unern opinions that i read
When I first started on Linux with Fedora probably a little over 15 years ago, I used gnome just because it was different. At some point I played with Enlightenment, and now I use KDE. It was different when I was more interested in screwing around with my system. Now that I use it for work, I just need everything to be as reliable, persistent, and easy as possible. I haven’t used gnome in many years, but I hear these stories all the time and I just don’t want to deal with something that’ll wrench my workflow when I have other shit to do and no time to play diagnostics.
I only tried GNOME long enough to see how crap it is, and have been a happy KDE user for years.
I went the other way. I liked the simplicity, and thought what about MORE simplicity? I went to i3 and haven’t really looked back yet.
I tend to flip flop, I like some things in GNOME better, but the lack of customization always brings me back to KDE after a while (Plasma, whatever)
For me it’s KDE on desktop, GNOME on laptop.
This is the way. Although Plasma 6 is getting reaaaal close to going on my laptop too.
Yeah, Cosmic looks really nice. Their app store interface needs a bit of modernization work, but otherwise, it looks well polished.
It’s more like, there is one way to go to the toilet but it involves going into a small porcelain cup. They refuse to admit that’s not practical, or that it doesn’t work for everybody, or allow people to use anything else. You will use the little porcelain cup no matter how absurd it is and that’s it.
Wrong. If an extension for your need isn’t enough, you can very simply just use another DE. No one is entitled to random free custom development work
Meaning gnome devs themselves are not entitled to the free custom development work of the third party extension devs, and therefore gnome is actively taking advantage of the third party developers(Third-party developers feel undervalued & exploited, potentially leading to burnout and abandonment of projects) while all round making it harder for them to maintain the extensions(GNOME’s decision not to provide a stable API for extensions makes it challenging for third-party developers to maintain their work across GNOME versions).
This is where KDE Community is different, they actively support, communicate, collaborate, etc. with 3rd party devs to build a strong relationship & a strong ecosystem.
In fact, Gnome devs are all around abrasive to the entire Linux ecosystem, including but not limited to the Wayland development team & the development teams of other desktop environments(GNOME’s design decisions, such as only supporting CSD & lobbying Wayland to mandate CSD & the controversy over the accent color protocol, have led to conflicts with the entire Linux ecosystem), their own user base(GNOME’s communication style is dismissive & unresponsive to community feedback), application developers(GNOME’s decisions sometimes force other projects to adapt or create workarounds, as seen with the server-side decoration controversy, further complicating development efforts), third party developers, and even amongst themselves(There are reports of conflicts even within the GNOME development team, suggesting internal tensions).
And yet KDE is still jankier.
People always talk about extensions breaking… I’ve probably used 5-10 extensions and only one of them broke, and I don’t even remember what it was.
Gnome will die the second Cosmic (Epoch) DE gets remotely close to 1:1 parity. It will be more stable, it’ll be more feature complete & support modern features, it’ll have a similar level of polish, a similar yet way more flexible design language and the devs will actively work with the Linux ecosystem & so on.
At that point the only people left over for Gnome, are those stuck on x11, and die hard shills/fanboys. Many developers are very much sick of Gnomes shit already and only put up with it because it’s popular.
Only if it becomes the default install of the major distros. That, I think is a major hurdle, not even KDE has been able to leap that.
It’s already going to be the default on one of the major distros at launch; Pop_OS! by System76. It’ll grow in popularity pretty quickly.
Perhaps or perhaps not. Every new desk top was going to be better than Gnome when introduced. I remember having such high hopes for Elementary back in the day too. It was so elegant and smooth to use.
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So you’re basing an opinion on the world’s dumbest, least accurate form of communication
As I said, I briefly used gnome in the far past and just remember being weirded out by the design choices that felt very “Apple like” . So them pulling an “Apple” and doing the “we know better than the user” doesn’t feel out of place.
This comment implies that Microsoft design choices are better which is hilarious
Microsoft at least isn’t trying to be a walked garden (at least, they didn’t used to)
It’s not much, but the bar to be “better than Apple” from that perspective ain’t exactly high
(Also, since they didn’t mention Microsoft at all or make some statement about how Apple was the worst, I don’t see how it even implies that… If you inferred that, I think that’s on you)
Apple is garbage but they have made some good design decisions. Microsoft rarely has. And no it’s not “on me”. Anyone using Mac windows and Linux over the years would see that most Linux DEs copy a lot from either MS or Apple, most outside of gnome primary mimicking windows.
So you literally just know gnome and kde plasma. That’s cute.
Not true but weird flex “pfft this guy only knows two desktop environments!”
Seems like you’re not very familiar with the history of computer interfaces if you can write what you just did
Woah there! That wasn’t a flex, I just said you don’t seem so familiar with current computer interfaces. But hey, if you wanna be offended you do you
I don’t get this comment. Gnome is not trying to make a walled garden, and Microsoft has taken every chance they get at making walled gardens (Windows phone, windows 8 arm, various proprietary file formats and protocols), they just haven’t been very successful at it.
Yep. It’s amazing how Microsoft fanboys come into the Linux communities spreading their weird biased takes
I mean, dude got it pretty spot on, so can we really criticize the accuracy?
He did not get anything spot on