Why has a submission about nouveau’s website devolved into Gnome/gnome devs bad, gib upvotes lol
Man I couldn’t be a Linux dev. Giving up your time to do highly skilled work for free, then you get roundly hated for it and called a piece of shit by the very people who are benefitting from your free work lol. It’d burn me out pretty quickly.
E: the other comments appear to have been removed. It was just a circlejerk about Gnome devs being evil, and mocking the dev here for having mental health struggles related to the amount of hate they receive.
Gnome I think is the best hope for mainstream adoption if that ever actually happens
Shows off a lot of the advantages of Linux desktop without needing to spend hours configuring it for it to look nice and work great
Maybe I’m missing some of the nuances between KDE and Gnome, but I’ve enjoyed the out of box experience with KDE far more than Gnome. That said, perhaps I’ve simply timed my switchover to Plasma such that I missed its teething pains. I say this as someone who used pretty much exclusively Gnome over the years.
What would you say sets Gnome apart?
The launcher is quite nice to use, fast and search oriented (I never used any of the start menu on windows besides the search bar anyway so the fact it’s the main focus is nice)
Virtual desktops (only on Wayland) are very well implemented and feel very smooth, three finger swipe works a charm, with the forge extension it tiles servicably as well
Also just one of the nicest looking DEs imo. I have since switched to hyprland because I wanted first class tiling support but I have my system UI looking very similar to gnome’s, using mostly gnome’s applications
Having used gnome on Ubuntu a couple years ago I have to say it has come miles recently (also Ubuntu’s gnome in my opinion is not as good as vanilla gnome) - it feels very clean and intuitive out of the box
@Flatfire @flashgnash I think it depends on the kinds of themes and extensions you add. For me, Plasma has always been really stable. For others not, and I think the admins are the culprit.
best hope for mainstream adoption
I feel for that the default Linux DE will need to have an UI closer to Windows, due to user familiarity with the traditional desktop metaphor. Maybe Cinnamon or even KDE are more suited in that respect. Neither need hours of configuring either. Personally, Cinnamon with Wayland support would be perfect for me (and I suspect a whole lot of Windows migrants as well).
Gnome is nice of course in it’s own minimalist way for many,but the workflow is very different from other OSes and I think many find it too minimalist requiring extensions to improve usability therefore. However, there isn’t a stable mechanism for extensions causing breakages between versions, which can be very irritating. I don’t know if that’s now changed now though, because I have been reading about a major change in the extension mechanism in Gnome 45.
I think that’s what makes it great for newcomers though. If you show them something pretending to be windows they’ll think why not just use windows, if you show them something better they might be more impressed
Coming from Windows gnome was pretty intuitive for me, it’s got much of the same workflow still even if buttons are in different places
I think several DEs could see mainstream adoption.
If the team that works on Cinnamon got a little bit more manpower and were able to implement larger changes such as adopting Wayland, I think they’d have a chance. Wouldn’t hurt to make the default theme a bit nicer too. I think the main thorn in Cinnamon’s side is the development pace and the fact that it would probably be viewed by the average person on the street as a weird Windows clone.
Plasma’s largest obstacle to mainstream adoption is bugs and instability, but in fairness it has improved a lot over the past couple of years. Seriously, compare 5.27 to any Plasma 4 release or any Plasma 5 release before like 5.16 - it’s night and day. Kwin still crashes and takes all your programs down with it, though. That’s a showstopper, but will be fixed in Plasma 6.
Speaking of Plasma 6, the fact they keep pushing it back probably means they want it stable from the beginning. KDE are doing a good job putting the “KDE is buggy” statement to bed.
I guess I agree that Gnome as it stands is the most appropriate for widespread adoption. It’s extremely polished and beautiful, it has comparatively decent accessibility features, it’s extremely stable despite being a frequently updating distro, it has amazing gesture support (better than MacOS even, imo), it’s decent in terms of touch support, the GTK4/Libadwaita app ecosystem is healthy, etc. but it’s not completely without issues.
Unfortunately this is all academic though until big laptop OEMs start actively pushing for Linux on their devices.
Counterpoint: I don’t think any Linux DE will ever see mainstream adoption.
It has nothing to do with how good they are. It’s not related to software support either. They could support every piece of software ever made; Linux supports 90% of games for Windows and emulators for dozens of other platforms and it still hasn’t attracted more than like 2% of gamers.
It’s related to what OP said: to gain mass adoption you need to put up with a lot of bullshit. It takes a company with some financial gain to do that, and paid developers. Volunteer contributors will eventually say “screw this” or go mental like Torvalds.
There’s no company that can do this. They tried and failed, because Microsoft. Apple and Google had to create their own platforms from scratch to get away from it.
What’s wrong with it? I’m currently using nautilus as my file browser on hyprland and it’s more than servicably
I don’t really use a file browser that much anyway so I might not be the best person to comment though. Tend to find it quicker and easier to move files around from a terminal then any file browser for everything except choosing a file for something
They absolutely do not. Their UX is based on actual usability studies, rather than just copying the Win95 UX paradigm.
You should look it up, it’s actually quite interesting.The attention to detail and the thought process of pretty much every UI element is pretty crazy.
Gnome is amazing so long as you’re not trying to use it like Windows. It’s not Windows. It’s not trying to be.
If you want to use Linux with a Windows UX, then use Plasma or Cinnamon.
Personally I find it quite refreshing to have a different choice, and IMO it’s worked out better. Even when I use Plasma, I now get rid of the taskbar/panel, use the activities view, etc. change it to the Gnome workflow, in effect.
It’s childish to call a UX bad just because you personally like things to work like Windows.
Got anything to back that up? I highly doubt the people here that were circlejerking about hating devs and even saying it’s good if they suffer mentally from abuse they receive are devs themselves.
That’s the kind of brain-dead childishness, immaturity, and lack of empathy that I’d expect from 15 year olds trying to act edgy in front of their mates.
Are you using Linux at work without systemd? Seems unlikely. All our 400+ nodes run RHEL and consequently systemd. This doesn’t seem to impact our researchers’ use of CUDA in the slightest when executing code on the nodes or in any kind of container.
