I gave it a fair shot for about a year, using vanilla GNOME with no extensions. While I eventually became somewhat proficient, it’s just not good.
Switching between a few workspaces looks cool, but once you have 10+ programs open, it becomes an unmanageable hell that requires memorizing which workspace each application is in and which hotkey you have each application set to.
How is this better than simply having icons on the taskbar? By the way, the taskbar still exists in GNOME! It’s just empty and seems to take up space at the top for no apparent reason other than displaying the time.
Did I do something wrong? Is it meant for you to only ever have a couple applications open?
I’d love to hear from people that use it and thrive in it.
Yes, I thrive in it.
I’ve always compared it to a window manager, but with a mouse focus instead of the keyboard. It feels very natural to me.
I like it, even though I’m not sure if I would call it the GNOME official workflow (is that even a thing?). I usually don’t get close to having 10 applications open. I tend to work with about 1 to 3 workspaces with various applications based on my needs. Furthermore, I keep the windows non-maximized which helps me condense more information yone screen
Nope, not even a little bit. That’s why I use Cinnamon. On the workspace front, though, I do use those heavily. It helps to have dedicated workspaces. On my home setup I have a sidedesk for Obsidian and PDF reading; a hobby bench for tinkering with linux, my network, and coding; a main for webrowsing and general info gathering; one for gaming (steam and lutris live there); and one for communications like discord, signal, matrix, etc.
Yes. With many windows open but I don’t use workspaces. Alt-Tab, and Alt-“above tab” is enough to me. And you can always super, first chars of the app name, enter.
I’ve been testing KDE for several weeks now, XFCE before that but I’m back to Gnome. It just feels right. Everything is where I expect it to be. No searching in thousands of menus. What scares me about KDE is that there are tons of options and stuff that no one will ever need. Especially KMail I find just awful. So many options and you only find what you are looking for, after an extensive search via a search engine of your choice. This is totally frustrating. XFCE does a lot better here, but I miss the one or other pleasant animation when opening windows and the like. Gnome, on the other hand, isn’t great either, but I feel most comfortable here.
I don’t get this complaint. If KMail sucks, don’t use it. I’ve never used it, and I’ve been on KDE for a long time. XFCE doesn’t even have a mail app afaik, and if you like the Gnome project’s mail app, you can use it on KDE Plasma. The desktop doesn’t restrict which apps you can use.
The large amount of settings are usually set to sane defaults, so you don’t have to change them. There are a lot of settings, but they’re all usually accessible via a GUI, so it’s not hard to change them. The customizability of KDE is it’s biggest strength.
If you like the way Gnome does everything, then you’ll be happy with it. Otherwise, you have no real option but to switch to another DE.
