> Fedora's default gnome is completely unusable.

I've been using Fedora's default gnome for years and never, ever had issues with it nor have I ever felt the need to figure out how one even goes about changing the defaults --well, other than the last update where they totally borked the touchpad to make it more applesque or something and I had to fix that so I could actually use the damn thing.

Though they do seem to like to remove things a lot, the footer at the bottom of the file window thingie comes to mind as it annoys me the most since the "modal popup file info" covers up the filenames often, but mostly I find the changes to be trivial.

So, yeah, once in a while they get a hair up their ass and do something wonky but on the whole I'm a happy gnome user.

You never ever had issues and then go on to list two major complaints. I see this a lot about major software packages people get attached to. Sunken cost fallacy?

I've used gnome 3 everyday for several years. I browse and code in it. What am I missing? What are the problems? I have seen few.

This is essentially a meaningless question.

Whatever issues other people conflict with, they are by definition already known to be no problem for you. It's either things you don't want or care about, and so never tried to do, and you wouldn't think it was important when descibed, or it's things that work fine for you, by your happy good luck of not having whatever combination of configs or hardware or usage pattern or sunspots etc where it fails.

I don't blame you for wondering. It's just that I think it's almost automatically impossible to answer the question and have any other result than you say "oh, that's all?" It's even fine for you to have that reaction, it's just that, what's the point if there is no possible other reaction? That's what I mean by meaningless question.

If you are happy in a Prius, because it does everything you want, then what do you care if I say it can't drive over curbs or be pop-started?

It's like when anyone else asks why you run linux instead of windows or mac, or why you root your android phone. Whatever you tell them, none of them ever thinks it adds up or makes any sense.

What am I missing on Windows? "On linux you can do whatever you want." But what else would I want to do? "Anything. I have no idea. Probably nothing by the sound of it."

It is great that you can use Gnome without issue, the problem is that Gnome developers and a big part of teh community had this attitude and ignored the complaints about lag and memory leaks until Ubuntu switched to Gnome and a big number of people were "forced" into Gnome and the problems could not be blamed on drivers or extensions.

If you are using terminals a lot you should try Konsole, see how customizable it is(tabs, you can have multiple profiles, set a profile per tab) the app is made to help you do your job better, same with Dolphin. Gnome apps are optimized for an ideal new users, a user that is so "special" that power options will make his brain collapse, the apps are made by designers and not by user feedback.

You can set profile per tab with gnome shell.

But I do recall serious difficulty getting konsole to look like anything but an eyesore.

I am glad to hear that there are still advanced features in Gnome but I do not understand how can a terminal application look bad, is just fonts on a background, you chose the fonts you chose the background, can you tell me I am very curious

> I'm sad to say this, but today's GNOME is a complete shitshow. [] And Mate Desktop is a major player in the DE space.

There's not just the Mate Desktop. Look at Budgie, built atop GTK3, and it's pretty nice and usable and uses the old paradigms of GTK2.

Unity, Cinnamon, and Elementary (all built on top of GTK3) as well. You know you're going in the wrong direction when a significant portion of your userbase leaves to form a myriad of competitors.

On the one hand choice is good, but on the other hand it would be nice if the Linux ecosystem were less fragmented. I feel like a lot of the blame for this fragmentation lies with both technical and design issues in Gnome 3.

That's one of the reasons that I use Linux Mint. It's Gnome-based, but with a curated UX, and being stable for 2 years means that I can just do my work without this kind of nasty surprises.

Has Mint improved sec-wise?

I remember that they used to "achieve" stability by not updating (apt pinning) important packages like kernel, xorg etc and did strange stuff like copying deb packages from ubuntu/debian verbatim into their repos.

Edit: I wouldnt touch Mint with a 10ft pole. Seems like they still have no sec advisaries, still ship a remix of debian/ubuntu packages and so on:

2013:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140214063150/https://lists.ubu...

2016:

https://lwn.net/Articles/676664/

>"Has Mint improved sec-wise?"

Yes, markedly.

They basically follow the latest Ubuntu LTS closely, and I get the latest Firefox etc. a couple of days after the official release.

I'm still considering KDE Neon, but that's mostly a personal preference for KDE.

I've now been running KDE Neon on my laptop (X220) for a little while, and I highly recommend trying it out. It's literally Ubuntu LTS with an almost rolling-release KDE repo, and a bit of extra polish here and there.

It has been even more "it just works" than Mint, which is already stupendously easy to install.

I truly do love Cinnamon and I recommend anyone to give it a try.

I collaborated with Gtkmm in the early days.

Nowadays it seems Gtk and GNOME documentation lacks updates and is full of broken links.

dont let you scare that off fedora though, LXDE is a great fedora spin :). People say good things about xfce also.

I've been using XFCE for about 3 or 4 years, and I really can't complain, it simply doesn't get in my way, it doesn't force me to relearn the UI, it even works with my old 800mhz EeePC, and the theme used with Xubuntu doesn't look as ancient as people say.

I remember trying Mate in the past, but I also remember I had issues running GTK3 software and I didn't feel motivated enough to dig for a solution. What I wanted was a hassle-free DE, and XFCE was the one for me.

I've been on XFCE for over 10 years. Old style menu, never gets in my way, runs GTK and QT apps, easy to exetend, four monitors, etc. So simple and stable. I've avoided so much yak-shaving that other desktop Linux users I know have been stuck in, more than once.

Cheers to XFCE team!!

The last time I tried XFCE I found that HiDPI support was pretty much absent, has this improved?

I use XFCE on a 4k UHD 40" samsung TV at 3840 × 2160 for my work machine. It seems to work just fine.

I was just trying Xubuntu. There's a setting to switch to 2x scale. Didn't seem to affect It apps. The window decorations stayed small, but there's a theme with larger ones. The cursor stayed small but can be adjusted.

Replying since I can't edit: it should read "didn't affect Qt apps".

It's not great, even in 4.13. Price I pay for stable is that "new" features take a while.

Yeh I love xfce as well. LXDE or XFCE and I am a happy camper. I even use them on powerful computers as well.

I picked up gtk and made my first gui app in an evening using Glade. It's not as hard as you try to claim. It even runs fine in Windows.

Making simple apps is simple, probably is much harder to do advanced apps

Wireshark changed from GTK to Qt https://blog.wireshark.org/2013/10/switching-to-qt/

Linus Torwald, a C fan and c++ hater , decided to port from GTK to Qt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0

If you make a simple GUI like for a python script GTK is enough

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0

Thank you for posting this, it's nice to see that someone already had most of my feelings.

If you're making a simple GUI in Python, Tkinter is probably enough too.

I've been trying to use KDE on and off, but it just randomly freezes on me for several seconds on anything other than an Intel GPU. I was excited to try it with the new open-source AMD drivers, but it still does that.

GNOME doesn't have this problem, so for all its problems, it works for me.

I never hear of this issue, if you want to try again open a bug or ask for help on reddit or support sites/forums. Most issues related to graphics are flickering and artifacts and KWin has many options you can try, including not using 3d effects. (Wayland is still not ready)

I'll definitely try to isolate this more and file a bug report, I currently only use KDE actively on my Intel GPU laptop, but I like the DE itself very much and would like to switch to it everywhere, potentially, in the future.

I would first try to set kwin rendering backend 1to Xrender, this uses the CPU and not OpenGL/GP so you can see if the OpenGL drivers are the issue. For me on NVIDIA control panel app I have more options for OpenGl and those helped me.

This page has some variables that let's you set some things and bypass kwin autodetection https://community.kde.org/KWin/Environment_Variables

I know it sucks that it does not work out of the box, at least you don't have Nvidia.