Contrary to the author, I see a lot of the design decisions in Gnome as careful and deliberate. They want the OS to disappear in service of whatever app you have in front of you. And I think they succeed, mostly. But that’s a sensibility that’s not going to work for every user or every task.
At this point, Gnome is more opinionated than even macOS or Windows. It’s going to put off some.
I’ll admit that I was a little worried when I started seeing screenshots of libadwaita and gnome 42, heading down the path of flat-everything, but in practice, the experience has been nice on both Arch and Fedora 36.
Tiling Assistant, this lets you define custom window snapping zones, its most helpful when you have a mix of landscape/portrait displays and you need more flexibility than the built-in behaviour offers.
DDterm, this one isn't essential, but its convenient to have a terminal shade ready to go. On my ThinkPads I'd bind this to the ThinkVantage key to quickly get a terminal up.
I used to muck around with themes and icon sets years ago, but Adwaita is pretty inoffensive these days, and dark mode is not an afterthought now.
I used to use Guake as my shade but it's a lot more convenient to have a unified solution for regular and dropdown terminals.
2015: Tried gnome3 on Fedora on my laptop. Hated it. I liked unity more, but I persisted with gnome anyway (because I had better things to worry about than DE), and eventually didn't mind at all. Used plenty of extensions to make life easier.
(I hoped between distros for no good reason, but used gnome in all of them).
2018: PopOS came out with their own style of gnome which IMO looked better. Switched to using that on my personal machine. I also stopped using extensions; only a couple of tweaks.
2020: Had to use XFCE on a desktop machine because I needed my machine to use as little resources for itself. I grew to like it eventually.
2022: Tried Fedora 36 with gnome 42, and I like the way gnome has improved. I now use it in the stock version, with absolutely no extensions or tweaks or anything. It just works (or rather, I adapted to what it provides).
Some random thoughts:
* My baseline criteria for liking a DE is: it should NOT remind me of Windows (the reason for that is a story for another day). This means Cinnamon and KDE are out, though they're pretty cool nevertheless.
* Gnome used to be a resource hog. This was really the only problem I had with it. After using XCFE for a while at work I had made up my mind to switch to it the next time I hop distro, but then newest gnome seems to have got resource usage under control again (or am I imagining it?).
* XFCE is a good no-bullshit DE.
* I don't care too much about DEs anymore.
The hate is practically a meme at this point. It makes me wonder what people need a desktop environment to do. Most of the criticism seems to be that it's not Windows or macOS
I’m constantly trying to find extensions to simplify simple tasks or make it usable and it’s frustrating. Tons of extensions are old and broken and don’t work anymore.
Visually I don’t like KDE Out of the box but I don’t need to install anything.
Most of the time complaints about Gnome boil down to "It's not behaving the way I think it should" and that - to me - is not a valid criticism.
People love to hate and Gnome is very prominent, so it is going to get hate and heat.
Let's take the linked article for example. What's its main topic? "Windows management".
You know what? It's 2022 and I don't want to play "Window manager" anymore. I want the UI to do that and you know what? Gnome does that for me. I got code to write and bugs to fix - I don't want to waste my time managing windows.
But hater's gonna hate - what'cha gonna do?
What do you mean? Like GNOME will remove the concept of windows and you will have only 1 window maximum?
Do you use Slack or email? How do you get notifications without a System Tray? Or you use a distro that restored some of the features back since GNOME is targeting only people that use only GNOME apps and it seems only 1 window at a time.
I dislike GNOME the community for their attitude, and dislike their sotfware for their shit quality and missing features, but you won't see me browsing GNOME forums or reddits to hate on them, they are getting enough hate from people that loved them just a few years back and loved when feature were removed until their favorite shit was removed and then they finally understood that the GNOME community devs and designers are not nice, just a bunch of big ego dudes pretending to be smart developers or genius designers and UX experts.
What are you even taking about?
https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/Notifications
> I dislike GNOME the community for their attitude, and dislike their sotfware ...
So... hater's gonna hate?
About System Tray, I mean GNOME refused to implement the standards and created their own cooler system , maybe they changed their minds , I see you have or had to use an extension https://github.com/Rickycezar/gnome-shell-slack-integration.
Btw I mean not only the message popup but a way to just glance at the Tray area and see you missed a notification or that you have unread emails in Thunderbird.
If Sack,Thunderibird,Discord,Skype work by default with no extra extension or extra compatibility layer in GNOME then great I did not know that GNOME developers lost this battle with the users.
> For me dislike is not the same as hate, it produces different feelings.
Fair enough.
> If Sack,Thunderibird,Discord,Skype work by default with no extra extension or extra compatibility layer in GNOME then great
I get notifications for Thunderbird, Firefox, Teams and other applications. I don't know if any of them have extra code to supply notifications for Gnome, but I don't use extensions or compatibility plugins.
> I did not know that GNOME developers lost this battle with the users.
I'm very happy with the way notifications work in Gnome. The system tray was a burning heap of trash and every applications was trying to dump their icon in it to have extra screen space. I'm not sorry it's gone.
I get it, not it's not for everyone. But the amount of bad press it gets is hard to understand.
I like Gnome but without extensions I find it borderline unusable on my desktop.
It provides a base DE for OSes to customize and provide a complete package for end users.
Yes, it was the distros that chose to ship it like this, but the gnome folks also announced the Gnome 2 was deprecated and would receive no support, pretty much instantly.
This left a sour taste with a lot of folks. It looked like deliberate sabotage of what had been a nice, stable DE. Personally, at that point I switched to Xfce and I've never looked back. Gnome is about the last DE I would investigate if I did want to switch away, purely because of the history.
I haven't seen much change between 41 and 42, which is fine since everything is already working great.