Xfce is really the best. Minimalistic, good looking.

I only miss 3 column tiling on my ultra wide screen.

I’ve used Xfce and XMonad together with great success. I’m on Wayland now (using Sway), but I still miss that combination.

I do regular 3x3 tiling on XFCE with cmd+numpad. You can define shortcuts in the window manager settings.

Not sure about that.

XFCE started as a clone of CDE. Now compare original CDE with XFCE and it is not really the same thing.

Sure, Gnome change from v2 to v3 was a major change in UI, but mostly for the better and Gnome kept a way to have a more classic behavior.

Yep.

GNOME makes often changes without long term strategy or asking their actual users. The removal of Type-Ahead-Find in Nautilus or background-transparency in GNOME-Terminal where mistakes. On the other hand new applications like Documents or Console required resources but provide no benefit over it counterparts. That said - Nautilus improved a lot in recent years and there are even patches available for Type-Ahead-Find (or Navigation). Same for background-transparency in the GNOME-Terminal. The separated top-bar-menus were also a problem (decoupling menus from application-windows was copied from Apple) but now reverted, they learn.

If the design team is aware of the usage and has a plan things fit well! The overview is great for keyboard and mouse users, the dash make simple things simple, they got rid of the useless desktop-metapher (copied from Win95) and also the system-tray (another thing from Win95). The keyboard focused use of GNOME is use core-feature, fast for experienced users and a relieve for novice users. The GNOME-Shell provided a good UI and removed many questionable ideas of the past.

Wishlist?

Decouple the release cycle of most applications from GNOME, excepting Nautilus and Settings. There is no need to couple Epiphany, Terminal, Maps, Calendar and so. Evolution already skips every second release. And feature-removal should require a good reasoning and not just „I don’t need that myself“. Many options are bewildering, many forks without merges are worse (lost developers and lost users).

My biggest gripe with gnome is how dependent each individual app is on installing the whole gnome-shell packages, wan to use their email app without using gnome as as a DE, well too bad Gmail/office and all other kind of providers won't work.

Gnome feels very anti Unix philosophy.

Gnome has always been very wannabe Apple philosophy.

More like wannabe Windows philosophy, at least in the early days. Their founding document was called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck" and was all about how the Linux desktop should be architected like Windows, COM components and all.

Isn't KDE similar in that regard? I don't really know, but when I installed a couple of KDE programs, pacman pulled a hundred KDE packages.

I'd argue that is more a symptom of applying the UNIX philosophy, if anything. A lot of those "hundred KDE packages" are very tiny, highly modular libraries that do "one thing". And no, the apps don't depend on the shell. In fact it's often the distros asking us to go a bit more monolithic again to ease the packaging overhead.

Those packages are separate because the system is modular. I assure you, it's more difficult for the team to do it like this, and in many ways it's a welcome feature. The package number might seem insane, but compare the aggregate size of them vs other DEs. It's still not a fair comparison, but it's arguably better than the number of packages.

Either way, many package managers provide groups or patterns to make it easier for an end user to maintain their system. Pacman does have such a feature.

Look, for example, do you prefer to be able to install SDDM just because you like the themeing capabilities, and be able to do so, with just the bare minimum packages; or, install GDM and having to pull the whole GNOME DE as a requirement?

Gnome has an component, Gnome Online Accounts.

It's purpose is to provide and manage account information for applications that need it, so the user doesn't have to configure their email, calendar, whatever, in each application separately. With each application storing passwords in a who knows where, or each implementing their Gmail OAuth.

So it is quite logical, that application that uses accounts will also need gnome-online-accounts.

'Do one thing and do it well` -- how is that anti Unix philosophy?

> With each application storing passwords in a who knows where

GNOME has a keyring system service for storing passwords, so it's not necessary to get the entire desktop shell to access the keyring.

Keyring is another component, specifically for passwords.

GOA is for storing account information: e.g. you configure your Gmail/nextcloud/whatever account once, and then all apps that need it can access it. So your Geary, Contacts and Calendar (separate applications) do not need each to implement account management and account specific auth flows -- not just passwords, OAuth is all the rage nowadays. And I, as the user, do not have to keep tokens in each app current.

It is also not 'entire gnome shell`. Just the required components.

sure but to setup gnome online accounts the official documented way you need gome-control-center, other ways to do seems to not have official documentation and have failed me.

here the required dependency list for control center on arch: accountsservice bolt colord-gtk4 cups-pk-helper gcr gnome-bluetooth-3.0 gnome-color-manager gnome-desktop-4 gnome-online-accounts gnome-settings-daemon gnome-shell gsettings-desktop-schemas gsound gtk4 libadwaita libgnomekbd libgtop libgudev libibus libmalcontent libmm-glib libnma-gtk4 libpwquality smbclient sound-theme-freedesktop udisks2 upower

Isn’t that a gripe about the individual applications?

Applications which are part of GNOME itself probably try to remain small and integrate well into GNOME e.g. Nautilus and Evolution. Applications which aren’t part of GNOME like Gimp or Geeqie rely only Gtk.

It just hurts if you want use a integrated GNOME-Application with a sole window-manager. That makes sense and we shouldn’t blame the developers for modularity and re-using.

I for one love Gnome and have seen nothing but a steady stream of improvements since 3.0. Sure 3.0 was a shock, but they stuck to it, and perfected their vision. And now it’s just a joy to use. If that’s not long term plans/vision idk what is.

> The removal of Type-Ahead-Find in Nautilus

I don’t know about Type-Ahead-Find in Nautilus, but typing to search in the file choosers is comically bad.

“Comically bad” here goes slightly beyond not working right to mildly destructive. I don’t know how the software pulls it off, but trying to open a folder found by Tracker search shows a nonsensical UI (no, I don’t want to “replace” the folder) and sometimes removes the x bit from the folder mode. I don’t even know how. A random chmod(2) call deep in glib? Why would the file chooser ever use chmod or fchmod?

Surely is more about slow evolution than revolution.

But Gnome did only a revolution once and since then it is the same.

I personnally totally saw it as a different project as gnome 2 didn't become obsolete immediately and Mate&Cinnamon forks took over so quickly for those looking for a gnome classic evolution that no one was really forced into using gnome 3.

> I personnally totally saw it as a different project as gnome 2 didn't become obsolete immediately

Yeah it did. They announced gnome 3 and deprecated 2 on the same day, and seemed to have made the deliberate choice to not allow them to coexist. As soon as your distro moved, bam, you were done.

> Mate&Cinnamon forks took over so quickly

After some months. This stuff was not there on day 1.

In the mean time, those of us who did not want to work the way Gnome 3 decided we should, had to find an alternative. And when we found a good one (Xfce for me), we stuck with it.

> Gnome kept a way to have a more classic behavior.

Not really, even with Plugins everything is handled by Mutter - you don't have the modularity of Gnome 2 where you can switch out the panel, file browser or window manager as you please.

Fortunately Mate forked Gnome 2 to retain the old desktop.

MATE is my preferred environment, but is it even viable anymore?

Despite being in the package list for fedora(?) on recent versions, It fails to install and talk on the bug thread is just to remove the packages from the repo.

Same here... MATE is the default... can't really migrate to Wayland then.

Ubuntu Mate still seems to be doing fine, but yea the latest mayor update of the desktop was two years ago, development isn't very busy there.

One of the nice things about Linux is that users have choice. A lot of people were put off by the transition to Gnome 3 and continue to be (self included). Which is fine since the desktop environment/window manager can be swapped out. It's nice to see Xfce being added to the mix for Wayland since is is clear that Wayland is going to be the future.

As for Xfce changing, that is to be expected since people's needs change over time. It is simply nice when those changes are gradual and not radical.

>It's nice to see Xfce being added to the mix for Wayland since is is clear that Wayland is going to be the future.

It's not clear at all - Wayland is in some ways a regression compared to X (try writing your own WM - tinyWM is 50 LOC, whereas the Wayland equivalent TinyWL is over 1000), and doesn't just "improve" X but changes paradigm entirely.

I'd like to see [Arcan](https://www.arcan-fe.com) be the future, it seems more elegant than Wayland.

Yes, quite different but roughly the same paradigms. I recently used an old HP-UX workstation with HP VUE and it felt very familiar and intuitive, not to mention the aesthetics were awesome.

Oh my. Gnome3 is so beautiful and so weird. WTF with "activities"? why have the activities menu at the top left? etc. I rather use Mate, Cinnamon, XFCE, or even KDE.

> but mostly for the better

Say what now? Gnome 3 is such a shitshow that I switched to XFCE because of it.

You should read “Who Moved My Cheese”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Moved_My_Cheese%3F

> In the corporate environment, management has been known to distribute this book to employees during times of "structural reorganization", or during cost-cutting measures, in an attempt to portray unfavorable or unfair changes in an optimistic or opportunistic way.

Yeah no thanks. I think I’d rather choke to death on Malcolm Gladwell’s cock.

Well, a big part of my job is trying not to move other people's cheeses. In other words, keeping the major version of the software I maintain at "1".

That's probably not the right lesson here. Perhaps you should read "I Moved Your Cheese" [0]. A short summary is here [1] - I highly recommend it.

[0] - https://www.amazon.com/Moved-Your-Cheese-Someone-Business/dp...

[1] - https://www.bkconnection.com/static/I_Moved_Your_Cheese_EXCE...

there is no law saying that you must migrate to another DE from time to time. you could keep using the same software your entire life

cheese moving, in this context, is not a force of nature. it's something that other people do upon you, and they could elect not to

KDE's Plasma hasn't changed the UI radically since the 4.0 release, and 6.0 will also not introduce any radical UI changes. It's settled down quite nicely, and most of the effort has gone into performance optimizations and polish.

This is not to detract from XFCE, which is a cool project with many strengths as well, and certainly deserving of enthusiastic users (doesn't matter which FOSS desktop you love, we all win).

Has KDE fixed the inconsistent spacing in their default themes? In past eras every time I tried to use KDE the inconsistent spacing in the apps included with the desktop was jarring.

I really, really wanted to like KDE as it's super powerful otherwise.

There's certainly always a lot of effort going into that direction. The KDE community also has a goals voting process that elects multi-year community-wide goals (each goal gets their own leadership, funded hackathons, budget, etc.), and "Consistency" was one of the more recent batches and is still ongoing: https://community.kde.org/Goals/Consistency

So I'd say it's worth checking back, and certainly the developers/contributors take your ask seriously enough to vote for it themselves.

I'm running i3 + xfce-settings for many years and to me it's a perfect solution, extremely stable. I have no opinion on wayland, but I dread the day when I'll have to move to it, as it will mean switching WM, and I assume lots of details will change. But at least it seems XFCE should still work! I just want my desktop environment to fade into the background and not bother me. I'm used to all the little quirks now :)

The `sway` window manager is an attempt to clone i3 for Wayland. If you do have to switch, that part at least, shouldn't be too painful.

"Sway" is i3 with Wayland, fear not (so much)

You would probably have to change your keybindings a little but otherwise it's very similar... before the Wayland part

Switching from i3 to Sway kept 90% of the same config for me, changing only keybinds and output configuration.

I did have to override args/env for some things to truly do Wayland, but that's shortening every day

I feel much the same, though I'm running bspwm, with my own cobbled together scripts rather XFCE. There's zero upside to me in an upgrade, but I worry it eventually will become hard to avoid.

I'm increasingly tempted to grab a simple Wayland compositor and "bolt on" a minimalist X implementation directly on it to also allow X connections with just enough of the protocol implemented to allow running some simpler X WMs (but I'd love it if someone beat me to it).

For WMs with lots of fancy stuff it'd can take quite a bit of the X API to support, but a simple X WM doesn't typically use that many request types (I just looked at i3's source, and it's X interactions are pretty simple...

exactly this is the reason why I sticked to XFCE. Super stable, no useless changes, easy to use and configurable. Lets me keep my workflow. It's a tool like the workbench of a carpenter. I want to decide how its organized once. And if there is a need to change something, then I will be the one to change that, as I am the one who uses it. Looking forward to Wayland support!

I like those experiments