I don't want extensible software. KDE is terrible in that regards. They have miriads of options, that's too much for me. I want opinionated software. I don't like GNOME, but it's the lesser evil and I learned to deal with its issues.

Also I don't like that KDE does not have its native launcher. I need to install some SDDE stuff which works under Xorg or something like that and looks ugly. Pretty weird stuff all that. GNOME just have GDM which just works.

My ideal environment would be Windows 95-like WM with zero configuration options which just works out of the box the way I want. It doesn't exist, unfortunately. May be I should try to write is, as I complain about it so much. Just have no idea about scale of such a project.

There are no other 10 DE environments. GNOME and KDE are the only two mature ones. Rest are either obsolete, especially with Wayland conquering Linux desktop, or for weird use-cases, like tiling WMs. I'm used to traditional windows managers, I don't want tiling WMs.

XFCE is plenty mature and very stable

Add Chicago95, and you've got some comfortable nostalgia.

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

This is just beautiful, thank you!

Cinnamon DE (linux mint) is stable, mature and miles ahead of gnome

Cinnamon is probably the best to use right now followed by XFCE because it uses XWayland by default. It provides nearly full use in both directions while still allowing both the new plugins and old widgets systems. It's also surprisingly stable. The only bug I've ever encountered in my now ten years of using it is on an N100 powered laptop, where if I let the computer go to sleep instead of turning it off eventually Cinnamon's process keeps requesting CPU time until it uses an entire core to itself.

Cinnamon getting good recently kind of blew my mind. I'm an ancient Gnome 2.x elitist, and typically hated cinnamon every-time I've tried it.

Every now and then I distro hop and ended up on LMDE (linux mint debian edition, the real linux mint) which only has a cinnamon offering out of the box. Much to my surprise its actually good. It still has random bugs triggered by stuff I've tried adding to the panel, but that's par for the course with gnome, XFCE, and MATE lately anyway. Over all it's a solid DE now even if the stock start/menu is underwhelming everything is fixable.

Lots of opinions that are less than idea in gnome. But the only one that really breaks me is lack of typeahead in Nautilus.

I just want to type D, enter and open Documents/, how hard can it be. It's been almost a decade since they removed it, and I still can't use vanilla Nautilus.

I always end up with Nemo or a patched Nautilus.

rant aside, the rest of gnome seems fine. Don't love it, but also don't hate it. I can add my own shortcuts with rofi/dmenu.

Works for me. I'm typing D, it instantly filters the list of files and selects first item. That's "desktop" for me, so I need to type O or press Down to select "documents" and type <Enter>.

The filtering of files is not instant. If you type do<enter> it won't be fast enough. Maybe there have been slight improvements.

But afaik it still defaults to search.

Try: https://github.com/lubomir-brindza/nautilus-typeahead

> My ideal environment would be Windows 95-like WM with zero configuration options which just works out of the box the way I want.

Why would we have any reason to believe that there would ever be a super-opinionated desktop environment that would be good? The examples we have -- which notably DO NOT include Windows 95, which had a zillion tiny knobs, many in the UI, but others requiring dropping to the registry (which is no different from screwing with confirmation files)... and, frankly, doesn't even include macOS, the system with some of the best customization of key bindings and the most universal automation -- are mostly bad. Put in the day or two of effort to make something that isn't opinionated work the way you want, and then reap the rewards for the following few decades of your productive career.

This is an honest question, not trying to get into an argument...

> I don't want extensible software. KDE is terrible in that regards. They have miriads of options, that's too much for me.

Why not use the default provided then and take the defaults as opinionated? That's what I do actually. I might change very few options, but I generally use the defaults. It's not that you have to configure kde before it becomes usable, the defaults are pretty ok.

Extensibility ~= extra complexity will necessarily increase the chance of bugs.

In something as complex as a display stack this is an important tradeoff.

This is only true if complexity under the hood actually affects your default experience. I don't think it's the case for KDE. "The chance" is indeed higher, except in GNOME it seems the bugs are actually real.

> My ideal environment would be Windows 95-like WM with zero configuration options which just works out of the box the way I want. It doesn't exist, unfortunately. May be I should try to write is, as I complain about it so much. Just have no idea about scale of such a project.

Have you ever tried Icewm?

But you don't need to configure kde to use it, you can just use the defaults for everything, nobody is forcing you to configure stuff. It is not some exotic tiling wm where you have to set up everything.

Cosmic.

Help me understand your two posts. From your earlier post you don't like GNOME because it's make different choices about what to support, and here you're saying you don't like KDE because it isn't opinionated enough.

Is the problem that you don't want choices as long as the maintainers always makes the same choice you would have when taking options away?

> It's pretty openly known that GNOME is hostile to its own userbase

It's pretty openly in bad faith to assign malice to open-source developers.

GNOME does in fact have a long track record on this point. Decades old.

And in my option is finally good enough for me to switch from macOS and to recommend Gnome to others. Not everyone likes that Gnome 2 (wasn’t bad, I must admit, but I don’t like it) and especially Gnome 3 was. I quite enjoy modern Gnome, and whilst there are some minor inconveniences I’d prefer being different, I can live with that for the sake of overall simplicity.

Dunno, Gnome hasn't been hostile to me.

I'm sorry, but there are MANY users of GNOME who are happy with the direction. I'd personally choose GNOME over any desktop environment on any OS.