So they dumped their own thing. Since unity was partially based on gnome, they used gnome before, and somebody else (rh) keeps pumping resources into it, it seems like a natural choice.
Of course. But unfortunately I think that what makes sense from a historical and resource-evaluation standpoint ends up falling down in terms of real-world usability.
I'm biased, but Plasma or even Mate would have been much better choices. Plasma has been so good lately and seems to take community feedback seriously. Stability has been great, it's extremely lightweight and the customization options make me...happy. I've been kicking myself for not switching from Gnome to plasma sooner. For anyone skeptical of plasma, I urge you to give it a try : kubuntu, kde neon, fedora kde, arch + plasma, opensuse are all great.
For Canonical: I suppose it sort of makes sense from a historical perspective in that before Unity they used Gnome, so they were returning to Gnome. But given that Gnome appears to be a single-threaded Javascript engine with memory leaks, I'm not convinced it's a great choice. Still, Gnome is backed by Red Hat and just got a $1 million donation ( https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/anonymous-donor-pledges-1... ), so in theory it should get better....but I've been thinking "it should get better soon" for a while, so who knows.
Modern KDE (e.g. 5.12+) is amazing! It's slim, it's fast, it lets you configure tons of stuff and it looks beautiful.
If you haven't used it in the last two years you should give it a try!
Then I discovered MATE. =D I have switched back to GNU/Linux with a MATE desktop since, and I could not be happier. To my taste, it gives both Windows and macOS a run for their money.
Out of curiosity: what is that "nice interface you use" your wife asked about?
The 'nice interface I use' which I switched my wife to is AwesomeWM. Not that user-friendly to configure, but really pleasant to use.
I agree. While standardization has its benefits, I think homogeneity also has significant drawbacks. Unfortunately, rare is the Linux desktop environment that gets things right for me. KDE comes close, I guess.
> And my wife long complained "why don't you switch my machine to the nice interface you use" and finally last week I did switch her off of GNOME and she's much happier.
What did you switch her to?
I haven't seriously tried KDE, though I've heard lots of good things about it recently. I don't know why Ubuntu chose GNOME over Mate, the latter seems a perfectly fine typical desktop environment paradigm.
> What did you switch her to?
AwesomeWM (which is technically a windows manager and not a desktop environment, but it's full-featured enough to be essentially like a DE), which I keep coming back even after trying other DEs/WMs. I had hesitated to put her on it since its configuration isn't user-friendly (it's a .lua text file..), but I just essentially copied over my configuration, and she's been much happier than on GNOME.
Personally, I am all for standardization and homogeneity. We need standards and homogeneity. I would gladly steamroll over all the people who oppose "monoculture" for the sake of opposing something.
You can't please everyone but I think gnome is the right answer for most people. Don't like something? Come join the discussion at https://gitlab.gnome.org (I hope I got that right)
Better link https://gitlab.gnome.org/groups/GNOME/-/issues
I do this with awesome, and it works well. It's a one-liner in rc.lua:
awful.spawn.with_shell "nm-applet"
The problem is I think the deep issues I have with Gnome are not things which are easily fixed, e.g. "stop leaking memory", "don't be a single-threaded Javascript process", "allow me to control workspaces independently on each monitor/screen", &c. &c.
I would love to see Gnome improve though, even if I never end up using it, but I am not currently seeing any obvious signs that this will occur.
I mean I still can't get over the asinine comment covered here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4757077
Very poor choice of words which will hurt us for a long time.
Archived at https://archive.fo/NbzkY
This is the opposite of the standardization and cooperation across desktop environments and window managers that I want!