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Comment by a-dub | Hacker News Reader

i always disliked gnome 3 because of the user interface (it seemed to be an amalgamation of all the bad things from os x or even macos), not because of the underlying language it's coded in.

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I know a lot of people who despise GNOME 3 on the whole, but I'm willing to defend it for what it is. If you've ever used a touchscreen Linux device, it becomes a whole lot easier to appreciate what they did with the toolkit. GTK apps just... work on a touchscreen. No modifications or fancy-pants libraries required. They also work really well on desktop too, with nice plump interactive elements that make sense for the category of devices that it's targeting. It looks equally as spiffy at 200% scaling as it does at 100%, and it's snappy as all hell.

I don't speak for everyone, but GTK3 is the unofficial "native" toolkit for Linux. QT isn't far behind (I've been using Plasma since GNOME 40 and it's a blast), but GTK3 just feels... right. Also licensing and custom stylesheets yadda yadda yadda.

I use GNOME + Wayland on desktop, with a few tweaks and extensions, and I'm totally willing to defend it. It's a lovely computing environment that just feels at home to me and I think it has a tasteful balance of modern and traditional UI patterns.

That's fine, I'm not going to take that away from you since I've heard great things about Wayland with the proper hardware for it. As for GNOME, I don't think it's terrible, but it does definitely feel like a regression to me when compared with GNOME 3.3x or GNOME Classic. It's perfectly fine to like it (computer UIs are still opinionated after all), but I feel like their leadership is heading in an undesirable direction for a huge chunk of GNOME loyalists. GNOME 3.38 felt like home to me for a long time, but 40 never clicked. Plus, their "my way or the highway" mentality doesn't work well when combined with their lack of contributors and overall supremacist, absolutist viewpoint on the desktop as a whole.

I do still like certain aspects of GNOME, but I worry for their future under the current leadership.

I'm loving gnome as well, especially since 40,but still can't help but imagine what unity would look like now had it continued development at canonical. One of my main gripes with gnome is the huge amount of wasted space in the top bar that would just be perfect for a global menu like unity had.

Canonical was really onto something very good with Unity, but Gnome3 is a UX disaster. Every single app from Nautilus to Gedit became harder to use. And it has lots of empty bars wasting space everywhere.

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