Comment by Rinzler89 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rinzler89 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>and it stays out of the way.

Funny because Gnome's defaults are so not what I want, that it really doesn't stay out of my way, on the contrary, it keeps frustrating me, and the worst part is that it's really not easy to change it to your liking. Had to use Ubuntu Gnome at work and it made me pull my hair out.

At least with KDE, IceWM, XFCE, OpenBox, etc. there's gonna be some setting or at least a config file to change what bothers me, instead of looking for the 20th extension which either is out of date and doesn't work on Wayland, or will break at the next Gnome update.

Gnome is only good if what's out of the box fits you like a glove, and then it's VERY good. Otherwise, forget about it, it's like trying to run a marathon in a shoe that doesn't fit you: it will be very painful. And I'm too old and set in my ways to completely overhaul my workflow and usage patterns to a new DE paradigm, the way Gnome expects of me, instead of sticking to those DEs/WMs I know already work for me.

YMMV.

I think Gnome's defaults appeal to people who don't want to work with GUIs but have to. For a lot of people it's a comfortably simple container for a terminal, web interface, or GUI driven config management tool and nothing else.

Then they log off, and go back to their polished MacOS or Windows machines to play games or watch movies.

>I think Gnome's defaults appeal to people who don't want to work with GUIs but have to.

I feel like this would apply better to stuff like i3, IceWM, OpenBox etc. , no? Gnome is definitely for those who want to use a GUI, not get rid of it, otherwise they would use something a lot more minimalistic instead of something that eats up 1.2+ GB of ram just to launch an app.

>For a lot of people it's a comfortably simple container for a terminal, web interface, or GUI driven config management tool and nothing else.

But you can do that with absolutely every WM/DE though.

Speaking only for myself, I did use bspwm for a good while, but ultimately I got tired of maintaining it. I'm looking for something that feels similar but is more out of the box. GNOME is the best I've found for that so far.

Yeah kind of. But configuring them is a chore that not everybody got an appetite for. Plus WMs lack the convenience apps which proper DEs provide out of the box.

Yeah this is me tbh - except I do use GUI apps as needed e.g. I game with Steam and play around with Godot (both in flatpaks).

But ultimately, I am in a terminal probably 90% of my time, and I want a DE that facilitates that... which GNOME does.

2nd sentence is not always true. I for one, staying with Gnome precisely because what you described in the first sentence.

This. I have both gnome and kde (work/personal) and miss kde at work

the desktops of my formative years were two: MATE and Windows Explorer. because of this, I knew straight away that GNOME wasn't what I wanted, and Ubuntu's decision to adopt GNOME 3 after all the hate that seemingly everybody under the sun had for the desktop (even if I guess this was a problem for Unity too, though I loved it) TOTALLY baffled me.

that being said, I fell in love with Adwaita's design and the GTK headerbar applications for their simplicity and elegance. I so fell in love with it that I begrudgingly decided to switch to GNOME desktop on Ubuntu, just so these applications would feel native.

a few years in, and i'll be real; you're absolutely right about how GNOME expects you to totally overhaul your workflow. that being said I regret to say that now I am fully married to the GNOME workflow and can't even bear to use MATE anymore (other than for brief stark fits of Compiz nostalgia)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com