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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

The problem is Gnome have really committed themselves to screwing up UI paradigms.

I'd be much less happy with Linux if Cinnamon DE didn't exist because that's essentially a Windows like experience without the BS.

Conversely the default Gnome desktop is awful IMO.

Taskbar, start button and menus all have decades of proven effectiveness, no one needed to mess with them just get the details right (e.g. fonts and interactions).

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You know what is proven effective? Not needing to reach for a mouse to interact with taskbar, start button and menus. GNOME is extremely effective as long as you aren't a clicker. If you want to stick to a 30 year old desktop metaphor that's on you but the rest of us have moved on.

I often see people praising gnome for it's keyboard efficiency but they are not even 10% as good as macos.

If they cared so much, they would have keyboard shortcut for everything, in every app, with the top bar displaying menu and every shortcut attributed to it, just like macos.

Instead you can use the keyboard to switch an app, close it and so on but once you are working inside, you immediately need to take your mouse. What's the point ? It saves 1 second and confuse lot of beginners.

I'm not sure what you mean - pretty much every modern GNOME application has keyboard shortcuts. In fact they use a consistent keyboard shortcut to bring up the screen that shows all the keyboard shortcuts: ctrl+?

What i mean is that the keyboard shortcut in gnome application is lackluster. there must be a dozen per app, whereas on macos every single function has a keyboard shorcut. Even KDE has more.

Discoverable user interfaces are orthogonal to keyboard interaction efficiency.

Menus are one of the primary ways you can discover keyboard shortcuts.

It took me a week or so to get used to Gnome, and now I find Windows 11 (and KDE) frustrating!

I like the gnome paradigm. The gnome implementation is bad though. I was promised that xwayland would be the bridge to a glorious future yet stuff like pointer confinement just doesn’t work and their implementation of refresh rate doesn’t play nicely with vscode. So, the reality is I still use KDE even if it’s not quite as visionary.

Same here I switched to Gnome many years ago and even the newest windows and macos desktop feel old and non user-friendly in comparison.

I’ll echo the other commenters who are praising Gnome. It is pretty keyboard-centric. Once you’re used to it, it’s quite nice. I’ve moved on to Niri, and can’t imagine going back to a floating window manager, but between Windows, macOS, and Gnome, I prefer Gnome hands down.

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