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Comment by drnick1 | Hacker News Reader

Uncomfortable, but true.

GNOME has reached maturity and hasn't changed significantly in years, while Apple is busy destroying macOS.

Really? GNOME is not what I would recommend to people.

I should applaud their efforts, and I get that much of it is voluntary, but their bugs are numerous, notable and the way they interact with the rest of the universe (both people with accessibility needs, and the wider developer ecosystem on linux) can most accurately be described as arrogant and hostile.

KDE is the bastion of maturity here, and I would agree that it is mature.

I’m not sure how the love for GNOME continues when KDE (while not my personal choice) has clearly been running circles around it since GNOME3 and the gap has only widened since that change too.

Both desktops are pretty mature. I've run both of their Wayland stacks, and Mutter/KWin both perform great these days. It really comes down to personal preference for most use-cases.

> I’m not sure how the love for GNOME continues

Because KDE looks and feels straight out of 2010 compared to GNOME? GNOME just suffers by leaving some (what should be integrated) features to its shitty extension system.

> looks and feels straight out of 2010

Can you name a UI/UX improvement in desktop design (that KDE doesn't have) since 2010 to warrant this being a negative?

It's just an age old debate. Those like me who like GNOME find KDE cluttered and rough around the edges. Others who like KDE think GNOME is too opinionated and occasionally buggy.

To be honest, I wish the GNOME team completely halted development and exclusively focused on bug fixing for at least a year. For example, Nautilus sometimes leaks memory and get killed by the kernel.

Sure, but in one of these you can change the mouse pointer speed- and the other forced systemd to hide its bugs (thus forcing all distros that wanted to run it to shim those bugfixes forever or adopt systemd).

So...? It's 2026, the "I hate systemd" position has been circling the drain for years, now. Are we going to complain about Wayland being the default session, too?

Neither GNOME nor KDE are perfect. We could list out bugs in both for days and still not be done. But they are both usable, and have divergent design that gives users a meaningful choice between which desktop they prefer. They both have strong ideological underpinnings that ignore weaknesses in their tech stack to drive progress forward at any cost. It's not the end of the world for either desktop. Both projects have been plugging away for decades without issue.

I’m actually a fan of wayland, but I don’t have to like something just because its ubiquitous now and I don’t have to like the reasons it became that way. Just to be clear.

You still didn’t answer any question I posed about UX though, since that was what we were talking about and I have levied specific criticisms.

In GNOME, pointer speed and mouse acceleration both have settings by-default. A11Y is taken fairly seriously, and has API-level GTK features to accommodate A11Y-specific modes.

What other questions are there to answer? GNOME is benign, there's a reason why it's the default in mainstream distros like Ubuntu and Fedora.

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