this post was submitted on 04 May 2025

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Who needs stable, feature-rich desktops anyway (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

250 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Context: https://pointieststick.com/2025/05/01/notes-from-the-graz-plasma-sprint/

(page 4) 50 comments

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 week ago (11 children)

I’ve found GNOME a pleasure to use. From my experience many folks that use Linux like to tinker with their computers. Even those new to Linux see a world of possibilities. GNOME doesn’t really embrace this tinkerer philosophy. They have an opinion on what at desktop manager should be and they’re constantly working towards that vision.

When I introduce GNOME to new people I explain to them some the project goals, design elements and how it’s intended to be used. Then I tell them that GNOME is opinionated on how things should behave and look, and if you try to force GNOME to be something it’s not you’ll probably end up using poorly documented or unsupported third-party extensions that break things. Generally the advice is, GNOME is great, but not for everyone, take the time to learn the GNOME way of doing things and if you don’t like it you're better off switching to another desktop environment than trying to change GNOME.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

I have no problem with using Gnome. It stays out of my way and Things Just Work for the most part as 99% of what I do is in a browser or a terminal anyway.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think both have their use cases. Gnome is absolutely fantastic, if you use it on a laptop with a touch screen (for university, school, etc), but on desktop I dont really like it that much. I like the simple design, but KDEs customisability is much better. However, their virtual desktops are kinda ass, but I dont really use them on my desktop PC anyways.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

lol if

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 week ago (10 children)

Honestly I can't imagine why anyone would use either of these when there are lightweight DEs like XFCE and Cinnamon that are not only easier on the system resources, but also more stable, customizeable, user-friendly and more pleasant to look at. I stopped taking gnome seriously ever since they came up with GTK3. They had a chance to fix it with GTK4 but instead they somehow made it even worse (as if client-side decorations wasn't bad enough, now theyre doing clientside shadows? Seriously!?!?). KDE is allegedly better because it gives the user more options, but anyone who's actually used it will tell you that it suffers from the same kind of bloat and braindead design decisions as gnome.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Gonna talk from KDE positions here. GNOME, too, has its place, but I recognize it's not for everybody.

More pleasant to look at

Certainly not for the average person. For a normie user, KDE looks way way nicer, and it's certainly way more modern than either XFCE or Cinnamon. Sure, the latter can be made into something modernishly enough, but the customization options are way more limited here. Either way, out of the box, KDE is much more preferable to most.

User-friendly

Can hardly find anything that is more user-friendly than KDE. Everything you can possibly think of is available graphically, the interface is extremely sleek and ergonomic, and you can change anything at all to your liking. Which leads us to...

Customizable

Why would anyone say XFCE or Cinnamon are more cutomizable is beyond my comprehension. XFCE can be somewhat reasonably customized, but the anount of technical knowledge required to do anything more than resizing bars is beyond the scope of normal users. Cinnamon is outright rigid, and its customization options are extremely poor by any means. KDE is easily customizable and can be turned into anything through a what-you-see-is-what-you-get graphical editor that requires 0 technical knowledge. Still, if you really want to go the old school way because you're used to it, want something not offered, or can't imagine yourself descending into the GUI designed for plebs, you can do it too. KDE is king when it comes to this aspect.

Stable

As far as XFCE goes, this does hold quite some weight. It has a mature codebase, allowing it to have plenty of things figured out. For mission-critical systems, it might be preferable. Same can't be said for Cinnamon, but either way, every popular DE is stable enough for home use without much worry - including KDE.

In any case, having used all four, I stopped exactly at KDE and GNOME - the former being perfect for casual multitasking and entertainment, the latter being nice for focused work.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

KDE is allegedly better because it gives the user more options, but anyone who's actually used it will tell you that it suffers from the same kind of bloat and braindead design decisions as gnome.

I've used KDE on and off for the past 20 years or so. These days I use KDE on my work laptop and Cinnamon on my personal one. Personally I think they both do their job just fine, but apparently I'm in the wrong.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

KDE is allegedly better because it gives the user more options, but anyone who's actually used it will tell you that it suffers from the same kind of bloat and braindead design decisions as gnome.

I have used it & can't tell you this. What am I doing wrong?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

From the top of my head I can think of a few reasons:

Better feature support (HDR, better fractional scaling etc)
Better integration (specifically Gnome)
More complete graphical settings
Quicker adoption rate
Wayland support (X11 is pretty much dead at this point)

Aside from RAM (of which most machines do have plenty by now) there isn't really too much overhead these days. In fact battery usage on Gnome and KDE with Wayland is usually better than with X11.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I wanna go back to XFCE when support for Wayland is okay.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Gnome was the main obstacle in Wayland adoption, by not implementing "server-side decorations".

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

The main obstacle in Wayland adoption was Wayland not being usable for years.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

I am really glad both exist. Gnome is awesome because of its simplicity and ease of use and KDE is really cool because it makes me feel like a superior human being

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I wish KDE worked well on Touch screens. It seems to really fail at that. Don't tell me it's X11. X11 on Gnome doesn't think my touches are a mouse. KDE thinks it is though.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

It works fine for me, and I use Wayland.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Steam deck is quite good with touch I find.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

It's okay. But it would be better if it didn't recognize touch as a mouse input. When I booted into Ubuntu once it worked flawlessly on the Desktop touch input working distinctly from mouse input. on KDE touches are mouse input which is annoying and uncomfortable.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago (3 children)

KDE is objectively the better DE from a technical standpoint (in my objective opinion) but sometimes GNOME just feels right in the moment. I have both installed and switch between them all the time

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago

I liked gnome for its minimalistic UI. I then realized i3 does that better :D

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I like a BeOS style vertical taskbar with window names. Neither of them do it well.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Maybe I’m biased because gnome is stock fedora but it runs so smoothly and I love how the windows button and search feature works out of the box. I know that can be setup in KDE though. I love how it feels unique unlike KDE and most other DE that just feel like bad windows. I love that it doesn’t have dumbass names like KDE adding k to everything. Also feel it just works.

Every time I’ve added KDE there’s also a bunch of stupid minor things that just down make sense. Why do so many applications lose the ability to use the right click menu like in jdownloader? Why do windowed games get pushed so vertical low? Why does search recommend things I clearly didn’t ask for? Moving windows with the arrow keys is icky and not smooth. Blowing them up with windows W like gnome’s windows key just looks bad. I want to love it but it just feels like a FOSS windows.

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