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Is GNOME the best Linux desktop?
GNOME users sure are a passionate bunch, as you can tell from the article quoted above. I got a taste of this when I wrote a review of Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 for Desktop Linux Reviews. |
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Comments (17)
You don't mind being force-fed an idiot proof desktop that is so simplified and dumbed down that only idiots will use it. Honestly, after using Gnome 2.x for years without issue I can't imagine what Gnome developers were thinking with Gnome 3.x!! Fortunately, there's MATE and Cinnamon for Gnome refugees who also can't see the logic in Gnome 3.x. For power users there's KDE. For minimalists there is XFCE and LMDE. I love Linux for its myriad choices in desktops!
For those who got a good work groove going with KDE3 and don't want to give it up, there's Trinity (TDE).
Jeff, your turn: what's E17 for?
Jeff, your turn: what's E17 for?
>>....there's Trinity (TDE).
...which just got a little better than it was already !
"Idiots", "Powerusers", "Minimalists"...I can't follow your labeling at all. "I love Linux for its myriad choices in desktops [but I belittle people who use one of those choices because I don't understand it]!". For the record, i don't understand 80% of the decisions made by the gnome team...and they seem to cater to someone other than me...but seriously, try to be nice :/
I think E17 falls in he same category as XFCE and LXDE, but with a very unique approach. XFCE strives to do few things "well" and staying that way forever (eternal stability), while LXDE is more about keeping a small footprint...I'd rather use openbox+tint2. E17 (I believe) is less about compromising. It uses modern concepts to create a very scalable desktop that is customizable, graphically powerful and uses well-defined standards. That said, I found E17 to be unstable and quite quirky. Quirky is a lazy description...but really, it had artifacts in menus and windows, the menu categories were hard to deciphre, and setting E17 up can be a daunting task.
I think E17 falls in he same category as XFCE and LXDE, but with a very unique approach. XFCE strives to do few things "well" and staying that way forever (eternal stability), while LXDE is more about keeping a small footprint...I'd rather use openbox+tint2. E17 (I believe) is less about compromising. It uses modern concepts to create a very scalable desktop that is customizable, graphically powerful and uses well-defined standards. That said, I found E17 to be unstable and quite quirky. Quirky is a lazy description...but really, it had artifacts in menus and windows, the menu categories were hard to deciphre, and setting E17 up can be a daunting task.
Power user... KDE.
Riiiggghhhht. Kinda like a Windoze power user?
Don't get me wrong, I've truly become a fan of KDE. But, I would be the last person to describe myself as a Linux Power User. My skills at helping others with Linux & KDE are woefully inadequate.
That said, I recognize when a tool works well.
Riiiggghhhht. Kinda like a Windoze power user?
Don't get me wrong, I've truly become a fan of KDE. But, I would be the last person to describe myself as a Linux Power User. My skills at helping others with Linux & KDE are woefully inadequate.
That said, I recognize when a tool works well.
No.
@the_doctor......I'm reading the thread with enormous interest. Exactly which item are you giving the "no" to ? Please explain for my density ?
Francy, I tried Trinity and got confused by the enormous number of items in its "launching pad". KDE4 will do me provided I can continue to make it do what I want. I've never been interested in Gnome.
Francy, I tried Trinity and got confused by the enormous number of items in its "launching pad". KDE4 will do me provided I can continue to make it do what I want. I've never been interested in Gnome.
> provided I can continue to make it do what I want
And that's the key. In a KDE layout I want an external global taskbar up top rather than have a section crowded in with all the other stuff (applets, desktop pager and icons for much-used programs) in the bottom bar. Sometimes I switch between panes using the taskbar rather than the pager -- it's all about quick thought-free access. When Mepis was going to KDE4, nobody could tell me how I could get that. Since then I've stayed away from KDE4, noting how heavyweight it is (http://l3net.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/cmp-all3.png at http://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/a-memory-comparison-of...) and thus how slow it would run on my machines, so they might have added that capability but I was no longer listening.
KDE4 does what you want; great! TDE does what I want. (I noticed some 3.5.14 RCs tucked away on the ExeGnu site -- something to look forward to.)
And that's the key. In a KDE layout I want an external global taskbar up top rather than have a section crowded in with all the other stuff (applets, desktop pager and icons for much-used programs) in the bottom bar. Sometimes I switch between panes using the taskbar rather than the pager -- it's all about quick thought-free access. When Mepis was going to KDE4, nobody could tell me how I could get that. Since then I've stayed away from KDE4, noting how heavyweight it is (http://l3net.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/cmp-all3.png at http://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/a-memory-comparison-of...) and thus how slow it would run on my machines, so they might have added that capability but I was no longer listening.
KDE4 does what you want; great! TDE does what I want. (I noticed some 3.5.14 RCs tucked away on the ExeGnu site -- something to look forward to.)
GNOME is perfect if you replace it with Xfce. Or Lxde. Or KDE. Or Fluxbox. Or IceWM. Or Afterstep. Or Enlightenment.
> i don't understand 80% of the decisions made by the gnome team...and they seem to cater to someone other than me..
Apparently so. http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rottin...
Apparently so. http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rottin...
Hah cr !!.......are you sure you are talking about Gnome ? Sounds more like KDE4 .
Tuxchick, I'm really cheezed off wrt Xfce.......I seriously wanted to give it a go, but the Toshiba I installed it on, simply would NOT allow it to run.....graphics confusion I think, but I'll throw it onto a dear old Lenovo and see what happens. I still believe Xfce could be the solution to my nausea over KDE4 and the semantic desktop,although I am now able to "turn the bl...dy thing off if I want to turn it off" - and then lose KMail........I never resort to profanities of course, but KDE4's development aims are now producing that effect.
Oooops.....sorry...it was lietkynes that made that remark......however, the rest of my comment still stands.
Tuxchick, I'm really cheezed off wrt Xfce.......I seriously wanted to give it a go, but the Toshiba I installed it on, simply would NOT allow it to run.....graphics confusion I think, but I'll throw it onto a dear old Lenovo and see what happens. I still believe Xfce could be the solution to my nausea over KDE4 and the semantic desktop,although I am now able to "turn the bl...dy thing off if I want to turn it off" - and then lose KMail........I never resort to profanities of course, but KDE4's development aims are now producing that effect.
Oooops.....sorry...it was lietkynes that made that remark......however, the rest of my comment still stands.
I tried GNOME 3.0 exactly once, when Fedora 15 was released. The ten minutes it took me to realize there was no more logout/shutdown button were roughly the time it took to decide to stick with KDE, Xfce and Windowmaker.
I have never worked up the gumption to try Gnome 3. I hear so many bad reports about it, it didn't seem worth it. I've never used any Gnome or KDE for an extended period of time, though. That fact has made it so all the upheaval surrounding Gnome 3 and KDE 4 was more of a spectacle for me than anything that actually affected me (probably just because I said that, the next major Xfce will do the same sort of thing to Xfce users ;-) ).
I tried out KDE 4 for a fair amount of time on my work computer. I can see why someone would like it, but in the end it was just heavier than I wanted my desktop to be. I still haven't really tried Unity either. That's because I've never been a user of regular Ubuntu, and Ubuntu Studio switched to Xfce when Unity became the default on Ubuntu, which I found amusing since I had always switched Ubuntu Studio to Xfce when I used it anyway.
I've used Xfce a lot now, but I also use Fluxbox, IceWM, LXDE and plain Openbox (well, usually with fbpanel or tint2). Enlightenment 17 seems pretty decent on Bodhi as well (other times I tried it, it seemed a bit flaky, but they were beta releases).
I tried out KDE 4 for a fair amount of time on my work computer. I can see why someone would like it, but in the end it was just heavier than I wanted my desktop to be. I still haven't really tried Unity either. That's because I've never been a user of regular Ubuntu, and Ubuntu Studio switched to Xfce when Unity became the default on Ubuntu, which I found amusing since I had always switched Ubuntu Studio to Xfce when I used it anyway.
I've used Xfce a lot now, but I also use Fluxbox, IceWM, LXDE and plain Openbox (well, usually with fbpanel or tint2). Enlightenment 17 seems pretty decent on Bodhi as well (other times I tried it, it seemed a bit flaky, but they were beta releases).
I have a garden Gnome.
@Ridcully: Yeah, KDE4 went in a direction I didn't wanna go, and they screwed up the launch... But, as soon as somebody (Tim Pearson KB9VQF) popped up to take responsibility for it, the KDE devs helped make the KDE3/TDE fork-into-maintenance happen. They didn't set out to make any use of it or Qt3 or Qt4-without-KDE a 'bumpy ride' with volatile APIs and conveniently incidental breakage, unlike Red Hat's Gnome devs, to judge by the linked article and its comment posts.
Sorry I'm late to the party. Lets start with correcting some FUD shall we?
Any piece of software is buggy and trash if you don't know what you are doing when you build it. E17 packages in many repos for a long time (and even some still today) are not packaged properly have a plethora of stability issues. Reading release notes is hard for some people.
Yep it is. That is why when you are new you shouldn't be using a distro/install of E17 that expects you to configure everything yourself. Pick somewhere that has a usable desktop OOTB.
Then when you want to get into the guts of things use your resources.
E17 is fast, flexible, and can look like anything you want with its powerful themeing capabilities. Most people just choose to ignore it instead of learn about it. Other go one step further and spread FUD about it simply by not understanding how to use it, but then give their opinion on it anyways.
Quoting:I found E17 to be unstable and quite quirky. Quirky is a lazy description...but really, it had artifacts in menus and windows, the menu categories were hard to deciphre,
Any piece of software is buggy and trash if you don't know what you are doing when you build it. E17 packages in many repos for a long time (and even some still today) are not packaged properly have a plethora of stability issues. Reading release notes is hard for some people.
Quoting:and setting E17 up can be a daunting task.
Yep it is. That is why when you are new you shouldn't be using a distro/install of E17 that expects you to configure everything yourself. Pick somewhere that has a usable desktop OOTB.
Then when you want to get into the guts of things use your resources.
E17 is fast, flexible, and can look like anything you want with its powerful themeing capabilities. Most people just choose to ignore it instead of learn about it. Other go one step further and spread FUD about it simply by not understanding how to use it, but then give their opinion on it anyways.
I don't know if a Gnome 3 discussion is the best topic to put my first post into, but here it goes...
I am not arguing any of the negative comments surrounding Gnome 3 other than "only idiots would use it". If it doesn't work for one's personal workflow, it is a fact and nothing to argue. But I want to share a positive experience and state that I am not an idiot (subjective).
My workflow is a simple home machine for email, web, and development. In the past couple of years I have used KDE, XFCE, Fluxbox, i3, and Gnome 3. My usage is more or less identical across all of those. I am primarily a keyboard user. I never start applications with a mouse, I use alt-f2, super, dmenu, etc.... I use alt-tab to switch between windows, rarely do I ever use the taskbar (if it exists). I never minimize windows. Visually, I prefer using the default look (other than background image) and I despise icons on my desktop.
Gnome 3 has provided me the most complete functionality out of the box (well, a single extension installed for alt-tab as I don't like app groups and I don't like tabbing between workspaces). Some of the others don't look as nice (very subjective) out of the box. Some I cannot get to everything with the keyboard alone. Is Gnome 3 better for me than the other environments? Slightly, but not to a point where I absolutely have to have it (i3 works even better in some cases for me).
Lastly, Gnome 3 provides the best accessibility (a11y) experience for visually impaired users (disclaimer: I am a sighted user). Xfce has been making improvements but is not on par with Gnome (reference is Joanmarie on a Debian mailing list). KDE needs work. I don't know how MATE and Cinnamon are (gtk3 updates provide a lot of the functionality). Unity does well I think. Others exclude it (yes, you can run Orca and some apps such as Firefox will work, but not the WM itself). My point is that it is useful for the subset of users with a11y needs, something usually overlooked.
I am not arguing any of the negative comments surrounding Gnome 3 other than "only idiots would use it". If it doesn't work for one's personal workflow, it is a fact and nothing to argue. But I want to share a positive experience and state that I am not an idiot (subjective).
My workflow is a simple home machine for email, web, and development. In the past couple of years I have used KDE, XFCE, Fluxbox, i3, and Gnome 3. My usage is more or less identical across all of those. I am primarily a keyboard user. I never start applications with a mouse, I use alt-f2, super, dmenu, etc.... I use alt-tab to switch between windows, rarely do I ever use the taskbar (if it exists). I never minimize windows. Visually, I prefer using the default look (other than background image) and I despise icons on my desktop.
Gnome 3 has provided me the most complete functionality out of the box (well, a single extension installed for alt-tab as I don't like app groups and I don't like tabbing between workspaces). Some of the others don't look as nice (very subjective) out of the box. Some I cannot get to everything with the keyboard alone. Is Gnome 3 better for me than the other environments? Slightly, but not to a point where I absolutely have to have it (i3 works even better in some cases for me).
Lastly, Gnome 3 provides the best accessibility (a11y) experience for visually impaired users (disclaimer: I am a sighted user). Xfce has been making improvements but is not on par with Gnome (reference is Joanmarie on a Debian mailing list). KDE needs work. I don't know how MATE and Cinnamon are (gtk3 updates provide a lot of the functionality). Unity does well I think. Others exclude it (yes, you can run Orca and some apps such as Firefox will work, but not the WM itself). My point is that it is useful for the subset of users with a11y needs, something usually overlooked.
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