this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Guys I have a foolproof plan to reach 10%
spoiler
What's the problem with GNOME?
Gnome = bad is a common Linux community circlejerk.
People will tell you Linux is about personal choice, but the second you say cool, I'm using flatpaks/Gnome/Wayland/System-D/any other thing that people get upset about, those same people will lose their fucking minds over you having a choice different to theirs.
It's not so much a circlejerk as much as a knowledge that KDE plasma is the most approachable DE with the most polished first experience for the majority of new users
The reason it gets interpreted as Gnome bad is that both Plasma and Gnome both mainly target users who want something that just works out of the box and doesn't have a steep learning curve, however KDE have managed to keep up better with what new users want in recent years while Gnome has fallen into a semi-trap of doing what their current/older users want. That doesn't mean it's a bad distro, frankly it's great for their current users, however it does little for newer users who may not find it as intuitive as other DEs, therefore making it a worse default DE for "off-the-shelf" distros targeting new Linux users.
At the end of the day though, it is about personal choice, and nobody's saying i3 isn't better for powerusers or that LXDE doesn't run faster, but if you have the knowledge that you want to install one of those or the many other DEs available, then you can just find the iso/distro/package with that DE and install it rather than just clicking the all-in-one-guaranteed-to-work-lts download button on the distro's homepage
That and the Gnome devs carry a lot of anti-consumer opinions and practices in particular since Gnome 3. Must be something to do with the Microsoft influence from around that time.
What are these anti-consumer opinions? And where is this Microsoft influence?
You say that like it's a fact rather than just your personal opinion.
No no no. I'm not misunderstanding people liking or preferring Plasma as hating Gnome. I love Plasma, and so should most people, it's a very good DE. I pretty much only use Gnome and Plasma these days, and can happily praise or criticise either of them.
People do have a hateful circlejerk about Gnome. Look at any large discussion about Gnome and it gets full of haters who still can't accept that Gnome 3 went in a very different direction to the traditional WinUX. People that say it's shit. People that accuse the devs of being evil. Go onto a submission about a new Gnome release and you'll find some smoothbrain making the classic wHaT fEaTuReS DiD tHeY rEmOVe tHiS TiMe joke which holds zero basis in reality.
And I'm not talking about fair criticisms either. I could rattle some off the top of my head. I'm talking about hatred.
Shitting on Gnome very much is the hip, trendy thing to do in the Reddit/Lemmy/reactionary YouTuber space.
According to many in the Linux community, Linux is all about choice, so long as your choice is the same as theirs.
It's a safe assumption to make though, based on the fact that KDE most closely mimics the Windows UX, which Gnome does not, and that the vast majority of human beings who use computers are most familiar with the Windows UX, hence most approachable.
I reject the premise that just because more people use Windows, a Windows UX must be the most intuitive and alternatives must appear more complicated to use.
There are more households that drive cars than ride a bike - is a car therefore a more intuitive to use transport tool than a bike?
That’s a crazy take though. Everyone knows that what you’re most familiar with is way more intuitive than something you’ve never touched in your life.
How intuitive something is only affects the initial experience. This is why driving a car usually takes a year to learn in most countries - it’s not very intuitive. If you know how to drive a car, however, you can learn to drive a bus much faster - it’s now intuitive because you already know how to drive a car, which is similar.
So of course whichever DE replicates windows the best is going to be the most intuitive. Doesn’t mean that it’s better once you’ve gotten used to it though.
That's one hell of a 'heavy lift' to create a non-Windows UX experience that is more intuitive and easier for Windows user to adapt to that is completely different from the Windows UX experience they know today.
Not saying it's not possible, but I think you'd have better success in pulling people over from Windows to Linux if the UX experience was similar, since they're already dealing with a retraining issue (Linux) that is a barrier they have to overcome when transferring over.
There's no need to add more obstacles to that transference process.
You're again assuming that being a windows clone will intrinsically make a DE more intuitive. I don't think that's true at all.
Yes I am, and I base that on my observance of human nature, and how a level of complexity of learning something new is a barrier that affects adopting something new, as well as my own personal experience as a UI/UX software developer for some decades.
An alternative UX would have to be incredibly intuitive to overcome that. And, with respect, Gnome is not that.
Well we'll just agree to disagree then. Appreciate the discussion though.
I really don't understand why anyone feels the need to hate on a desktop environment. It's not like on windows or mac where it is what it is and you're stuck with it. If you don't like it, just shut up and switch to something else (unless you like your de overall but have some improvements in mind of course, no reason to shut up for that).
It's just that they hate feet fetishists.
People forget that freedom is a lie within the natural world. Why do they think they have freedom within the digital realm they all made up?
Because they made it up with freedom
It's still bound to the natural world, where freedom is a lie
I love Libadwaita. It's so good I started to use it to develop general cross platform apps
Does "cross platform apps" include Windows in your case? If so, how is your experience compiling and packaging a libadwaita app for Windows?
Hey, sorry for the late answer, but I think you might be interested in this:
First of all, as a disclaimer: I'm not a professional front-end developer. I'm usually doing backend stuff and this is the first time I wanted to program a cross-platform desktop app. I spent a lot of time researching and settled on GTK / Libadwaita.
And I actually spent the last months building and packaging the project for every platform. With every platform I mean macOS, Linux and Windows. I strongly recommend doing this with a CI pipeline as there are many specific steps you need to follow.
I will provide a template on Github when I'm finished as well as a more in-depth blog post about all the steps and explanations. The main problem is that most is not documented at all and what's documented is super outdated. So I had to figure out many things by myself. But the actual process, when you know how to do it, isn't even really hard. I'll post the links to the template here when I finished it all but it might still take some months as I currently also have other stuff to do.
Thanks for coming back to this!
Why? I've been happily gaming on gnome for over two years now
Because he wants it to be Windows and hasn't found Dash to Panel and Wintile yet.
Thank you about mentioning Wintile! I was wondering today if there is a way to do 2x2 tiling on gnome
Hah, no problem. I'm the author, so it was a bit of a plug ;)
That last part is always a good idea. You should never not slap the Nvidia CEO.
Who even does that? The distros I have used recently that aren't headless have a choice either at image download or during install.
No need to go as far. Just jail everyone working on Adwaita.
They always acted like the are the only ones in town, but while checking the spelling just now, the first result says "Adwaita (from अद्वैत, meaning "one and only" in Sanskrit)" The serious UX designers were a joke to them from the start.
I love libadwaita/GTK4. All my apps are consistent, look and work in the same way, they all look gorgeous, and there's extreme attention to detail and adherence to good, well-studied UI paradigms.
Libadwaita has went a long way in making my system feel like one cohesive ecosystem, rather than a smattering of inconsistent, wildly different apps.
Libadwaita and GTK4 is amazing and the developers deserve a lot of praise.
But hey, if you don't like it, just don't use it. It's that easy.
The entire point of FOSS
Not when you are forced into it because it's made a dependency of something you use.
Then use an alternative, if you really hate anything even remotely connected to it on your system and are seeking the ideological purity of having zero related dependencies.
You're not entitled to have the software that's provided to you for free be exactly how you like it.
But if your view is popular enough, there will surely be alternatives or altered forks.
Oh no I do when it comes to that. The problem's (usually) not there.
The problem mostly lies with distro packagers. They often ignore the "this dependency is optional" part and make the dependency mandatory. Back in the day Fedora was terrible at packaging new stuff (trying to remove PulseAudio would also try to remove Libreoffice, for example), nowadays it seems it's Debian's turn at the horribad packaging wheel. So in order to "use an alternative", which would actually be the exact same software I'm already using except correctly compiled and packaged, I'd have to jump distros.
One notorious example is NetworkManager, which in Debian requires systemd for some weird-ass reason even tho you can run a correct Debian system without systemd. The Antix people compile it correctly, with systemd as optional / shim'd, but that means having to add Antix's repo to Debian to use NetworkManager in Debian.