Linux

Kinda a tangent, but I've been using KDE plasma for a while and have really been enjoying it as a kinda in between of windows style desktop with some more gnome-like features (like workspaces, which tbh I've barely used). Of course both are super customizable, but it seems to me to maybe be a bit easier to customize Plasma? I'm not sure, I haven't used stock gnome as much.

Default workflow with no extensions is never good for me, there are a handful that provide must have QoL improvements. Once you install those it is very nice. Love it and always miss it when I use Windows or OSX.

I really like it, the constraints works for me to enforce more efficient habits. I would say I'm not a naturally efficient person, I recognise that and, essentially, benefit from having a workflow created for me. With KDE, it has the customisability out of the box to create your own workflow, but I couldn't personally design a good workflow.

But I'm not everyone, of course, and I would say GNOME is not necessarily for everybody.

Good that you gave it a fair shot. I feel like a lot of people just throw a lot of extinctions at it first without trying to understand the vanilla workflow - I used to be one of them until I tried vanilla for about 3 months.

I like it, even though I'm not sure if I would call it the GNOME official workflow (is that even a thing?). I usually don't get close to having 10 applications open. I tend to work with about 1 to 3 workspaces with various applications based on my needs. Furthermore, I keep the windows non-maximized which helps me condense more information yone screen

Yes. With many windows open but I don't use workspaces. Alt-Tab, and Alt-"above tab" is enough to me. And you can always super, first chars of the app name, enter.

Yes, I love it! Really it's the MacOS-like "Expose" feature that I find to be essential.

I would advise against using workspaces though, I find those actually sort of go against the core idea of it IMO. There are a few things I'd really like added to it, but for the most-part when you get into it it's great.

My main desktop I have 4 monitors (I know, but once you start a monitor habit it's really hard to not push it to the limit - this is only the beginning!) It roughly breaks down into:

1. Primary work (usually a full-screen editor)
2. Terminals (different windows, some for the project, some monitoring)
3. Browsers - documentation, various services, my own code output
4. Communication - signal, discord, what's app (ugh), etc.

The key, literally, is you just press the Super key and boom, you can see everything and if you want to interact with something it's all available in just one click or a few of key presses away.

On my laptop with just one screen, I find it equally invaluable, and is actually where I started to use it the most - once again, just one press of Super and I can see all the applications I have open and quickly select one or launch something.

It's replaced Alt + Tab for me - and I know they've made that better, and added Super + Tab, but none of them are as good as just pressing Super.

The things I'd really love added to it are:

• Better tiling (including quarter tiling). It's a sad state of affairs when Windows has far better tiling than Gnome.
• Super then Search, I'd like it to filter the windows it's showing and shrink/hide the others, along with a simple way to choose one using the keyboard.
• Rather than having an icon for each window, I also want the tooltip information to always be shown (e.g. vs code project) and for standard apps to expose better information for that (e.g. Gnome Terminal to expose its prompt/pwd) and/or have a specific mechanism by which apps could communicate.
• Adding Quicksilver-like functionality to the launcher/search would be amazing. e.g.
  • Super
  • Sp... (auto-populates Spotify)
  • Tab
  • P... (auto-populates Play/Pause)
  • Return
• Session restoration - it just doesn't work at the moment for some reason. Some apps do, some don't. Some go to their correct position/size, some don't.

I personally find Gnome works best on Laptops using the Touch pad with its Gesture controlls. But yeah there are things like the missing application tray that can be annoying which can only be added with extensions. Which is annoying again. So pure Gnome is the bare minimum and can work, but with extensions it can bekomm extremely good. In my opinion.

A qualified yes. I love the overview, which is, IMO, the most elegant way to launch applications and manage workspaces of any OS or DE. I also love the general look and fluidity of the environment and how it gets out out of your way when you don't need it. But I preferred the pre-GNOME 40 vertical workflow to the new horizontal workflow.

There are also three must-have extensions that make GNOME usable for me:

• AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support. GNOME can wish away tray icons if they want to, but the tray hasn't gone away and is still necessary for some applications.
• DashToDock. Makes app switching more accessible and adds right-click to close.
• Gnome 4x UI Improvements. Increases the size of the workspace thumbnails so you can actually see what's in them (like it was before GNOME 40).

Yes I love Gnome workflow. Actually so much that if I am forced to use KDE for example, it feels really archaic and slow to use.

I do, except I always enable minimize and maximize because it seems foolish to me to have those disabled by default. It's really smooth and whenever I have too many windows open, the overview makes it easy to find what I'm looking for. Initially I was against hiding the dock in the overview but I decided to give it a try one day and I actually ended up enjoying it not being visible.

What's funny is that I actually end up using the overview instead of alt-tab most of the time because it's faster for my workflow, and the default window switcher for apps with different windows open is BAD.

I've gotten so used to the workflow that I find myself dragging my mouse to the top left corner of the screen on Windows lol and painfully wait the extra second it takes to open the Windows overview when swiping up with three fingers on a trackpad.

I like it quite a lot on my projector / media pc, but I wouldn't daily it over sway with custom hotkeys. Cosmic is definitely turning my head tho..

The only change I make is rebinding mod+num keys to switch to a specific workspace instead of a specific application. It makes a lot more sense.

Gnome does make it feel like I should have like 3 apps open and anything more is a mental burden. I personally really like the overview though! If I could get gnomes overview as my meta key in KDE it would be killer!

I personally love gnome. But I would not want to use it without my extensions even for a few hours. Yes upgrading they sometimes break with updates but most of the time the developers update for the new version in less than a week. Othr than that I just love the polished look and feel. Everything looks kneatly organized and clean. Ofcourse I have gripes here and there. For example the Software Center sucks even with its sleek look. It fails to get app information or check for updates too often and needs a restart. But I tried KDE too and it just doesn't feel as nice to use. And if you feel Gnome isn't for you than that's great too since with Linux you have so many options. But I will stick with Gnome for the time being.

I use Dash to Panel to show taskbar icons for running applications, with the topbar moved to a sidebar to save valuable vertical real estate: https://imgur.com/tc0IbuM.png

I use the Workspaces Indicator extension to keep track of which one I'm in, but I use workspaces to focus on specific tasks using groups of applications... not an individual workspace for each application. I normally only have one or two workspaces in use.

I disable the Activities button and Overview (or Overlay or whatever they are calling it now) completely.

I previously used Arc Menu to replace the Applications View, but dropped that when they added folders to the Application View. It's still a bit clunky, but it's usable now that is supports some minimal organization.

Since I spend 90% of the time in a terminal window or development environment, I find GNOME works fine for my needs (Ubuntu). I generally just use whatever desktop environment comes with a distro. The days of me wanting to spend time tweaking the Linux environment are long gone. I just want it to function to support the actual work I am trying to accomplish.

I use many extensions, but I also like this "keep the vanilla simple" approach of Gnome. Instead of trying to support many different workflows, it does only one, and it does it well. Everything is much more polished, compared to other DEs, simply because there's less stuff. And support for extensions seems to be excellent, since there's so many of them and they often work very well.

I recently disabled Dash to Panel, and installed Pop Shell. I'm loving it so far, using my Trackpad gestures from switching between workspaces. Granted, I don't really need more than 3 or 4 desktops (Browser, Terminal, Messaging...) and it's not quite vanilla as I have Pop Shell managing tiling for me (but still pretty close!). I also need to try it with my "docked" workflow, using an external monitor and keyboard shortcuts (as opposed to trackpad gestures).

I don't like it, I use plasma. Workspaces are great through, I just have my system. Terminal is space 2, browser space 3, communication space 4 and so on

Using vanilla gnome and comparing about empty task bar is a bit strange.

If no one used it, it would be the first piece of perfect software ever written. It isn't. So, yes, people use it.

I grew up using Macs and so coming to Linux from that perspective, I like it. It has a similar feel to the Mac desktop environment.

I may take the plunge to a window manager at some point, but for now it works for me.

I prefer GNOME to KDE and I understand that there's research and philosophy behind some of the decisions, but I just can't get around some of the quirks. "Workflow" itself is fine, with tiling on top, you can get by. But those window decorations. So much space is taken by a completely useless, fat bar at the top of each window even though it's not really aimed at being touchscreen native.

Yes, I like the default workflow. I always have particular applications on the same workspaces, and I close them as I need to. Sometimes I have multiple, usually a maximum of two on one workspace, because I can ALT+TAB through them. I like that the top bar is uncluttered. I don't use the dock at all, but Activity Overview is sometimes useful. I can operate the desktop completely with my keyboard. It's also very minimal without too many options, and it looks pretty. I find it very usable.

The only annoying thing was needing to manually create shortcuts inside of dconf for workspaces 5-10. I really don't know why they force you to do that...

BTW there was a nice idea behind the only close button in early GNOME 3. Apps were intended to save the state on exit, so one doesn't need to minimize windows, they can close it and reopen at any time and see the exact content of a window. But GNOME completely has failed to deliver that idea.

What makes things worse, there was no clear way to keep apps on the background when the main window is closed. It was seemed as antifeature. But that was a different world where weren't so much of internet service applications running on the background 24h a day. Now there is a background portal but with quite minimal support in the DE.

I find the GNOME workflow very intuitive and have grown really accustomed to it over the years. It's minimal and gets out of the way, while at the same time everything I need is accessible on one keypress through the activities overview.

I don't feel at home on any other desktop environment. Even on Ubuntu I revert everything to stock GNOME.