(If you know where I stole this from, I love you.)

I love all open source desktops equally

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment

I bet it's lightweight as fuck, tho...

Gnome has one great purpose and that is for tablets. Not a fan of their whole ethos though

Same place as the famous banana quote! How much could a banana cost, Michael? $10?

I've always had deep suspicion of GNOME because of de Icaza's involvement and the pretexts with which the project was started. Knowing that de Icaza ended up at Microsoft and is now a huge fan of MacOS and Apple confirmed my suspicions. Lucille Bluth is right, there I said it. 😍

If GNOME did a standard start menu style interface in 99% sure I’d be using that.

I mean I don't dislike it.

I need to rewatch this.
"Haha, marry me!"

Which is funny because I don’t like start menus and wouldn’t use it

Gnome... isn't Gnome. Gnome 2.x/MATE is Gnome. Gnome 3.x and further is gnome shit (or dwarfen shit? We should ask DND specialists to clarify this moment)

It deserves all the criticism.
And it is by far my favorite DE.

why in the fuck is it pronounced guhnome

Gnome's devs are insular and don't listen to suggestions from outsiders. That sounds like Svirfneblin to me!

Gnome with Arcmenu is what you are looking for. It's probably worth checking out Zorin OS as it is Gnome based and has templates for star menu.

You know you're doing things right when there's 2.5 million downloads to change a core paradigm of your DE.

I myself identify as an equalist . I hate all of them DE equally. Standalone WM is superior (for me).

Because the "G" has gone silent for too long and will not take it anymore.

Yup! Still the default on HP-UX too!

I do dislike it. Sorry everyone.

Most users come from a Windows background, so they’re used to the "simplicity" of its start menu. For unknown reasons, many still favor the limited Windows-like experience over the native GNOME shell...

I would be much more interested in GNOME if I could replicate my top bar with all extensions on both my monitors. I don’t want to only see the clock on my 2nd monitor.

I find it weird how fixated people are in the start menu. To me it feels extremely clunky experience, no matter was it plasma or windows.

The way gnome has combined task switcher and "start menu" (rather comparable to finder in macos) just feels so much more natural.

Then there's the application menu thing that I've maybe used twice in the past 5 years lol

Fuck that, I'll keep saying genome. Guhnome is much much worse than the jiff thing.

When I first started using Linux over 20 years ago, I did try Gnome. Then went back to KDE immediately.

From what I have read in those 20+ years, the design philosophy hasn't changed.

Because Gnome Shell is terrible! Or, people just want to use their computer and not have to learn a whole new way to do it. Most desktops understand this.

Because that’s how people speaking Old English would have pronounced it. And we all know how particular 10th century Saxons are about their Linux desktop.

It may not be a perfect environment, but you know - DEs don't come with a handbook!

My main issue when I was using GNOME is that it needed a run ton of extensions to be truly useful, and most broke after a new release.

I'm using KDE basically out of the box, nothing bothers me enough to try to fix it.

Given that it isn't 1994 anymore, your opinion is extremely reasonable.

I liked Gnome back when Ubuntu was brown.

I agree. There is basically nothing to learn on GNOME that would take more than 5 minutes to explain. Windows sucks and included in that is the UI. I really don't understand clinging to that UI so hard. If I didn't know Stockholm syndrome wasn't real, I'd call it akin to that ..

I’m using KDE basically out of the box, nothing bothers me enough to try to fix it.

KDE : Plasma is the sleekest desktop we've come up with yet!

Just put the taskbar where I want it and shut up.

There are several manpages available in the terminal and online

I would be much more interested in gnome if it didn't feel like the offspring of 2010s mac and fisher price.

I went the complete opposite. Hated KDE, loved gnome. Now KDE is my go to.

In fact there were several manpages available in the terminal and online, but Lucille was in denial about that.

Tbh I don’t mind the Mac look - in fact it’s one of the things that drew me to it as I use macOS for work - and the above complaint is my only real complaint.

I keep posting it wherever it’s relevant in case someone comes out of the woodwork with a solution 😅

Most users come from a Windows background, so they’re used to the “simplicity” of its start menu.

I think it's that it's jarring to go from "let me add a new thing to what I am doing" to "I need something new. EVERYTHING GO AWAY SO I CAN LOOK AT WHAT I WANT"

I started my Linux journey about 5 years ago on mint with the cinnamon DE. It's not the fanciest but it got the job done, no real complaints.

Recently I made the change to debian without too much thought on the DE and I was presented with gnome. Took me about 5 minutes before I was looking up alternatives.

Now on KDE plasma, and out of the 3 I've tried it's definitely my favourite.

Kde is so ugly and buggy, requiring tons of setup n knowhow to fix. GNOME feels limiting and oversimplified, but honestly 9 out of 10 times its fine.... even if its setting menu infuriates on the regular.

Im old and i dont having 100 hrs to rice shit anymore

The criticisms I've heard:

• You can't customize it!
• Hey, extensions don't count, because sometimes they break between major version upgrades!
• The developers are mean! They didn't even take my suggestions!
• The design philosophy is bad! It doesn't even want to be windows!

I have been using versions of GNOME for about 5 years now and I have always been able to customize my DE to a very high degree. Out of every random extension I've tried, probably 80% work, and that is even counting unmaintained ones that haven't seen an update in years. And out of those extensions I chose to keep using, I've only have an occasional stability issue. I think I've actually experienced that once since 2021 when I switched to Linux as a daily driver.

Maybe I'm just asocial but I don't expect to reach out to my software devs and influence them at all. Unless I reported a bug and they were a dick about it, I'd probably never complain about the devs. And lastly I think the design philosophy is excellent. Maximizing screen real estate while being quite flexible, rejecting everything shitty about windows and incorporating everything good about macOS.

Every problem I've had is so far outweighed by the positives that it's not remotely close. It makes sense to me that it's so popular. KDE on the other hand... I am glad it exists but I wish it were better. I feel like it literally wants to be windows. People say it is SO customizable and I was convinced to give the latest version a chance recently. It does not feel like finished software to me, tbh. Before I could really give it a shot I needed to customize the UI to be more minimalist. I found the UI to do that quickly. Within five minutes I had crashed the desktop several times, and I felt unable to achieve what I wanted at all. The drag and drop UI for the taskbar area wasn't stable in my experience. It kept crashing AND wouldn't do what I wanted.

What criticism of GNOME is so well deserved? I just don't see any criticism of it that I feel is deserved. Meanwhile KDE seems janky to me and to this day I haven't once seen anyone hate on it. You'd think it was basically perfect.

As a GNOME user since forever, I find it fascinating how much time KDE users spend thinking about GNOME. They seem so obsessed with customization, yet seem incapable of understanding that people could have preferences different from their own.

Heavy dose of nostalgia there. I remember the Sun SPARCstations at uni and changing my desktop environment every other week.

I haven't run into any bugs but also I'm not the most intensive user so maybe I just don't run into them.

Plasma has improved A LOT in the past year. Like a year ago I hated it. now? I daily drive it. I hate to use this phrase but everything just works.

I was kinda disappointed with the 6.6 release as I really just want dedicated virtual desktops per monitor but their compromise actually isn't that bad. I just had to turn off animation for changing workspaces and it's fine. Even tiling works A LOT better on Plasma than it used to and dare I saw kinda works better/is more smooth than Sway and the like and I'm not even using krohnkite. you can quickly toggle the splits for windows and even do vim style navigation between windows. you can even do vim navigation with windows that aren't tiled.

Plus the stuff they have packaged in is just better than most alternatives out there. I love Konsole. it has everything I need. and Kate is also a fantastic IDE you can REALLY customize that is slept on by many people. Dolphin is great too. It's nice having a DE that just has all the stuff you need right out of the box and you don't really have to change any of the defaults.

Yeah mate, it was the best

What is the last KDE you tried? Plasma is SO good, right out of the box.

I was fine with Gnome before they went v3.

KDE was/is my favourite. I don't play favourites tho. But it's def KDE.

(Xfce being second, but tbf I never gave a fair chance to the rest of them. DEs aren't really a thing that would hugely impact my life, unless they would be too buggy, but afaik we are past that if you aren't on a strict rice diet.)

The only bug I ever see is Dolphin having a delayed startuo, and I have a bunch of file shares mounted which NFS might be causing delays. KDE is awesome, and it's Tumbleweed so not even stable KDE.

That being said I put my family on Cinnamon.

When saying it deserves "all" the criticism, I might have been hyperbolic
I agree with most of what you said.

The keep it simple philosophy I agree with, but there are a few UI decisions, a few missing features I couldn't wrap my head around. They tend to be rectified in the end because it's common sense, but it takes a very long time and it can be frustrating. I'm sorry my memory is shit so I only remember the sentiment and don't have specifics. I do have one recent example, I needed to change a very simple shortcut. The system doesn't allow it and it feels arbitrary.

Extensions are really great. Some are absolute gems, and they tend to work perfectly. But the fact some are almost mandatory to have sane default is an issue. Especially when you have multiple devices.
I don't think most people want a useless popup telling you the program has launched (or the window is activated, what is it again?), popup which once clicked won't even open said program.
The extensions graveyard is hard to see though. I had recently a good one that wouldn't be ported to latest gnome, killing my linux tablet workflow.
and can anyone tell me what the app menu with icons in seemingly random order is for?

I've used KDE for 4 years and mostly liked it, but I had tons of issues, and very few with Gnome.
KDE users I know your experience might be different but I'm telling you how it went for me. Gnome, while imperfect in this regard, has been much better. I tried Plasma 6 when it came out and it was pretty much the same for me, but I will give it another try at one point.

I use GNOME on my laptop because it's really nice for touch devices. It has a learning curve, I have to add extensions to do things I expect an OS to do and I'm still not sure what I'm doing, but it's nice.