I don't run Gnome now (since I have more fun hacking on Sway), but I really don't think that the characterization of it being a "tablet desktop" is actually very fair. I found Gnome to be very productive, and actually extremely keyboard focused. Outside of a tiling window manager like Sway or i3, I actually have found it more keyboard-centric than any other desktop I've used.
The reason I am harping on keyboard is because to me the keyboard is the signature differentiator between "desktop" and "tablet".
I feel like everyone hated on Gnome because it was different. They tried it for ten minutes, didn't bother trying to actually learn how to use it, declared it as "shit", and moved on. I was one of those people.
It wasn't until I decided to stick with Gnome for a few weeks (using the Antergos distro of Arch) that I came around, and now I find it to be the most productive of the "normie" desktops on Linux.
> I feel like everyone hated on Gnome because it was different. They tried it for ten minutes, didn't bother trying to actually learn how to use it, declared it as "shit", and moved on. I was one of those people.
I don't want to learn how to use my computer. I know how I want my computer to work. I just want to adjust my desktop environment to match my vision (which doesn't really match the default of any window manager)
This is where gnome fails for me because it's opinionated software: they have a vision of how it should work and everything is forced that way. Similar to how Apple does it. Choices and configurations are reduced to a minimum.
So for me KDE with its huge configurability is just what I need and gnome is absolutely not. I did actually try to use it on a touch device (surface pro 3) but I needed so many plugins to make it work my way that I started getting issues with plugins interfering with each other and not supporting the latest updates etc. With KDE I could set it all up my way with built in settings. Opinionated software is just the wrong model for me. Unfortunately it's becoming more common because people still look up to Apple.
Ps in similar ways I also mod websites, I have custom stylesheets for a lot of sites I use that remove pics and make it just a plain old list of content similar to hacker news. People who are UX designers probably frown on this but they are designing for everyone (and often not with the user's wishes in mind but ulterior motives like marketing and engagement!), not for me. I know what works best for me. And I don't let others tell me what I should want.
> I feel like everyone hated on Gnome because it was different. They tried it for ten minutes, didn't bother trying to actually learn how to use it, declared it as "shit", and moved on
Anecdote time.
I was using GNOME for a substantial amount of time, despite all the issues that it was giving me - the regressions, removing functionality, breaking extensions every so often; but the final straw that broke the camel's back was a tablet thing. At some point I think the ability to resize the left panel in Nautilus went away? Or maybe was never there to begin with. In any case, I found a discussion about the exact issue where the outlook was that resizing the left panel will not be added, as there's no way to signal the ability to resize it on touch screens.
At this point I decided that enough is enough and moved to KDE.
You're not the people I have an issue with, sorry for the ambiguous use of the word "everyone" there.
If you gave it the good college try and made an effort to actually learn how to use it and came around not liking it, then that's totally fine. It just didn't gel with you and that's ok.
> outlook was that resizing the left panel will not be added, as there's no way to signal the ability to resize it on touch screens.
Interesting. I hadn't heard that; maybe tablets are holding back Gnome a bit, though I still think it's fine as a desktop overall.
I think I just wanted to vent an old personal frustration here. And perhaps to give a bit more substantiated subtle hint about how things are in GNOME. I feel like anyone using it will run into quite bad issues eventually.
Just now I remembered a second straw - the issue where scrolling down in a big folder with thumbnails on would repeatedly scroll you back to the top. I am not confident this has been solved until now either.
I vaguely recall the desperate feeling of "this DE does so little, and yet in the few things it does, it's still borderline unusable".
GNOME’s design philosophy apparently amounts to one developer (with no training or experience in design) saying “I don’t personally consider this feature to be important, and so it’s gone.”
Thanks for formulating this, as I’m too lazy to even start the conversation with the folks who’d like to have a lot of everything on their screens, with myriads of distractions and just ugly little everything. Otherwise ‘that’s tablet,’ and it’s ‘the Gnome team pushing their nonsense,’ not the particular user being used to something completely wrong from the UI/UX perspective. I’m having no issues with teaching Gnome anyone. It’s simple. Yet powerful, I can use it no issues, and it’s my second favourite after Sway. I feel those of us who actually appreciate Gnome should be more vocal about it, otherwise these weirdos with 2 mins of Gnome experience yelling too loud.
As one of these folks who want a lot of everything on my screen, I'm baffled by your declarations that my workflow is somehow objectively "wrong". Go convince Airbus that the cockpit can only have two gauges, and needs a lot of blank space.
It’s wrong because it takes too much of attention, which we don’t have a lot these days. Good for you if it works, and you really need that much at once. But it’s just wrong for a newcomer, people are getting lost among options. That’s not a rocket science, really. I won’t object there are interfaces where the most simple way of doing some work / task is to have everything on one screen, without constant switching. But for an average person using general purpose OS, it’s just not the case. My point of view that those folks who really need everything at once, they have no problems with creating an environment they need. Everyone else would benefit with the simple things being the default. I’m really happy about Gnome, I can recommend it to everyone, regardless of the previous experience, Windows or Mac. It’s simple enough to explain to a parent, by using a tablet metaphor. Here is the dock, here is the settings, upper right corner, here is all apps, etc. I even enjoy the no minimise button, you don’t really need it. I used Gnome for over a year on one of my computers, quite often and for prolonged periods of time, and even I’m a Sway user, I enjoyed it a lot. To the point I thought perhaps I should switch from sway. But I stayed with sway, for the simplicity’s sake. And the ability to design my personal environment as I see it.
I use standard GNOME as my desktop environment and nothing about it feels like it was designed for tablets and/or smartphones. Not that it isn’t capable of being used as such, but my desktop usage doesn’t indicate that tablet/smartphone use-cases were the primary goal. Is GNOME even in wide use for those contexts?
ya i was a GNOME hater for a long time after the GNOME 3 transition, switched between Mate and KDE for years. But gave up on those due to persistent video instability and went to vanilla Ubuntu GNOME and it's actually pretty nice. Not sure if it was good originally but I actually prefer it now.
In a bit of fairness to the haters, Gnome 3 used to have a lot of graphical glitches and was unstable in a lot of its early iterations, but I broadly agree with your characterization.
I think if you actually give modern Gnome a chance (and actually make an attempt to learn it), it's actually a pretty slick desktop.
Years of fighting to restore basic features was funny the first time, but gnome 3 was not the first time; I do not blame anyone for not trusting that gnome won't pull the rug again, and soon.
Vanilla Gnome user here. Gnome may look like it was designed for tablets but it has a keyboard shortcut for basically anything. So you don't do much of point and clicks if you know Gnome. You can but you don't have to. It just gets out of your way as they say.
Since I found with searchable app menus / start menus that I don't ever navigate through menus but just start typing, I ditched the menu entirely and have KRunner bound to the Win key. Not only is it fine with any desktop app GTK or not (that packagers have ensured will install with its FreeDesktop metadata file or some such), it supports all the enabled KDE Search plugins. So I don't ever open a calc app again, either..
It really was! I have never even used a tablet, but I was disappointed when they dropped Unity and went back to the old way.
But I was never a Windows user, either, and I've never held the idea that there is one normal and right way to do a computer interface, so I think I was more open to it than many people are.
I stayed on a workable Unity install on 2020.05 LTS for as long as possible, then switched to 2024.05 LTS, at which point Unity, for some reason, no longer functioned (even though I was using the Ubuntu Unity flavor). Tried Gnome for a while but what ultimately lost me was the notifications. To close out a notification without switching focus I had to, very carefully, click right on the X in the upper right corner. Otherwise it would activate the notification and switch focus.
I've got a workable setup with XFCE4, the whisker menu bound to the super key, a few panel plugins to make a maximized app have the same behavior as they did in Unity, and the Plank docking program (along with a brief shell script bound to the dock that kills and relaunches Plank when it starts moving out of place). The notifications work the same as they did on Unity - clicking on them dismisses them unless you click on the "activate" button to switch focus.
