[nomad41]

It's funny because that's my exact experience using Windows. Buggy and incredibly bad defaults, completely mouse driven with insufficient keyboard controls. macOS is bearable and I can be productive on it, but I think GNOME is the perfect desktop for productivity. To each their own, I guess.

[emerongi]

> GNOME is the perfect desktop for productivity

GNOME is quite decent in its current form and the most user-friendly desktop out there at the moment. People who hate on it just have some historical gripe with it, I feel like.

Ideally I'd be using something like Sway, but I can't be bothered to spend time on making things work the way they need to. GNOME gives me everything out of the box and doesn't get in my way. KDE is much more customizable, but less friendly on the eyes. Windows is probably OK if you're used to Windows (I'm clearly not). I have to use macOS at work and it's just a worse version of GNOME - bad defaults, weird design choices, less features, minimal customizability.

[michaelmrose]

It's perfectly OK to mistake a subjective preference as objective user friendliness its most people's definition of the term. What is negative is to confuse disagreement with your preference with being unreasonable.

> People who hate on it just have some historical gripe with it, I feel like.

The way it handles virtual desktops with multiple monitors out of the box poorly thought out. With 3 monitors having changing workspaces only effect the primary monitor is very poor user experience. that leaves virtually pun intended without the affordance of virtual desktops at all.

There is a setting to expand virtual desktops to all monitors and now you no longer have to dig through something that looks like the windows registry to enable it which is indeed a nice upgrade but it misses the vastly superior third option of being able to independently switch each monitor.

An obvious affordance instead of digging through a settings menu would be a little iconic padlock beside a representation of the virtual desktop switcher that when unlocked enables you to manually switch a singular monitor or when by default locked allows the monitor to change with every other monitor.

Trivially enables not only all 3 possible workflows but allows one to discover this organically at the cost of a small amount of screen real estate.

This is a singular issue but their entire history is rife not merely with subjective differences in user preference but objectively bad design.

[zasdffaa]

> People who hate on it just have some historical gripe with it, I feel like.

You mean like I spent 2 months with it and just found a list of weirdness and outright bugs?

Perhaps "historical gripe(s)" happen for a reason?

[Spivak]

Bugs? In software? Never! By all reasonable accounts GNOME is a well-run broadly-scoped project with a perfectly normal amount of bugs given it’s size.

[yoyohello13]

You said you tried it “a couple of years ago”. Sounds historical to me.

[michaelmrose]

This is disingenuous. The implication of the grandparent comment is not that the persons experience happened 2 years ago instead of right now its that its automatically invalid because of it. In context the word historical doesn't mean anything useful.

[zasdffaa]

Title of post: "Gnome Turns 25". So maybe and maybe not. I just ran into so much WTF I find it hard to imagine it's fixed now, plus some others here rather agree. It's enough to put me off anyway.

[zasdffaa]

> completely mouse driven with insufficient keyboard controls.

Certainly not. I suspect you aren't familiar with win, it has a lot of these although MS seems determined to wreck them.

I'm no MS shill, I wish they would DIAF, but I do find windows highly reliable and the UI was pretty good until they decided to fuck with it. By comparison I found gnome actively user hostile. Even small niceties that windows has are missing (eg one of very many, go up a folder in windows and the folder you were on will be the one selected, very handy). I would like to sit down with you and compare experiences, but ain't going to happen. Glad it works for you though.

[philliphaydon]

Windows has never had as many DE bugs as any Linux DE.

And Gnome is far from a perfect desktop experience out of the box. Once you add a few plugins it’s pretty decent but out of the box. No. Just no.

But the productivity of linux is so far superior to windows. The only reason I subject myself to windows is games and old .net framework projects.

[ungamedplayer]

> Windows has never had as many DE bugs as any Linux DE.

Do you work at Microsoft and have access to the internal bug tracker?

[input_sh]

> but I think GNOME is the perfect desktop for productivity

I'd agree if it weren't for the default keyboard shortcuts.

Like every app in existence uses ctrl+tab to switch between tabs, but GNOME's apps (like Files and Terminal) use ctrl+pgdown.

[nebalee]

Xfce (Thunar, Xfce Terminal, Mousepad) also uses CTRL-PGUP/DOWN to cycle tabs, as does MATE (Caja, MATE Terminal, Pluma uses CTRL-ALT-PGUP/DOWN). Neither uses CTRL-TAB for tabs but to cycle through buttons/icons on the GUI.

As far as I can tell CTRL-TAB for tab cycling is not very wide spread. KDE uses it, but that supports CTRL-PGUP/DOWN as well.

edit: And I'm not sure why CTRL-TAB even works in KDE because the default shortcuts to cycle through tabs are CTRL-PGUP/DOWN and CTRL-[/] (tested on KDE neon).

[cuu508]

I use Alt+<number> to switch to n-th tab. It works in Files, Terminal, Sublime Text, Firefox, GIMP.

[amelius]

Funniest moment in UX design was probably when Windows invented the lock-screen curtain (the screen that you have to drag up to unveil a password input box), and the Linux desktops copied that.

[kaba0]

But at least copied it such that any keypress will go to the input field, not get swallowed.

[silon42]

I find the exact opposite. Windows (was, aka <= 7) reliable, with good keyboard support... MacOS is useless by default until you add Alt+Tab.

[aidenn0]

> completely mouse driven with insufficient keyboard controls.

Is this really true now? If so, it's sad how far windows has fallen. It was very easy, almost pleasant to use Windows with no mouse, from 3.0 all the way through XP (which was the range of my regular windows use)

[oblio]

It's not true, it's a clueless comment.

[secondcoming]

> completely mouse driven with insufficient keyboard controls

Wait, what?

[oblio]

What have you tried and failed to do with a keyboard, as opposed to the other somewhat mainstream options (MacOS, Gnome, KDE)?