[AngriestLettuce]

Sometimes, but that's a finnicky beast in its own right. You need to figure out which poorly documented variable you need to change to do whatever, usually from a Stack Overflow post from some other poor fucker, then make heads and tails of system settings vs. user settings, the dbus nonsense for communication, the weird gconfig shit for fiddling with system files, etc. Doing something as simple as e.g. changing the image used on the login screen for all users is far more complex than it should be.

I understand that GNOME has other goals than I do for my machine, but it's basically the antithesis of the reasons I choose to run Linux in the first place. I think it being the de facto "standard" Linux desktop environment is really hurting the ecosystem.

[midoridensha]

>I think it being the de facto "standard" Linux desktop environment is really hurting the ecosystem.

I completely agree. I think it's a case of moneyed interests having taken over. Someone in another HN comment a while back implied that the big reason for Gnome and its philosophy is Red Hat's big corporate and especially government customers. Why so many casual Linux users have jumped on the Gnome bandwagon I don't understand. If you want something that gives you no choice and tells you how to use your computer and is "simple", then just buy a Mac.

[QUrprUd1nCeicw]

Please stop with the conspiracy theories. GNOME is still very much a volunteer project. And KDE also gets corporate contributions too which they're very grateful to receive.

GNOME isn't really against "choice" either, they just optimize for a different workflow.

[bruce511]

I'm thinking maybe there are two distinct groups of people. One group choose their OS and love to fiddle and fine tune its behaviour.

Another group have their OS chosen for them by their employer. They don't care about the OS, or software in general - they just want to get through the day.

Perhaps KDE is well suited to one group and Gnome to another?

[QUrprUd1nCeicw]

GNOME can be fiddled with, just not in the same way as KDE.

And KDE can simplified for installation on work computers, just not in the same way as GNOME.

Personally I use GNOME now because it fits my current workflow better, but in the past I had a different workflow and I used KDE more. I still have both of them installed so it's not difficult to switch.

[johnny22]

> Another group have their OS chosen for them by their employer. They don't care about the OS, or software in general - they just want to get through the day.

People like Linus Torvalds didn't get their OS chosen for them, but still chose kept Fedora's GNOME default.

[account42]

> default

Sounds like someone else did make the choice for Linus, even if it could have been overruled.

[raverbashing]

> they just optimize for a different workflow.

Usually of the people that just work with a giant terminal session with screen and that's it.

No, really, because having a terminal application where "Tab Next" doesn't wrap around just goes to show how worried they are about users outside that niche (and yes maybe they fixed this now, but come on)

[abrouwers]

You don't understand why some people might prefer a more precisely defined, simpler-by-default desktop? I can only speak for myself - I've been using linux full-time for ~20ish years, and gnome 3 is the one of the most solid, stable, elegant desktops I've used. I understand why some prefer KDE, but I spend most of my times in APPS, not configuring my desktop environment.

Also, what does "big corporate" customers even mean? At my corporate job, I get paid to do work (within applications), not spend time configuring settings in my DE. I'd be quite curious to hear how gnome specifically prevents you from doing your job.

Last thought, but "just buy a mac" is a rather silly argument; in fact, if gnome is being to mac, that's a pretty high compliment, IMO. If that's not your thing, that's fine, but it's also fine for others to want to use a simple, well-designed desktop.

[pxc]

> I understand why some prefer KDE, but I spend most of my times in APPS, not configuring my desktop environment.

When I first got into KDE, I was young and excited about all of the eye candy and downloadable widgets and stuff. I spent a TON of time tinkering with the desktop environment. But nowadays, I use KDE with something like 85% or 90% of all the options at their default settings. I think that's a really common way to use KDE: everyone has their 5% or 10% of customizations, and it's not much, but for everyone that 5% or 10% covers different options.

I feel that in that way, defaults are very important for KDE as well. They provide a center of gravity for the userbase, and their appropriateness determines how much work it is for everyone to maintain a usable setup.

Anyway, on KDE I have a handful of settings saved in my dotfiles or similar, and the rest I don't really spend time configuring anymore. So I totally understand GNOME users who take a similar approach but fall a little further on that spectrum where the settings are 98% or 99% at the defaults.

I don't know why (maybe it's my reliance on the CLI and the deep familiarity of GNU and Linux together), but for whatever reason, despite being a KDE guy, I strongly prefer GNOME to Windows or macOS. It feels thoughtfully designed, and limited, yes... but not too restrictive. I get the comparison, but macOS feels hamstrung and confining to me, including compared to a nice, current GNOME distro.

[danjac]

It depends on your needs and workflow. Personally I spend most of my time on my laptop in the terminal, browser, email and one or two other apps like Discord. I just want something that is simple and stays out of my way and I don't want to spend my time crafting the perfect desktop. Stock Fedora+Gnome with a couple extensions pretty much covers all my needs.

Other users have different expectations and needs and perhaps KDE suits them better, and maybe they are happy spending hours fine-tuning their desktop experience. All good and I'm happy we all get to have a choice.

[seba_dos1]

Sounds similar to my needs and workflow, and yet GNOME always feels to me like it requires me to spend hours fine-tuning it, finding extensions that make simple things possible and tweaks that aren't exposed anywhere by default to make it usable - while Plasma works fine out-of-box and I'm not worried about little things I do like to tweak in my desktop because I can be reasonably certain that I'll be able to quickly reconfigure things whenever I get annoyed by them.

However, I do like to use GNOME on my phone (with phosh as a shell). It fits there quite nicely and IMO feels better than Plasma.

[unethical_ban]

Maybe I like simple, intuitive keyboard shortcut driven environments and also like Linux.

[pjmlp]

KDE also uses DBUS, which is the successor of Bonobo and DCOP, after both desktops agreed on the same infrastructure.

XFCE also uses it for their plugins.

[AngriestLettuce]

On the side of the desktop environments and their usage of it, the fact that I have to "dbus-launch" to change a user's settings from a shell seems pretty insane to me.

Technology-wise I'm sure other protocols are worse and all, but DBUS does not spark joy. My experience with DBUS is that it's a pain in the ass to program with, and can cause strange issues if you for example have a service that needs to be available both for early boot and late during shutdown and you're not very careful with your dependencies. Documentation is sparse, and it seems like 99% of people just use the low-level library they keep screaming you shouldn't use anyway. I used the glib one, and it put me off programming anything GNOME ever again.

I am not a fan of DBUS.

[QUrprUd1nCeicw]

I have bad news for you, every alternative is going to be the same or worse. There's no good and clean solution for early boot services. The Linux kernel expects you to handle any of those issues in userspace with a userspace daemon like dbus. If you're upset the documentation is sparse, well, welcome to open source.

Nobody is "screaming" at you to stop using libdbus. The issues with it are actually spelled out in the docs. Here's what they say:

>The low-level API documented in this manual deliberately lacks most convenience functions - those are left up to higher-level libraries based on frameworks such as GLib, Qt, Python, Mono, Java, etc. These higher-level libraries (often called "D-Bus bindings") have features such as object systems and main loops that allow a much more convenient API.

>The low-level API also contains plenty of clutter to support integration with arbitrary object systems, languages, main loops, and so forth. These features add a lot of noise to the API that you probably don't care about unless you're coding a binding.

So unless you really have your own object system, language and event loop, you shouldn't bother with using libdbus. Use literally any of the other bindings of which there are many. The glib one is only going to be good if you're already using glib's event loop and object system.

[abrouwers]

Most popular options seem pretty well exposed via. gnome-tweaks. I'm curious which others you find missing?

[AngriestLettuce]

I don't have an actionable list off the top of my head, but in particular, about 6-12 months ago, I started digging into how to theme my install. Wanted to have e.g. different system theme colours than Ubuntu eggplant, a different background, different login screen, etc. There were so many different ways and places of doing things (stylesheets packed in gresource files, dconf, more oldschool config files, gnome-tweaks) that after messing around with it a bit I just gave up. Didn't seem worth the time.

It isn't any one particular option that I'm missing, rather the entire experience of modifying its behaviour is a pain in the ass. They seem to labour under the delusion that if they just make this one perfect system, everyone will be happy with it, so they don't need to prioritize customizability. This is rarely ever the case when dealing with real people with different needs.

[QUrprUd1nCeicw]

That has nothing to do with GNOME. That's going to happen any time you try to theme 100 different programs and try to get them all to look consistent. Try to imagine writing one CSS and applying it to every website you visit and expecting it to work correctly. It's just not going to work, you'd have to manually rewrite the CSS for every site. The same is true of desktop applications. The only reason your desktop appears consistent with the default Ubuntu themes is because all the apps already did the work to target that theme. If you want another theme, you have to do all that work all over again. You can't avoid this just by adding more options, it's a large amount of extra code that needs to be written every time for every app.