[Pannoniae]

The Linux desktop is better than ever (in fact, I am switching to it the first time in a few days! I just need to setup some things first)

Sadly, the enshittification has also taken over parts of the Linux desktop as well though. For example, the mobile-first, flat-everything user-hostile design. (like gnome)

Dark themes were not common while skeuomorphism was mainstream, they are only in demand right now because viewing an extremely low-contrast white flat theme is an eyesore.

Luckily, KDE and the similar still exists and you can theme it:)

[throwaway5Am1k]

>enshittification

This is the 2nd time this word has been used to describe the Linux desktop in this thread, and it's disingenuous. FOSS doesn't do any of the things described with enshitification article: it doesn't sit between buyers and sellers and screw each of them in turn. That's not what's been happening. Maybe the software goes shit, but it is not "enshitification". At every turn there's been alternatives (GNOME3 -> Unity/Xfce, KDE4 -> Trinity, Pulseaudio -> Pulsewire, systemd -> upstart, Debian -> Devuian, etc)

Stop misusing the word, you're discrediting the good work of FOSS.

[Pannoniae]

I am not misusing the word. I don't know what their incentives are, but they are just progressively making things worse and more locked down in the name of "progress".

Bland, corporate, utterly inoffensive and lifeless "design"? Check. Trying to remove theming from users? Check. etc....

The only reason why they haven't succeeded like other OSes is because it's FOSS. But they really want to take away the user's choice, shift the Overton window, and pretend like things were always bad.

[throwaway5Am1k]

>I am not misusing the word

Yes you are, see:

>they are just progressively making things worse

That's things going "shit". That's been around for as long as software has been around (e.g. Borland). Enshitification is a very specific thing: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

To quote it:

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

>shift the Overton window

You're all over the place. This has nothing to do with enshitification.

[Pannoniae]

It is enshittification because they are making the software worse in opposition to the users. They don't care that the users hate the changes, they still do it anyway, deliberately.

[rpeden]

Have you considered that many users do like the changes, and you just aren't one of them?

I first used desktop Linux in 1996 and liked it well enough. I remember using GNOME 2 and Xfce around 2010ish and liking both of them well enough, too. And they're still around if I want to use them.

But honestly? I don't use them because I like modern GNOME better. I use it every day, everything just works, and I like it more than the alternatives.

[liotier]

> But honestly? I don't use them because I like modern GNOME better. I use it every day, everything just works, and I like it more than the alternatives

Same here, but with KDE - and I'm a former XFCE user, and before that I was a Gnome user...

None of us is the whole market !

[Pannoniae]

Yes, I have, but fundamentally, using old stuff is usually quite hard. If I could revert to it, it would be great, but those are usually not too compatible with today's technology.

I use those despite their horrible UI, not because of their horrible UI.

[epidemian]

Words have meaning.

You used a word that has a specific meaning to refer to something else, hence the miscommunication.

[blueflow]

I disagree, use the word more to complain about GNOME and what they did to their UI. Even my 512GHz Windows XP Laptop runs more smoothly, and that without SSD.

[jraph]

I don't like Gnome so much, but enshittification is quite a strong word to qualify it.

I'd prefer we reserved this word for when stuff gets worse because of money / investors, with incentives at odds with the user needs.

I don't believe Gnome suffers from decisions that are bad because of financial incentives.

[throwaway167]

I quite like Gnome.

I also think enshittification is a strong word, and a wrong one.

Because praise the shit. Praise the choice of shit. You like your shit. I like my shit. I enjoy my Gnome shit, I enjoyed Gnome 2 shit but I love Gnome 3 shit. I don't like KDE shit. I can't remember how to spell XKFG shit because it's not big enough to fit in my memory.

It's all choice. And praise choice. I do like Gnome. If you want to keep running Gnome 1 like it's 1999, I'm sure there's a way to do that too.

[Pannoniae]

Well, I am open to changing my mind. What do you think, what's the reason then? From an outsider perspective, 10 years ago I've seen all those beautiful, perfectly usable UIs, and they have almost all disappeared by today. What happened? Why do you think GNOME does that?

[jraph]

I believe its maintainers truly believe they are taking the right decisions that are good for the project.

They limit the feature set so they can stabilize on a smaller basis.

They take UI/UX decisions they think are right.

That's what I think.

I also think they managed to build a beautiful UI that works quite well and that pleases many people.

I also think they removed useful features, lagged on important features (thumbnails in the file picker, which I always found bad anyway, including in the Gnome 2 days). I also think they believe they know better than their users on what they need when they really don't, that they should be more understanding of users trying to work around the flaws instead of despising them, and that they shouldn't both reduce the feature set to a minimum and break extensions in each release. And I do indeed think they made UI like it would be used on tablets, degrading the experience desktop, way too early when they didn't work well on tablet anyway for many reasons and KDE was the only bearable option on tablets at the time.

So I really believe they truly do what they think is best, but I also like the KDE approach way better: listening to the users, trying to polish things while not removing too many features, being humble in their decision, and acknowledging their users might have different needs / taste. (for instance, in Plasma 6, they are reverting to double click by default - many KDE devs prefer simple click and think it's objectively better, but they recognize many users are disturbed by this default.)

[dizhn]

KDE is reall pretty good in listening to the users. They announced the removal of workspaces a while ago but then realized some people are actually using it. They reverted their decision on this. Of course people also stepped up to keep maintaining it. That's key in open source projects.

[dizhn]

Not workspaces of course. Activities.

[leidenfrost]

> I also think they believe they know better than their users on what they need when they really don't

This. They have this kind of Apple syndrome of belittling use feedback, minus the part of being a billion dollar megacorporation

Also, things would have gone differently if they forked gnome 2 into a new project and left the original sources intact, instead of dragging all the userbase and distros with them.

To me, this was the shittiest move. Instead of saying "hey, we want to remake gnome into a very opinionated DE so we will make a new project for it", they said "we will use the same gnome2 sources so we will not listen to you but you are forced to listen to us!"

[jraph]

I can't blame them taking their own project to the direction they want. I would certainly do this with my own projects if most maintainers wanted it.

Distros were also free to follow, or to migrate users to MATE.

(of course, I would strongly care about not breaking users habits if I can help it, but that's the direction I would take)

[sophacles]

It's possible that your subjective opinion of what makes a good UI differs from the subjective opinion of the people doing the work on Gnome.

I'd need some strong evidence that they are selling you to some other party in order to enrich their investors. Who are these investors? How do they even get profits from Gnome? What choices have been made that let 3rd party companies get better access to you/your data from Gnome itself?

Differences of opinion aren't evidence of intentionally screwing over users in order to get more money for investors.

[boomboomsubban]

Your opinion of what a good UI looks like is 10+ years old, GNOME is constantly trying to look like a modern relevant UI. I also hate it, that's why I don't use GNOME and instead use a desktop environment committed to looking like what was popular 20 years ago. I seem to be in the minority, I encounter many people that love GNOME

[bachmeier]

> the enshittification has also taken over parts of the Linux desktop as well though. For example, the mobile-first, flat-everything user-hostile design. (like gnome)

My first successful experiment with Linux was in 2003 (having flopped in the late 1990s, when Linux could be found on the shelf in stores everywhere). The desktop I used then was Gnome 2. My current desktop is Gnome 2, with more or less the exact same look and functionality, though it's called Mate. It's only enshittification if you have a way to force it on people against their will.

[christophilus]

I love Gnome, so not everyone agrees on the "enshittification" claim. It's the most visually consistent DE for Linux, in my experience, and has an aesthetic that I appreciate. It mostly just stays out of my way, but has affordances for the things I need. Fortunately, there's plenty of choice in the Linux world, and we can hopefully coexist without too much hostility.

[palata]

One big advantage of Linux is that if you don't like gnome, you can use (and contribute to) something else.

And the great thing about e.g. a window manager is that there is no lock-in effect. I must use GitHub because everyone is using GitHub (even thought I like the git e-mail workflow better), I must use WhatsApp because everyone is using WhatsApp, and I must use the Slack and their damn Electron app because my company chose Slack and I don't have a choice.

Gnome does nothing like that: I don't use it, and I don't even know how many people use it. I don't see why there would be a reason to complain about it; if you don't like it, don't use it.

[hkt]

I find the criticism of GNOME a bit weird - personally, I love its user interface because it virtually isn't there. It gets out of the way and when I do see it, it feels clean and well organised. I'm old enough to remember the windows-esque start menu type setups (which I know many DEs still use) and am a bit of a convert to the convergence mindset of GNOME.

To be honest, the only thing that bothers me about Linux desktop environments is that there isn't a simple way of getting a 4G dongle and using my laptop as a phone (calls, SMS, etc).

[tilsammans]

I agree completely! I ditched Ubuntu for this very fact. GNOME and snaps are deal breakers for me. I switched to Fedora KDE a year ago and I use it every day. And not just for coding. It's a real treat and stuff just works and gets out of my way.

[dizhn]

I use KDE because Gnome's multimonitor is always problematic in my environment but I spent a few days on it trying to use it the way they intended it to be used and now have a lot of sympathy for it. It's a really nice simple workflow. This is mostly applicable to work though. I don't know that it would work so well for general purpose home use or even non-technical work for that matter.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

you know, I hear this sentiment a lot (linux desktop is now awesome!).

And it may even be true this time around (I love me some KDE).

But for me, it doesn't matter. Once I discovered i3 I just never went back, there is just no desktop that can compare to it.

Obviously I'm not your typical user, so this is an aside from a "nerd", but it's sometimes interesting not having a horse in that race anymore (I've been using i3 for 10-15 years I think at this point?)

[bawolff]

I don't get why people complain about gnome so much. I don't like it either - so i don't use it. There are like a billion options for linux desktop.

[Pannoniae]

Because it's a huge part of the linux desktop, that's why. Sure, there are alternatives, but the range of alternatives is only ever shrinking.