[jorvi]

Yeah, except I prefer the cleanliness of Gnome over how scattershot and buggy KDE feels, so I’m SoL. I’ve even looked into launching games into their own little Gamescope instance, but if you don’t run Gamescope as your main window manager, you lose most of its benefits.

> For Mirror's Edge, were you using Steam Input?

Yes. The problem lies in the fact that only the Xone driver properly supports the Xbox wireless adapter, but it doesn’t play nice with Mirror’s Edge. Xpad and XpadNeo do work, but those require USB or Bluetooth.

And me having to tweak a million things tells why gaming on Linux still sucks, aside from Deck’s blessed config. I don’t want to deal with a thousand papercuts, I want to boot my system and play. Windows is still closer to that experience than Linux.

[OJFord]

> Yeah, except I prefer the cleanliness of Gnome over how scattershot and buggy KDE feels

But if it's the difference between gaming working or not for you, wouldn't you rather use it? Surely you barely interact with it anyway while gaming, only to get into Steam?

If this is a machine you use for something else too, you could just have a gaming user that logs in to KDE and your normal user that uses Gnome?

[eropple]

> Surely you barely interact with it anyway while gaming, only to get into Steam?

I'm a Linux desktop user and I drop into a game once in a while while I'm waiting for another meeting or waiting for a build to finish or whatever. My work desktop doesn't use VRR (the just-for-games PC uses Windows), otherwise I'd be in the same boat as 'jorvi because it quite matters to me that games on my desktop integrate into everything else at a passable level. For me, GNOME does a better job of integrating my different activities than KDE (which wasn't always the case! I was a KDE3 user for a long time!), so I use GNOME. And it remains an unsolved pain in the ass that the Linux desktop experience isn't coherent enough to mean that we should only be thinking about desktop environments if we want to.

Coherent, holistic switching between tasks is a thing that people are allowed to want and attempting to convince people that they don't is a bad look.

> If this is a machine you use for something else too, you could just have a gaming user that logs in to KDE and your normal user that uses Gnome?

This is a really sad observation on the state of the Linux desktop. Still.

[bee_rider]

>> If this is a machine you use for something else too, you could just have a gaming user that logs in to KDE and your normal user that uses Gnome?

> This is a really sad observation on the state of the Linux desktop. Still.

It seems like a somewhat odd observation, is it really necessary to have another user to do this? I can easily switch between Gnome, i3, and Sway on my system, I mean that’s going between X and Wayland, no issues… maybe KDE and Gnome have some specific incompatibility though? Odd.

Anyway, at least there’s a workaround. If Gnome is a hard requirement, how is Windows even a candidate?

[eropple]

> maybe KDE and Gnome have some specific incompatibility though

It's a layer down from the DE itself, it's the window manager beneath it. GNOME ships Mutter and KDE ships KWin. GNOME is pretty tightly tied to Mutter; KDE is less tied to KWin, but KWin also tends to support shinier features than Mutter does anyway so I don't know why you wouldn't use it anyway.

> It seems like a somewhat odd observation, is it really necessary to have another user to do this?

Strictly no, but having to have another login session, period, is bonkers to me. It's reasonable to respond to that suggestion with incredulity.

> If Gnome is a hard requirement, how is Windows even a candidate?

For me, it's not. At the moment it's inertia, because Windows has legit become the best Linux dev environment I know of with WSL2. I originally switched back to a Linux desktop because I was working on some hardware stuff that benefited from being on a Linux platform, but I'm certainly not tied to it past that.

[OJFord]

> It seems like a somewhat odd observation, is it really necessary to have another user to do this? I can easily switch between Gnome, i3, and Sway on my system

Ok, sure, it was just the first solution that came to mind. On mine logging in launches straight into sway. I think only in the first session (to allow recovery in case of some related issue) so I suppose I could switch tty and then manually launch whatever DE.

But to me I think the odd observation is that it doesn't need to be a different user if we're talking about still having to log in again anyway.

Unless you mean some kind of session saving, swaymsg exit, and then launch the other one? But then you have to maintain whatever session saving (probably different in each) solution and what have you really gained.

[zeta0134]

Honestly it's the reverse for me, but I guess that's down to personal preference. "Gnome" apps keep updating with the "new" GTK style, which means the title bar becomes a conglomeration of a bunch of weird controls, the familiar dropdown menus vanish, everything gets moved into a tiny little hamburger menu and, often, the layout breaks in subtle ways.

The calculator app just recently did this, and now I have to type and enter one line of numbers before the text control realizes it's too small and resizes itself. That first line of numbers is nearly invisible. Happens again every time it's opened.

I'm not sure who decided that desktop apps need to look and feel like touchscreen-first mobile apps, but I don't particularly like it. KDE still feels like a desktop environment, so it's my strong preference. I'll put up with a very slightly less polished experience if it means stuff stops rearranging itself just for the sake of change every couple of weeks.

(Aside from KDE, Cinnamon is pretty solid and less feature packed, maybe give it a whirl?)

[jwells89]

Hamburger menus are among my greatest gripes with GNOME. In apps with any functionality at all they end up being poorly organized junk drawers filled with odds and ends, and because they have to be somewhat short to be effective, functions that don’t fit in them either get buried or cut.

What makes this all worse is that GNOME has acres of space reserved at the top of the screen with its statusbar, most of which is empty and doing absolutely nothing. It could house a macOS-style global menubar (as Unity did for fullscreened windows) with room to spare… Though global menubars aren’t everybody’s cup of tea I think many would agree they’re better than the alternative of oversimplified hamburger menus, and they would help achieve the clean look GNOME is going for without so dramatically impeding functionality.

[CamperBob2]

The calculator app just recently did this, and now I have to type and enter one line of numbers before the text control realizes it's too small and resizes itself. That first line of numbers is nearly invisible. Happens again every time it's opened.

OT, but I recently started using a Python REPL as a calculator, leaving it open full time in a window. It's pretty great. Haven't touched an actual calculator, or a calculator app, in weeks.

[prmoustache]

>Yeah, except I prefer the cleanliness of Gnome over how scattershot and buggy KDE feels, so I’m SoL.

You know that linux distros are multiusers/multiseats systems right? You can perfectly use Gnome as default desktop and live switch to a dedicated gaming user with kde plasma desktop that is only used to launch games.

Kde plasma shoudln't be buggy if only used as a game launcher and disable baloo file indexing if you want to limit kde memory usage to minimum.

[Zekio]

you could try Xow it supports the wireless dongles for xbox controllers if that is what you are trying to use

[Phelinofist]

Isn't Xone the new version of Xow and Xow is no longer maintained?

[barbariangrunge]

Just chiming in to say gnome is wonderful to use and I miss it every time I have to use something else

[Audiophilip]

May I ask what "SoL" stands for? (Not a native English speaker.)

[bigstrat2003]

I've always heard it as "short on luck".

[30]

Shit out of Luck