[PaoloBarbolini]

Why do we still put up with GNOME?

I've spent the last 10 years off and on from Linux. Had I used something other than GNOME, I believe my experience would have been better.

I've been on KDE for the last 3-4 years and things work so well I could never imagine going back to GNOME.

[reacweb]

I think power users are not the main target of Ubuntu.

I have put my parents on Ubuntu (gnome) in 2013 to replace windows XP. My mother is 88 now. I think it is the perfect fit for her (dad is dead years ago).

I use ubuntu gnome because tweaking my computer is not where I want to spend my time. YOLO. Using a "mainstream" desktop that can be explained to "non specialist" has its benefits. I accept to suffer some annoyances and there is always a way to fix the most annoying ones by sacrificing time.

[wao0uuno]

>I think power users are not the main target of Ubuntu. Then who is? Normies buy iPads and casuals stay on Windows. Is this why Linux can't gain any market share?

[reacweb]

IMHO, Ubuntu is trying to gain market share by targeting non-experts — making Linux simple enough for normies and casual users. Casual users are generally less likely to mess things up on Ubuntu than on Windows.

[ndiddy]

Every time I run Ubuntu on a computer it always ends up in a state where it does not boot after a few months. This has happened on multiple computers, none with nVidia GPUs, over a period of a bit over 15 years. I don't do anything funny with my computers. No custom kernel, no weird kernel modules, no trying to shoehorn in 3rd party repos intended for Debian, etc. The last time I tried was last year, when I got a new job and my work laptop came with Ubuntu 24.04. Sure enough, after a few months an update made it unable to boot. I have not had this problem with any other distro. I switched the laptop to Fedora and it's worked perfectly fine. This makes me question the logic of trying to give Ubuntu to novice computer users.

[antisthenes]

Learned absolutely nothing from the Firefox add-on ecosystem disaster and subsequent decline.

[lproven]

Yup. And this is no bad thing.

[lproven]

This isn't true any more, and hasn't been for some years, you know.

It was true but times change.

Microsoft chose to kill off Windows 10, which it once promised would be the last desktop Windows ever. Its replacement is bigger, slower, stuffed with adverts and upselling attempts, and has an artificial demand for TPM 2.

That's driven thousands of people to check out Linux, and if you don't know anything about Linux, then Ubuntu is the number one best-known distro. Many techies dislike Snap (to the extent of spreading lies like "it's not FOSS"), but it makes version upgrades safer, which matters more to non-techies.

(I say thousands so the pedants don't shout at me, but I suspect the reality is at least hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.)

Linux Mint is friendlier, yes, and so is Zorin OS, but both are based on Ubuntu.

Valve has sold millions of Steam Decks, which demonstrate that it's now possible to run premier new Windows games on Linux with performance at least as good as on Windows. All Linux users know their hardware runs faster and cooler with Linux than Windows anyway.

Chromebooks (which are as cheap as laptops get) outsold Macs (which are expensive) by revenue in 2017 in the USA and within 3 years in the rest of the world. ChromeOS is a desktop Linux, based on Gentoo. It has hundreds of millions of users who have never heard the word "Linux".

Companies with cloud-based IT are deploying ChromeOS Flex as a response to ransomware attach. (E.g. Nordic Choice hotels.)

Many of us see Ubuntu's characteristic desktop in shops, bars, travel stations and things regularly now. I hear its startup sound on trains. I have totally non-techie friends running Ubuntu at home. I've given Mint to lots of mildly technophobic friends and they get on just fine.

It's not over, but the year of Linux on the Desktop came about a decade ago, and the penguin taleban were too busy in-fighting to notice.

[wao0uuno]

>That's driven thousands of people to check out Linux, and if you don't know anything about Linux, then Ubuntu is the number one best-known distro.

Not really. Most normies seem to choose meme gaming distros based off Fedora like CachyOS or Bazzite. Many are waiting for official SteamOS release which is based on Arch.

[hollerith]

CachyOS is based on Arch.

[pennomi]

Snap is TERRIBLE for non-technical people. Imagine installing an image editor via Snap, and then the default sandboxing making it unable to access the images on your media drive. No errors, it just silently fails.

This has been a problem I’ve dealt with on nearly every single Snap I’ve installed. If you’re a file editor, you must let me edit my damn files!

[lproven]

I often hear things like this, but I never encounter them myself.

I've run every single version of Ubuntu ever released. Work machines stay on LTSes, testbeds run interim versions.

After the 22.04 release, I carefully de-snapped my work laptop, using `deb-get` to install native packages of everything. Worked a treat, took less disk space, things started a tiny bit faster.

Then I enabled Ubuntu Pro and it force-reinstalled snapd. It's fair enough to have it as a dependency: it's a standard component. I was very annoyed, though.

But when I upgraded to 24.04, a lot of things broke. I had to spend ages re-enabling repositories, getting new keys, changing version strings in stuff under `/etc/apt/sources.list.d` and so on. It's a PITA.

So I have performed a volte face. I removed all my `deb-get` packages, and reinstalled the snap versions. All my comms and messaging apps, music and media players, and so on.

It's much easier. No extra repos. I experimentally took one laptop from 24.04 to 24.10 to 25.04 to 25.10 and yesterday to 26.04. All my apps stay in place. Nothing broke. No custom repos. No changes needed to any config file. It just works.

I've been using Linux for 30 years, starting on Slackware and moving to Red Hat and Caldera and SUSE via lots of others. But I'm old and grumpy and I want stuff to work without fiddling. I want low maintenance. Snap is low maintenance. My messaging apps can download stuff into my Downloads folder, open attachments from Documents, and so on.

I run native packages of my own browsers (Waterfox and Chrome) and AppImages of Panwriter and Logseq, and I have none of these difficulties.

Life is easier if you don't fight the OS and the vendor.

And Ubuntu is still easier and less hassle than Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, or any of the other big names.

[jhoechtl]

I find it hilarious how much religion is put into Gnome vs. KDE in this case. I did use both. I honestly have no strong favourite. After that many years of Linux desktop environment DE hopping I came to the conslusion that the DE should get out of your way and allow you to focus on your work.

Both Gnome and KDE support that. Actually Gnome a tad better as it gives you less knobs to turn an waste your time. Accept the defaults and if defaults are bad move somewhere else.

[NGRhodes]

I pick the software best for my uses and then look at which desktop supports that software and workflows around them the best. Not always clear/clean selections possible in my situation - I've a jumble of GUI designs and frameworks used, so I favour a more agnostic desktop.

[pizza234]

> I came to the conslusion that the DE should get out of your way and allow you to focus on your work.

This is the exact problem of GNOME; they routinely drop a lot of useful functionality, often irreversibly. So [for power users] GNOME absolutely gets in the way of the user.

[SkiFire13]

> Why do we still put up with GNOME?

Because maybe not all people have the same preferences as you?

[dijit]

Preferences don't form in a vacuum though. There's a perception that GNOME is the "good environment" which means its decisions get treated as more important than other DEs' when things change: and that's somewhat self-reinforcing.

Distro: "The most used DE needs first class support, we should probably bend to it" → Distro: "We should probably make this DE the default since it's so widely used and supported" → User: "I choose the default" → Distro: "The most used DE…"

So yes, people have different preferences; but if your preference is GNOME today, it might not be GNOME tomorrow, and "I picked the default" isn't quite the neutral signal it looks like.

[SkiFire13]

I'm not sure about this. In general I see more criticism of GNOME than praise, so if anything the perception would be that GNOME is not a good DE.

[tuna74]

A desktop/workstation/whatever should have a graphical user interface. If you want another GUI you can choose another distro (like Kubuntu etc).

[dijit]

where exactly did I say anything contrary to what you said.

Are you implying that GNOME is the only thing that should be considered graphical? That everything else has to be an alternative? That GNOME, by virtue of existing has infinite reprieve to change the definition of user interfaces at their leisure; even if it means breaking muscle memory hundreds of thousands of times over decades.

I don’t follow the point of what you said.

[tuna74]

Ubuntu can have one GUI and Kubuntu can have another. Every distro can't be everything for every person.

[dijit]

Lets put KDE as the default for Ubuntu and have GNOME available on Gnubuntu instead. :)

[pizza234]

There's much more to the story. GNOME is a sort of authoritarian organization known for their antisocial behavior: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti... (and there's much, much more).

Since GNOME is the default Ubuntu DE, they have a certain responsibily to listen to the users/devs and leave the system open (to an extent). But their direction is the opposite:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210901171117/https://twitter.c...

They've been doing massive reduction in functionalities, really insane like limiting copy/past of terminals just to the current screen (which hurts any sysadmin), generally without any way to enable them back.

I haven't heard of any other OSS organization trying so hard to limit freedom of their users/devs, and this is an explicit goal - they don't want to weaken their brand.

GNOME is nothing short of the Oracle of open source.

[amadeuspagel]

A distro making your project the default doesn't give you any responsibility.

[jamiejquinn]

I fundamentally agree with you. I don't think responsibility is quite the right word. But if they don't seem to care about a massive portion of their users, why are they building gnome at all?

[dandellion]

I agree that responsibility is the wrong word, but I've also noticed there's certainly some form of expectation, social responsibility, or care that other projects have and gnome has always lacked. When I started using Linux it was the desktop I liked the most, but some of the choices seem almost hostile or intentionally designed to drive current users away, and unlike most other projects I've used, I've never seen them listen or make improvements based on any feedback from users.

[SadTrombone]

Who is "we"? I find GNOME great.

On the other hand, I'm not a fan of people disparaging free open source software that they've never contributed anything to, either money or code.

[globalnode]

UI designers got it right with a taskbar on the bottom and widgets to let you know what you have open at a glance without having to move the mouse across the screen or press buttons. For a multi-application PC desktop thats the right model. Not for phones ofc, they need a different model. Trying to force the phone model on the desktop PC model just doesnt make sense, not now, not then, not ever.

edit: grammar, also Cinnamon fixes these issues thankfully.

[_blk]

Glad you like yours. I like (Vanilla) Gnome + PaperWM.

But seriously why would they disabled the middle mouse copy paste buffer by default? Anyways, gnome tweaks to the rescue I guess

[XorNot]

Because Cinnamon exists and has a delightful commitment to functional minimalism.

[tracker1]

Part of why I've been pretty happy with COSMIC, even if a bit experimental in ways. The File Manager is probably the most quirky part for me... mostly it works fine though. Most of my other issues seem to be more about the wayland switch than anything specific to COSMIC.

[reddalo]

I agree. GNOME used to be perfect, now it looks and feels like it's been designed by someone who's never used a computer.

I wish Ubuntu would just give up with GNOME and switch to something more sensible.

[tuna74]

You can use something else. Kubuntu might be nice for you.

[reddalo]

Yes, I've migrated to Kubuntu first and now I'm enjoying Linux Mint. The Cinnamon environment gives me old-school GNOME vibes. And Mint doesn't have Snap, which is also a big plus.

[rawoke083600]

Been a long time i3 user. Usually works well if you put in the initial time. But of late been very happy with Xubuntu (xfce)

[ndsipa_pomu]

I had to migrate away from Xubuntu (xfce) due to the poor HiDPI support. Kubuntu (KDE/Plasma) is now my current desktop of choice.

[arcanemachiner]

Why not both? XFCE + i3 make a great pair.

[phyalow]

I use XFCE too, simple and doesn’t get in the way.

[tuna74]

You don't have to "put up" with Gnome. Use whatever you want.