Gnome is great. It changes your workflow, and can be really good for someone who uses their keyboard a lot. However, it doesn’t’ give you a lot of options to customize out of the box. I am going to go over how you can change icons, themes, window buttons, and how to utilize extensions to customize your desktop to the max.
I do think, it’s good to have desktops that offer up their specific workflow that you can choose to adjust to.
For example a few years back, I made a trip through the tiling window managers which eventually landed me on bspwm, which had no way of minimizing windows.
That concept of not minimizing and not overlaying windows broke my mind. Because how are you supposed to have more than 4 windows open, if they all need to fit on the screen at the same time?
The answer was a much more fluid use of workspaces. If you actually need to see windows at the same time, you put them on the same workspace, otherwise you generally just have one window per workspace.
That probably seems complicated, but it actually reduces the number of concepts that you’re dealing with. If you can’t see a window, it’s always on a different workspace; it can’t be minimized or behind another window.
Nowadays I’m back on KDE, but with the Kröhnkite KwinScript for tiling, around 40-80 workspaces, heavy usage of Plasma’s Activities to group those workspaces, and a persistent workspace overview in my panel.
So, KDE always had the technology to make this workflow work, and even better than on bspwm, but I would’ve never found that workflow, if it wasn’t for bspwm pushing me to try it.
Having said all that, I do think it’s stupid that GNOME pushes people towards their specific workflow idea when so many distros ship it by default.
No one adopts a new workflow, if that’s not what they knowingly signed up for. They’re going to come from Windows to Ubuntu and think that this desktop is really bad, because it fights their way of working at every corner.
Yes, of course. They could’ve named Gnome 3 something else though, since it vastly digressed from what was the Gnome 2 user interface. It was not an evolution, but a complete redesign. That’s basically my only “problem” with Gnome 3 ;)
Sounds cool, I’ll look into that. I’ve been missing tiling features but really like the polish KDE Plasma has gotten the last few years.
Yeah. They basically decided they don’t support Gnome 2 anymore in the blink of an eye. They forced the community to come up with MATE as a continuation of it and IIRC the MATE devs needed a few years to really take off with it. Radical change is good, but not when you stop supporting your whole userbase…
That, too. And coming from Windows, which has a single window manager and a lot of opinionated defaults into a completely overwhelming system where you need to make choices will mean that the Year Of The Linux Desktop™ might never be a reality. Which doesn’t need to be; because we can have a year of lots of people using a particular Linux distribution and broadening their horizons instead…