• Ephera
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    53 years ago

    Step 1: Install KDE Plasma.

    …which is only somewhat throwing shade. I genuinely spent like 3 days when I was new to Linux to try to get Cinnamon to work in a way that’s literally just a checkbox on KDE.

    Obviously, GNOME has its strengths that may make it worthwhile to customize, but yeah, unless you know that that’s what you want, it can definitely be easier to just switch to a different desktop environment.

  • Helix
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    3
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    3 years ago

    Gnome is great. It changes your workflow

    Should a desktop environment not enhance or support your workflow instead of forcing you to do things their way?

    I used Gnome once, back in v2. That UX is now called Mate, but I switched to KDE. Glad to see some MacOS fetishists came to rewrite the Gnome DE into what they believe others must work with.

    I’d love to actually see some research telling me I’m doing computers wrong.

    • SudoDnfDashYOP
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      23 years ago

      Gnome is not for everyone. Especially gnome 30. I personally dislike gnome 40 for the exact reason that it is just like MacOS. I think that extensions allowing you to completely change everything is a reframing factor.

    • Ephera
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      23 years ago

      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.

      • Ephera
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        13 years ago

        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.

        • Helix
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          13 years ago

          I do think, it’s good to have desktops that offer up their specific workflow that you can choose to adjust to.

          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 ;)

          Nowadays I’m back on KDE, but with the Kröhnkite KwinScript for tiling

          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.

          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.

          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…

          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.

          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…