this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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I've quite enjoyed gnome so far. What are your complaints with it? Granted I don't think I have actually used another DE but I genuinely don't run into issues with gnome and the design is good enough imo.
What's your preferred DE and why?
My complaint with Gnome is just one, but it is overbearing: Gnome devs want to decide what is best for you, which stinks and goes against the very fundament of open software. But would not per se be a problem -- If they hadn't also decided that a bunch of things that are considered basic features that every other DE and even other OSes have implemented for the past 20 years are, in fact, unnecessary.
Consider the humble System Tray.
Gnome removed the System Tray in favour of a "Control Center". And the Control Center works really well -- For inbuilt Gnome stuff and applications that were written for Gnome. But stuff that is DE agnostic, or god forbid, ported over from another OS? Some of them expect a tray to be there. Have functionality that doesn't work without one. Or do work but are janky. Gnome doesn't offer a system tray. You have to install a third party extension, which would also be fine... Except every time Gnome updates every other third party extension breaks.
And like, sure, it's not Gnome Devs' job to ensure the operability of third party addons, but that you need them to begin with is a failure. Gnome's attitude towards everything seems to be "$#¨$ you, like just actually go &%$# yourself. You do things our way or you use something else. We have decided these things are useless, if you think they are necessary you are a $&@# and %$#$ you and the horse you rode in on"
As for my personal favourite DE? KDE Plasma. It's not something I'd ever recommend to a newcomer, but I like it precisely because of how many moving parts it has. I can make my system look, feel, and act just the way I like it. It's like the polar opposite of Gnome really.
Oh?! Those app icons not appearing or working properly every once and a while are a gnome problem? Genuinely just thought I was doing something wrong.
I am not necessarily new to linux as I have distro hopped extensively so I might give KDE plasma a shot as I have heard good things but I am certainly not an expert when It comes to linux. I have only learned enough to keep my games running and my desktop environment clean. Sometimes I will run into an issue I cant fix and just reinstall the OS or try another one lmao.
I've recently grown quite interested in customizing my DE but was struggling to understand how people do it. Not used to messing with config files and I downloaded themes but didn't know how to install them. It often feels like I simply expected to know a lot of linux knowledge so steps often go unexplained and since I learned how to use linux primarly independantly and through necessary maintenance, there's a lot of of stuff I simply never learned because I did not need to.
Also what is the difference between a system tray and a control center?
Functionally, there isn't one. Both serve the same ultimate purpose: To be an area where background services and system functionality can be accessed quickly and easily, while staying out of the way of whatever you're doing in the foreground.
The tray is just an older, arguably more primitive metaphor for the same thing: "Just give every service and app its own icon, and make it so that icon can be clicked to access its options and features". It's simple, but it works.
The control center is more elegant, like, really, it is. It saves screen real estate and such. Giving you a little scrollable window where every controllable thing has its own little area. But that is contingent on the application itself implementing that functionality. When an application expects an old-fashioned tray, Gnome's control center just tells that app to go $&#* itself, when they could, if they wanted to, just add a corner on the control center for "legacy apps". But they don't wanna, because they think they know better than everyone else.