I gave it a fair shot for about a year, using vanilla GNOME with no extensions. While I eventually became somewhat proficient, it’s just not good.

Switching between a few workspaces looks cool, but once you have 10+ programs open, it becomes an unmanageable hell that requires memorizing which workspace each application is in and which hotkey you have each application set to.

How is this better than simply having icons on the taskbar? By the way, the taskbar still exists in GNOME! It’s just empty and seems to take up space at the top for no apparent reason other than displaying the time.

Did I do something wrong? Is it meant for you to only ever have a couple applications open?

I’d love to hear from people that use it and thrive in it.

  • sudo_su
    16•1 year ago

    I’ve been testing KDE for several weeks now, XFCE before that but I’m back to Gnome. It just feels right. Everything is where I expect it to be. No searching in thousands of menus. What scares me about KDE is that there are tons of options and stuff that no one will ever need. Especially KMail I find just awful. So many options and you only find what you are looking for, after an extensive search via a search engine of your choice. This is totally frustrating. XFCE does a lot better here, but I miss the one or other pleasant animation when opening windows and the like. Gnome, on the other hand, isn’t great either, but I feel most comfortable here.

    • @gamer@lemm.ee
      7•1 year ago

      I don’t get this complaint. If KMail sucks, don’t use it. I’ve never used it, and I’ve been on KDE for a long time. XFCE doesn’t even have a mail app afaik, and if you like the Gnome project’s mail app, you can use it on KDE Plasma. The desktop doesn’t restrict which apps you can use.

      The large amount of settings are usually set to sane defaults, so you don’t have to change them. There are a lot of settings, but they’re all usually accessible via a GUI, so it’s not hard to change them. The customizability of KDE is it’s biggest strength.

      If you like the way Gnome does everything, then you’ll be happy with it. Otherwise, you have no real option but to switch to another DE.