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.
Absolutely love it! I’ve donated hundreds of dollars to the Gnome foundation.
I like that practically all of the OS functionality is behind either super+seach or the quick settings menu. I love how powerful the overview is, and all hidden behind a single key press. I like that asking “Is X possible?” is immediately answerable, and 95% of the time it’s right in the first place I think to look. I like the trackpad gestures and workspaces on my laptop where I don’t have multiple large screens. I like that it has very little need for system tray icons which are clunky, inconsistent, and ugly. (Ex: Discord can only be quit from it’s tray icon… -_-)
I’m not a DE power user apparently, but I’m certainly not the mythical “lowest common denominator” that Gnome supposedly caters to either. I do a lot of programming in C/asm/, and write plenty of code involving lots of esoteric math. I don’t have much use for Python for instance, but I don’t think it’s “dumbed down” either. :p
KDE (and Windows to a similar extent) always has way too much “stuff” it wants to show you, 90% of it I’ll never use. Every window toolbar is chock full of icons, and so many actions trigger popups, notifications, or dialogs that have little purpose. It’s all terribly distracting and annoying. Still, I’ve donated hundreds of dollars to KDE foundation as well since it’s an important part of the Linux ecosystem. I don’t use it, but that doesn’t mean I hate it, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t flourish too. Open Source is not a competition.
What I don’t understand about Gnome is how are you supposed to handle some task. I’m thinking about moving stuff around between directories. I sometimes need to have 3 or more separate folders open at the same time and quarter tiling and split view in Dolphin is a godsend. Gnome has neither split view in Nautilus nor quarter tiling.
Yes, I know there are ways around that like Pop-shell and other extensions, but I am specifically curious about the default Gnome workflow. In my opinion Gnome tends to skew too much towards form over function.
Its pretty simple you can open 3 different nautilus windows or open 3 tabs in nautilus. Not really very different then dolphin’s function but I found myself never using that function in dolphin anyway. I have a good example for a many window workflow that I do sometimes which is when I tag my music. Usually I have a web browser on one workspace or the music tagger split in half with the web browser and then I have separate work spaces with nautilus open in 2 windows with some tabs. I do all that alongside a game playing in the background casually and maybe a picture-in-picture window alongside that also open watching a video. I only have one monitor.
I do use snapping for some things like my IDE, and use the side by side once in a while, but generally don’t use snapping. I have used the Pop Shell on my work computer where I tend to have a lot of terminals and little windows open on my big 4k monitor, though 90% of the time I leave it off. Generally speaking I just use small free floating windows and use alt-tab or Gnome’s overview to find a hidden window. I dunno when snapping entered the scene, but the first time I used it was maybe a decade ago. It’s nice, but decades of computers before that have trained me to mostly not care I guess. You can do tabs in Nautilus and drag files to the destination tab. I do that a lot I guess.
Good on you for donating to kde and gnome! In case you don’t know, there is an option in discord settings to quit whenever the window is closed.
I did not know that… Thanks! I looked through all the settings at some point, but mussed have missed it.