(If you know where I stole this from, I love you.)
I like Plasma.
I know, real brave take
All the JavaScript in gnome make it super icky to me as an ex-webdev, and unusable on hardware that is otherwise perfectly fine with other DEs. From high resource usage, memory leaks, and breaking extensions, I have a hard time believing that their userbase is anyone other than mobile native younger folk who are good at consuming via the iPad launcher paradigm. Just my humble opinion, nothing more.
I tried to use linux on a tablet, I’ve tried GNOME multiple times since it is apparently the best for touchscreen-only devices. This was hell.
As much as I’d love to be able to like that thing I just can’t.
Zero customisability, everything has to be changed through extensions, but the extension manager isn’t even part of GNOME’s core and has to be installed separately.
The settings page is severely lacking so I had to configure everything in .conf files or through CLI directly.
And the whole thing is as stable as a one-legged chair on top of a unbalanced washing machine.
KDE extension crashing : “oupsie a part of your desktop crashed and restarted as fast as possible, hope you didn’t notice”
GNOME extension crashing : “go fuck yourself, I burned your whole session to the ground, log back in and pray you weren’t doing anything worth saving”
In the end I customized KDE to look and behave like GNOME, this way around was surprisingly easier than just making GNOME bearable.
Oh and to the taskbar haters out there : my first computer was running windows 95 so you’ll be taking my taskbar from my cold dead hands, only KDE let me fulfill my dream of putting taskbars absolutely everywhere (even got two perpendicular ones on my bottom monitor)
I got to take this baby from 999 to 1K
I think the key is to just not hate on someone else for having a preference for one you don’t care for. (And not being an overzealous missionary for your own preference.) It’s fun seeing the variety and people geeking out about the little intricacies they love about their favorites
That’s just a good approach to life in general.
Just use any Linux distro you like!
Stock Ubuntu with GNOME
This made me laugh more than it should have. It perfectly captures how we all try to be neutral… until that one preference slips out. Classic moment.
I like gnome and it’s philosophy 😬
There’s plenty of “customizability” friendly options out there. I like how gnome isn’t afraid to break things to improve
Gnome haven’t “improved” anything since gnome 2. Gnome 3 and above? Only downhill from there.
KDE: “I just blue myself”
I like gnome DE, I dislike the arrogance of the project team.
My straw was the login-to-exposé thing.
Can you elaborate for the curious? I tried searching but couldn’t find anything. What’s the login to exposé thing?
Once upon a time, when you logged in you arrived at the desktop. Then typically you’d click a docked application icon or use the hot corner to open the overview (Apple calls it exposé on macOS) and search for an application to start. Some people would just hit the keyboard shortcut and start typing an application name. Very quick.
One day, the gnome team decided that since a lot of people do this, that immediately after logging in you’d arrive directly at this overview/exposé mode ready to type an app name.
Quite a few people didn’t like this change, and requested a setting so they could enable/disable it as was their preference. The response from the gnome team was essentially ‘get fucked’ enshrouded by weak/nonsense justifications for the change and for not making it optional, apparently taking the request as some kind of personal attack.
It was a trivial minor change but the way the team handled it was… lacking.
It was (and still is) the default input focus to the Search box on the Save dialog. Why? Just… why? Why would I ever want to start typing in the Search box when I’m saving a file. I have never, ever thought to myself as I saved something that I should search for something to name this thing I’m saving after something else somewhere on this filesystem.
Why? Just… why?
Any time you ask the Gnome devs this, you can expect the answer to be “elegance”. And then they block you.
I prefer the default gnome experience to the default kde experience.
I also prefer the styling of most gnome apps, and actively dislike kde apps styling.
Gnome is less customizable, but customizable enough for what I want.
I’m also biased, because I was using Ubuntu since it came out, up until a few years ago 🤷♂️
I’m also biased, because I was using Ubuntu since it came out, up until a few years ago 🤷♂️
Yes. Same here. I’ll complain about pain points in Gnome all day, but I owe the various gnome contributors many thanks. Gnome has been a more than good enough daily driver for me plenty of times.
The #2 reason I’m still on a Mac is because I prefer the look of its UX. Can you recommend a good window manager/theme that replicates macOS Sequoia?
And also one that will replicate system 7 because I am an old and nostalgic man.
Making KDE look like a Mac is an entire genre of easily downloaded and installed themes:
https://store.kde.org/p/1400409
https://store.kde.org/p/1305006
System 7 stuff is going to look very small at 2026 screen resolutions. The widget dimensions on it mostly correspond to the original Mac’s dimensions, from 1984.
That being said, it looks like archive.org has archives of kaleidoscope.net’s — the most popular third-party theme engine — theme archives:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140423004746fw_/http://kaleidoscope.net/schemes/completelisting.shtml
So in theory, somone could make a bulk converter from System 7 themes to GTK or whatever.
checks
https://www.gnome-look.org/browse?cat=135&ord=latest&tag=macos
There’s an “Mac OS” category of GTK themes on gnome-look.org, and I imagine that the KDE people probably have something comparable. I haven’t used any myself.
Thanks! I’ll try these out tomorrow.
Sidenote: Is there a flying toasters screensaver?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Dark_(software)
A 3D version of the toasters featuring swarms of toasters with airplane wings, rather than bird wings, is available for XScreenSaver.
That being said, it looks like xscreensaver doesn’t presently fully work on Wayland (or didn’t as of six months ago):
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/07/xscreensaver-6-11/
XScreenSaver 6.11 is out now. This is a Unix-only release – this version contains preliminary support for Wayland.
This is maybe not entirely ready for prime time, but I figured I’d get it out there so that some people who actually understand Wayland can poke at it.
I love GNOME but I found the default usage pattern aligned very well for laptops. And I don’t mind they only implement finalized Wayland protocols. But Wayland moves so slow!
I use KDE on in my normal desktop because I want VRR and HDR for gaming. I like KDE but its default theme still looks rough around the edges and it has random bugs and kwin crashes when gaming and sometimes on resume.
Both have things I like and things I don’t like and I wish I could take the best from both.
I like Cosmic DE a lot because of this. It feels light, efficient, and smooth like KDE. But it feels coherent, consistent, and laptop friendly like Gnome.
… But Cosmic still feels a bit too incomplete for me to daily.
Sounds like it’s time for you to try danklinux.com
I prefer GNOME for the UX but I do appreciate KDE’s customization and settings. KDE seems more unstable though, I’ve had plenty of crashes from it vs GNOME
I do not know if this is a hardware thing but KDE has not been unstable for years.
🤷♀️ it seems good at recovering from crashes except for Dolphin
Gnome is very competently made except it’s made for a different genre of person to me, and their attitude towards customisation is outright disdainful. You install an extension or mess around in tweaks and gnome looks at you like you just used the salad fork for seafood.
I think it’s made for people who like Macs or sth.
Wouldn’t be a problem(people can use whatever makes them happy) if the gnome Devs shit attitude didn’t trickle outwards and harm customizability in other environments.
I hopped from a fully customized AwesomeWM install on Arch to Gnome on Debian and… there is something to be said about having your OS look & work cleanly out of the box.
Serious question. Why is there an expectation that your DE should be customizable? Isn’t the fact that you can choose one in the first place a customization?
Why is there an expectation that your DE should be customizable?
Why wouldn’t there be? It’s Linux. Everything should be customizable.
And it is. If you don’t like it fork it
Because the point of Linux is I get to make it my own
If I wanted to use what the Devs tell me is the right setup and “just works”, I’d not own a computer at all. I’d just get an iPad, which has that appliance like “no options, just does what it’s made to do, works great under those constraints” thing going for it.
You have as much customizability as you will take for yourself. If you don’t like it, fork it.
I don’t think you understand the implications of what you’re suggesting.
Forking a project as large as Gnome is a massive undertaking. Not only is it a lot of up-front work to implement the functionality, but you also have to stay up-to-date with all upstream changes, and there’s likely at least a few Gnome developers that are paid to work on it full-time, so that is a lot to maintain. And not only do you have to build it for your own distro, but you also have to convince maintainers of other distros to adopt it as well and put it in their repositories, otherwise you have no community of users, which means no community of developers either.
Forking Gnome is wildly impractical. It’s not a feasible suggestion to make at all.
Orrrr I can use something else. Which I do. Something that respects the fact that my computer is in fact mine.
And like i said. It’d be fine if gnome was gnome… If it stayed in its fucking lane serving the people that like it.
But the gnome Devs have a lot of influence on how things like Wayland are taking shape, so their “let’s turn Linux into iPad” attitude does in fact affect me.
I started my Linux journey about 5 years ago on mint with the cinnamon DE. It’s not the fanciest but it got the job done, no real complaints.
Recently I made the change to debian without too much thought on the DE and I was presented with gnome. Took me about 5 minutes before I was looking up alternatives.
Now on KDE plasma, and out of the 3 I’ve tried it’s definitely my favourite.
Plasma has improved A LOT in the past year. Like a year ago I hated it. now? I daily drive it. I hate to use this phrase but everything just works.
I was kinda disappointed with the 6.6 release as I really just want dedicated virtual desktops per monitor but their compromise actually isn’t that bad. I just had to turn off animation for changing workspaces and it’s fine. Even tiling works A LOT better on Plasma than it used to and dare I saw kinda works better/is more smooth than Sway and the like and I’m not even using krohnkite. you can quickly toggle the splits for windows and even do vim style navigation between windows. you can even do vim navigation with windows that aren’t tiled.
Plus the stuff they have packaged in is just better than most alternatives out there. I love Konsole. it has everything I need. and Kate is also a fantastic IDE you can REALLY customize that is slept on by many people. Dolphin is great too. It’s nice having a DE that just has all the stuff you need right out of the box and you don’t really have to change any of the defaults.
Dolphin is surprisingly powerful. I was using a tool (SshPilot) to handle my remote connections and it had an option to browse a remote computer’s filesystem. I was curious what that would look like and it just used my local Dolphin windows and opened up my remote computer and easily browse the files there. I’m so used to using an external program like FileZilla for stuff like that.
Yeah I agree. GNOME 3 is hideous, completely unusable. I don’t know why they had to ruin the perfection of GNOME 2.
I also liked GNOME 2 a lot. Current GNOME is okay for what it is, but it feels too dumbed down for my tastes. For example the default editor has basically no features compared to gedit back in the day. The desktop is kind of nice on a laptop with a good touchpad and gestures though.
It was developed and released during a time where people obsessed with touch interfaces thanks to deficient computing devices like phones and tablets. So many people were wholly convinced that these things were going to completely replace general purpose computing, so projects like Gnome, which were being run by Red Hat, had to follow along one way or another, though they probably did so willingly.
In any case, I am SO glad those days are over. It was far, far worse than the AI hype that we have to put up with today.
You have a right to that opinion but Gnome 4(0) was released a year and a half ago, and we’re on 49 now. Also, I think it’s beautiful and elegant.
