Probably an unpopular opinion, but IMO Gnome has done immense harm to Linux for the past decade. Their disruptive change from Gnome 2 to Gnome shell was extremely harmful. Their going alone, with complete redesign incompatible with freedesktop.org that used to be a standard, ruining almost a decade of compatibility efforts, and compatibility between Gnome and other desktop environments.
I understand that many people love Gnome today, but Gnome almost caused me to switch away from Linux because of all the problems they caused.
It’s too bad really, because Gnome used to be a cornerstone of Linux desktop.
Yes Linux is more popular than ever, But when Gnome changed to Gnome Shell Linux marketshare clearly declined. That Linux has begun to rise again, is definitely not because of Gnome Shell but more despite of it.
I absolutely love how developers can do their own thing on Linux, as they say scratch your own itch.
Problem with Gnome was that the team was extremely arrogant, completely dismissed any criticism, and even rejected contributions that would remedy some of the problems. Gnome was a weird community project that didn’t give a shit about the community, and abandoned everything they used to stand for.
I wouldn’t normally have a problem with that, except Gnome’s behavior was harmful to the Linux community as a whole IMO, they abandoned their own community, deprecating gnome 2 before gnome shell was ready. They made life for other desktop projects harder, if they wanted to create an environment that supported Gnome together with other desktop environments, and for other desktop environments that wanted to allow to run programs made for Gnome somewhat seamlessly, which was tradition at the time.
How you cannot see that that is harmful and detrimental to Linux as a whole I don’t understand. Also remember Gnome had a vastly dominant presence on the Linux desktop, with about 80% user share of desktop environments. So what they decided to do, had immense influence on Linux as a whole.
Edit:
I just found that today Gnome is now only about 20% according to Arch packagestats. I can’t find good stats for marketshare between Linux desktops.
Edit2:
I don’t get why this comment is so unpopular. Maybe because some people misunderstand when I talk about Desktop compatibility. I’m not talking about how things look or work from a visual and user perspective, but the ability to run Gnome apps at all on other desktops, which worked very fluently between all Linux DE before Gnome Shell. It has Nothing to do with whether I like the looks and feel of Gnome, I actually kind of like that, except for a few regressions. The deprecation of Gnome 2 was too soon, because they did that before Gnome shell was ready, that was also IMO a pretty obvious fuck you to their own users. All in all it created uncertainty of the validity of using Linux.
Feel free to find better stat, as I write I can’t find a good stat, so pretty clearly I don’t expect it to be 100% representative.
But for sure Gnome does nolonger enjoy the 80% they had before Gnome Shell.
Yeah, it’s kinda hard to find good stats because Linux users hate telemetry. I doubt there is an accurate desktop environments market share stats out there. Might as well conduct our own poll here and see the stats for this community.
Gnome is great, and I commend the devs for having the bollocks to come out and say “No, we don’t think Microsoft perfected OS UX in the early 90s”, and do something different that works well, despite knowing the amount of hatred and even death threats they’d get for the change. And yeah, they really did receive a bunch of death threats lol
They even gave years of warning about the upcoming Gnome 3 changes to give people time to prepare or jump ship, and they also included a “Gnome classic” option for a while at the login, both of which they had zero obligation to do.
I’m gonna be honest, I’m a person of habit and routine, so I hated my workflow changing at first, and I installed all kinds of extensions to emulate the Windows way of doing things that I was used to, then one day a friend said I should remove those extensions and give the vanilla workflow a real shot. Again, I hated it at first but after a couple of days it “clicked” and now I can’t go back. The workflow is a stroke of genius, despite being fundamentally extremely simple. I’m personally glad KDE is also seeing this and incorporating Gnome-like elements to their DE as well. The activities view is just such a good idea.
I understand that some don’t want to shift workflow and they just want to continue with the tried and tested WinUX paradigm, and that’s fine. They can use one of the other desktop environments that cater to that (KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, XFCE, Budgie, etc), or they can use a Gnome extension like Dash to Panel.
It evidently didn’t hurt the Linux desktop as the Linux desktop is more popular and more problem-free than its ever been. If Gnome was such a nightmarish shit show like people on Reddit and Lemmy purport, it wouldn’t be the default on a load of distros, they’d have jumped ship sometime in the past 13 years.
I hate gnome and it was part of what hurt my initial attempt at linux. I’m also very happy they’re doing it. Like you say, it’s good someone is trying new things. And maybe I would like it if I really gave it a try. But I also prefer my ability to customize over on KDE. Maybe I’ll try a gnome like setup at some point
Gnome is great, and I commend the devs for having the bollocks to come out and say “No, we don’t think Microsoft perfected OS UX in the early 90s”, and do something different that works well, despite knowing the amount of hatred and even death threats they’d get for the change.
Good to read your take on that bit of history, thanks. On one computer where I have GNOME, it is really nice and comfortable for what I use it for.
Gnome is great, and I commend the devs for having the bollocks to come out and say “No, we don’t think Microsoft perfected OS UX in the early 90s”, and do something different that works well, despite knowing the amount of hatred and even death threats they’d get for the change.
Some of us might say Gnome 2 perfected the Microsoft UX paradigm. Or KDE 3 did it, depends on the person asked. The thing in common would be “Gnome 3 sucks donkey balls”.
I understand that some don’t want to shift workflow and they just want to continue with the tried and tested WinUX paradigm, and that’s fine. They can use one of the other desktop environments that cater to that (KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, XFCE, Budgie, etc), or they can use a Gnome extension like Dash to Panel.
Some of us might become irritated at your attempts to call everybody not liking Gnome a Windows admirer.
It evidently didn’t hurt the Linux desktop as the Linux desktop is more popular and more problem-free than its ever been. If Gnome was such a nightmarish shit show like people on Reddit and Lemmy purport, it wouldn’t be the default on a load of distros, they’d have jumped ship sometime in the past 13 years.
It’s not nightmarish shit, but I get tired even emotionally using it faster than I do with my FVWM config.
Still - I think I’ll try it again. Since it’s a weekend.
Am I in any way even asking people to stop using Gnome? I’m certainly not trying to prevent it either. IMO their actions when designing Gnome Shell were detrimental to Linux, you are 100% free to disagree.
No, but people are downvoting you because you’re just whining about your own personal feelings about it, and nobody cares about your sniveling wahwah words.
What nonsense to spew, the fact that Gnome broke standards between Linux desktops was a huge issue among developers, just because you are too ignorant to know, doesn’t make it “my personal feelings”. The harm was very real, and could be seen widely in many areas, and most significantly on the fact that Linux actually lost users. Where it had been slowly gaining for years before.
Geez, it’s almost like there are no alternatives, forks, or other mainline development branches that didn’t do that. Oh, wait a second…
Nobody is forcing you to use GMOME, and they as a community can do whatever they want. You are free to fork and use whatever version you like, or not at all. The beauty of open-source.
I understand that many people love Gnome today, but Gnome almost caused me to switch away from Linux because of all the problems they caused.
For all the people upset about the GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 change the MATE desktop environment was started (Launched in Debian in 2013) and it is still alive and kicking :
Yes that is true, but there was no similar breakage, everything KDE 3 and KDE 4 mixed well with other desktops, and mostly followed established standards for the Linux desktop.
The KDE team never showed similar arrogance to the Gnome team either, and KDE didn’t remove beloved basic functionality because obscure “reasons” like Gnome did.
Also KDE was not nearly as significant to the Linux environment as Gnome was.
Finally that is whataboutism and not a valid argument to the debate that what Gnome did was extremely harmful to Linux as a whole.
It’s not whataboutism, it’s personal experience. I used Slackware mostly after switching, so no Gnome.
About significance - you might be mixing up Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 transition with GTK2 to GTK3 transition.
GTK3 I hated with passion, oh yes. I literally built GTK programs from source if the repo version was GTK3 and GTK2 was supported for some time period, later got too lazy to do that.
Still, the inconvenience of needing a whole theme instead of one ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file .
Probably an unpopular opinion, but IMO Gnome has done immense harm to Linux for the past decade. Their disruptive change from Gnome 2 to Gnome shell was extremely harmful. Their going alone, with complete redesign incompatible with freedesktop.org that used to be a standard, ruining almost a decade of compatibility efforts, and compatibility between Gnome and other desktop environments.
I understand that many people love Gnome today, but Gnome almost caused me to switch away from Linux because of all the problems they caused.
It’s too bad really, because Gnome used to be a cornerstone of Linux desktop.
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13 years, and there’s still no feature parity.
Yes Linux is more popular than ever, But when Gnome changed to Gnome Shell Linux marketshare clearly declined. That Linux has begun to rise again, is definitely not because of Gnome Shell but more despite of it.
I absolutely love how developers can do their own thing on Linux, as they say scratch your own itch.
Problem with Gnome was that the team was extremely arrogant, completely dismissed any criticism, and even rejected contributions that would remedy some of the problems. Gnome was a weird community project that didn’t give a shit about the community, and abandoned everything they used to stand for.
I wouldn’t normally have a problem with that, except Gnome’s behavior was harmful to the Linux community as a whole IMO, they abandoned their own community, deprecating gnome 2 before gnome shell was ready. They made life for other desktop projects harder, if they wanted to create an environment that supported Gnome together with other desktop environments, and for other desktop environments that wanted to allow to run programs made for Gnome somewhat seamlessly, which was tradition at the time.
How you cannot see that that is harmful and detrimental to Linux as a whole I don’t understand. Also remember Gnome had a vastly dominant presence on the Linux desktop, with about 80% user share of desktop environments. So what they decided to do, had immense influence on Linux as a whole.
Edit:
I just found that today Gnome is now only about 20% according to Arch packagestats. I can’t find good stats for marketshare between Linux desktops.
Edit2:
I don’t get why this comment is so unpopular. Maybe because some people misunderstand when I talk about Desktop compatibility. I’m not talking about how things look or work from a visual and user perspective, but the ability to run Gnome apps at all on other desktops, which worked very fluently between all Linux DE before Gnome Shell. It has Nothing to do with whether I like the looks and feel of Gnome, I actually kind of like that, except for a few regressions. The deprecation of Gnome 2 was too soon, because they did that before Gnome shell was ready, that was also IMO a pretty obvious fuck you to their own users. All in all it created uncertainty of the validity of using Linux.
You can’t seriously believe Arch is representative of the overall Linux desktop space…
Feel free to find better stat, as I write I can’t find a good stat, so pretty clearly I don’t expect it to be 100% representative.
But for sure Gnome does nolonger enjoy the 80% they had before Gnome Shell.
Yeah, it’s kinda hard to find good stats because Linux users hate telemetry. I doubt there is an accurate desktop environments market share stats out there. Might as well conduct our own poll here and see the stats for this community.
Absolutely, I’m a bit puzzled why I’m downvoted on that one? 🤔
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Gnome is great, and I commend the devs for having the bollocks to come out and say “No, we don’t think Microsoft perfected OS UX in the early 90s”, and do something different that works well, despite knowing the amount of hatred and even death threats they’d get for the change. And yeah, they really did receive a bunch of death threats lol
They even gave years of warning about the upcoming Gnome 3 changes to give people time to prepare or jump ship, and they also included a “Gnome classic” option for a while at the login, both of which they had zero obligation to do.
I’m gonna be honest, I’m a person of habit and routine, so I hated my workflow changing at first, and I installed all kinds of extensions to emulate the Windows way of doing things that I was used to, then one day a friend said I should remove those extensions and give the vanilla workflow a real shot. Again, I hated it at first but after a couple of days it “clicked” and now I can’t go back. The workflow is a stroke of genius, despite being fundamentally extremely simple. I’m personally glad KDE is also seeing this and incorporating Gnome-like elements to their DE as well. The activities view is just such a good idea.
I understand that some don’t want to shift workflow and they just want to continue with the tried and tested WinUX paradigm, and that’s fine. They can use one of the other desktop environments that cater to that (KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, XFCE, Budgie, etc), or they can use a Gnome extension like Dash to Panel.
It evidently didn’t hurt the Linux desktop as the Linux desktop is more popular and more problem-free than its ever been. If Gnome was such a nightmarish shit show like people on Reddit and Lemmy purport, it wouldn’t be the default on a load of distros, they’d have jumped ship sometime in the past 13 years.
Just let people use what they wanna use, man.
I hate gnome and it was part of what hurt my initial attempt at linux. I’m also very happy they’re doing it. Like you say, it’s good someone is trying new things. And maybe I would like it if I really gave it a try. But I also prefer my ability to customize over on KDE. Maybe I’ll try a gnome like setup at some point
Good to read your take on that bit of history, thanks. On one computer where I have GNOME, it is really nice and comfortable for what I use it for.
Some of us might say Gnome 2 perfected the Microsoft UX paradigm. Or KDE 3 did it, depends on the person asked. The thing in common would be “Gnome 3 sucks donkey balls”.
Some of us might become irritated at your attempts to call everybody not liking Gnome a Windows admirer.
It’s not nightmarish shit, but I get tired even emotionally using it faster than I do with my FVWM config.
Still - I think I’ll try it again. Since it’s a weekend.
It’s funny when people want to criticize windowing UI they condemn Microsoft, but when they want to sing it’s praises the credit Mac.
Make up your mind.
Am I in any way even asking people to stop using Gnome? I’m certainly not trying to prevent it either. IMO their actions when designing Gnome Shell were detrimental to Linux, you are 100% free to disagree.
No, but people are downvoting you because you’re just whining about your own personal feelings about it, and nobody cares about your sniveling wahwah words.
What nonsense to spew, the fact that Gnome broke standards between Linux desktops was a huge issue among developers, just because you are too ignorant to know, doesn’t make it “my personal feelings”. The harm was very real, and could be seen widely in many areas, and most significantly on the fact that Linux actually lost users. Where it had been slowly gaining for years before.
Geez, it’s almost like there are no alternatives, forks, or other mainline development branches that didn’t do that. Oh, wait a second…
Nobody is forcing you to use GMOME, and they as a community can do whatever they want. You are free to fork and use whatever version you like, or not at all. The beauty of open-source.
For all the people upset about the GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 change the MATE desktop environment was started (Launched in Debian in 2013) and it is still alive and kicking :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MATE_(desktop_environment)#History
Yes, and I think it may also have helped KDE a lot, KDE is really great today IMO. For the classical Gnome 2 experience I prefer XFCE.
KDE 3 to KDE 4 transition was very dramatic too. Sadly Trinity is not as good a fork as MATE is.
KDE 3 was just an amazing desktop, but using it is not very practical. Relevant software using Qt3 - yeah, well, no.
Yes that is true, but there was no similar breakage, everything KDE 3 and KDE 4 mixed well with other desktops, and mostly followed established standards for the Linux desktop.
The KDE team never showed similar arrogance to the Gnome team either, and KDE didn’t remove beloved basic functionality because obscure “reasons” like Gnome did.
Also KDE was not nearly as significant to the Linux environment as Gnome was.
Finally that is whataboutism and not a valid argument to the debate that what Gnome did was extremely harmful to Linux as a whole.
It’s not whataboutism, it’s personal experience. I used Slackware mostly after switching, so no Gnome.
About significance - you might be mixing up Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 transition with GTK2 to GTK3 transition.
GTK3 I hated with passion, oh yes. I literally built GTK programs from source if the repo version was GTK3 and GTK2 was supported for some time period, later got too lazy to do that.
Still, the inconvenience of needing a whole theme instead of one ~/.gtkrc-2.0 file .
Fair enough and yes the KDE road was a bit bumpy back then.