VanillaOS is very promising, but it has Gnome as the only DE option unfortunately.
I installed it just to see if maybe I was wrong about gnome being shit and even if it still is maybe vanilla is good enough to put up with it. I never fucking learn.
KDE user here. Never used gnome, why is it an issue?
Gnome is less configurable, and opinionated. If you don’t care about that, and you like how gnome feels… use it.
I can’t wait to see everyone shit on cosmic.
Gnome way, we know what’s good for you.
Everything that people try to convince me is good about it just feels so counter intuitive. It also looks like it should be touch friendly, but I tried it on steam deck and it just absolutely wasn’t. We have decades of touch interface design on phones and tablets yet somehow it’s worse than the flop tablets that came before ipad. But to each their own I suppose. Some people absolutely love it and it works for them. That’s a big part of open source computing, one can chose the desktop environment with the most unlikeable devs if it makes them happy.
Anyway spin up a vm when you get a chance and try it. Try all of them if you can find the time. I find a lot of them kinda nostalgic and I really like tiling wm’s for feeling like a power nerd and making my computer completely unusable to my friends. Mostly I just use kde though.
It’s actually touchpad-and-keyboard-friendly. IMO the perfect UI for a laptop, especially with a small screen.
If you use a 27" monitor and a mouse, it makes absolutely no sense. Use KDE für that.
It’s very minimalist and the project ditched the Windows-style approach some years ago. Personally, I’ve grown to love it and other DEs feel bloated now.
To each their own 🤷♂️
I use KDE in macOS theme, and now it does not at all feel like windows 😄
KDE can be whatever you want, but requires time to configure
Gnome is trying to achieve “it just works”
It just works meaning “use your computer how we think it’s most efficient”
I have to use macOS at work and I sorely miss the efficiency and simplicity of gnome.
I’ve spent a lot of time configuring and tweaking various DEs in the last 20 years, but somehow gnome shell nailed it for me.
Happy to have many options as a Linux user!
its a more locked down experience, if you pretend the extension store doesn’t exist. That and hdr and vrr are somewhat not done yet (probably done in a couple updates) while kde has most new implementations done quicker. I will say there is a level of polish to gnome that kde sacrifices, but like polish some people just don’t consider it their priority. tldr: its personal preference.
I wouldn’t call it a store
yeah, its uhhh stretching the definition of store maybe. But the stuff in there’s actually quite good for how little effort it takes to use.
There’s little to know customization outside extensions which are very powerful but prone to breaking. The gone mindset is to support basically one workflow and to make changes as it needs fit regardless of stability. Personally I like this, it prevents things from getting stuck in the past. Plus I’m not one for extreme desktop ricing.
Edit: also I’m a huge fan of declarative systems like nix, and with little to no support for layout config outside of their GUI tool it introduces and unknown variable for me
it’s “my way or the highway” but for gui
Just as apple user love it 😂 one has to add, that there are plugins that improve the experience a lot.
Seems so antithetical to the entire concept of Linux and FOSS
Because some people don’t like GNOME and toxically scream about it.
Imagine if all the hours spent on packaging the same software in different ways was spent on a single distribution.
Imagine how much less would get done overall and how many fewer people would participate if we did not let people work on what they wanted to work on.
The only choice left would be to contribute or not and more people would choose not to contribute (probably the choice you have made).
Then we would have something like Windows and only half the people learning the important bits.
Evolution happens by iteration. Every iteration hopes to be a little bit better by bringing something a little bit differently.
F1 cars are a good example of that. Yet, nobody is going to say F1 from the 90’s could compete with today’s version.
And, anyway, time well spent for someone is always a waste of time for someone else.
BTW, I want to thank all the Void Linux contributors for that excellent distribution. It has been a while since I changed my main distro.
I was using Debian for 15 years; but sadly it didn’t evolved much and something new appeared…
