Coming from Windows, gnome was the desktop that taught me how to use and appreciate multiple workspaces. I’m now entirely sold on KDE, but there’s something to be said about the gnome workflow.

gnome 40+ has a great workflow
coming from windows 10, it was different at first but now it feels just natural

I like GNOME because I don’t want customizability.

OK, I like a bit of customizability, but I’m not a designer and trying to make things look consistent and nice is a pain. I once spent days making an icon theme work in Xfce (the freedesktop standards for naming icons are not followed by anyone… (meaning both Xfce and icon themes))

I use GNOME as is and accept it and everything is swell.

Also I use a laptop and I’m addicted the three-finger swipe window preview…

I use vanilla gnome. Dead simple, no nonsense, gets out of my way. Perfect DE for me.

I like Gnome Shell. It’s polished and extensible. Libadwaita and the header bars are nice as well. I generally prefer nautilus to dolphin, even if I hate having to ctrl-l to edit the path.

I use KDE however because Mutter is still dogshit slow, especially in wayland. My work PC has a R5 3600, RX 570, and 48GB ram and it struggles to maintain 60fps across 3 1080p monitors. KWin runs significantly better, so I use KDE and just configure it like I would Gnome.

I ran Pop! OS for about a day which uses Gnome (don’t know which version) and while I liked bits of it I really disliked the file browser and image viewer. The file browser makes it difficult to browse folders outside of my home folder, there are no image previews and there’s a needlessly large gap between folders and files wasting visual space. The image viewer is not great, it can’t open the images made by my Nikon DSLR and quite a few times the image viewer would load the image at full resolution putting the title bar off the top of the monitor.

I remember my first time installing Ubuntu as a teenager and the fact that the desktop environment was Gnome made me hate it. At that age and time I wanted something familiar and Windows-like. Since then, 13 years ago, I always hated Gnome (and Ubuntu) and I don’t feel like that is going to change any time soon.

The new SteamOS opened my eyes to KDE Plasma and now I am running Garuda on my main desktop. Eventually I plan to switch to Arch and “make my own distro” or just use SteamOS once it gets official desktop release.

Mostly like. Big negatives list:

• constantly breaks extension compatibility
• actively hostile towards tiling
• forced horizontal workspaces
• fails miserably if dri doesn’t work 100%
• changes configuration systems like socks
• output/logs noisy and not useful

I use a vanilla Gnome without extensions - Arch Linux.

• clean desktop
• I don’t want distraction desktop with tons of infos…app like NextCloud must running without infos about syn etc.
• for productivity need clean and optimal desktop with tiling windows
• 3 or 4 working desktops
• and keyboard shortcuts

Most important for me, less blotware, functional, clean and minimal distraction - minimalist desktop.

What I hate is CSD… using it with CSD is sad for #xfce user :'(

Using it because it’s the least buggy DE i’ve tried so far. With a few extensions the workflow isn’t too bad either.

I love the design of the applications in general tho, in the sense that they do one thing and one thing only and there aren’t a billion options trying to cover every use case without doing any of them well.

I like a lot of pre-customised versions of GNOME like with Ubuntu or Pop!_OS but (and I’m currently using this on Fedora) the default “out of the box” GNOME experience is a bit rough and unfriendly. Sure I’ve got it customised now with some fancy top panel stuff but its still clear I just shoehorned in a bunch of GNOME extensions - and I’m still yet to find a tray that is 1) still supported and 2) to my liking.

Ir was my first desktop I encountered when introduced to GNU/Linux and it is actually what made me delay my switch to GNU/Linux since I disliked it so much. back then I did not know there are more desktop options so Iit made me think the whole GNU/Linux is not interesting to me. It was not until a few years later until I was told there are other options and I was shown KDE desktop (not called Plasma yet back then) that I fell in love with GNU/Linux.

Why I did not like GNOME was that it was too limited and limiting and unconfigurable. And I would say nowadays it has gotten even worse while KDE Plasma has improved a lot. I think GNU/Linux would have a lot more success at capturing the desktop OS market if KDE Plasma would be the major and default desktop in all those enterprise distributions. It is just so much better and so flexible you can even turn it to mimic any other desktop or even better customize it to fit your wery own best way of workflow and using computers.

I use i3wm, and any time I launch a gtk4 app, it takes way too long to load. 🥱 So I don’t care for gnome4. 😅

I use gnome 4 because it is the most “out of the way” DE. I disable the dock and use an extension to hide the top bar, so there is literally nothing on my screen but the program(s) I’m using. I haven’t found another DE that let’s me do that (hiding the dock/taskbar doesnt count, cause it still comes up when you get the mouse too close which is super annoying).

I also like the window presenter thing, which I first started using with KDE. I prefer gnome’s implementation though, since it is the same key to bring up the window selector and the app launcher. I often want to switch to a window only to find it isn’t open, or I want to open a program that already is open but hidden behind other windows, so it makes sense to put them together. I also can’t be bothered to learn more than one hotkey. I’ve tried to obtain this overall behavior in KDE, but I found it was a whole lot of configuration just to get what gnome already does, so I might as well just use gnome.

I found the “touchscreen-y” interface bothersome at first, but I’ve gotten used to it. The biggest issue is not showing a large number of app entries efficiently, but it’s pretty trivial to remove the entries you don’t actually need with alacarte.

Gnome’s default apps (like the newish gnome text editor) are getting too simplistic for my preference, but again it’s super easy to swap them out.