When Gnome 3 first came out, it was comically unusable, but now a lot of the big issues have been fixed and I find it only mildly idiosyncratic. I like the KDE user experience more but I also think KDE is much buggier. I switched to gnome last year after getting tired of dealing with my desktop freezing/crashing and it’s been pretty smooth sailing. My main complaints are:
Switching applications instead of windows on alt-tab (has any computer user ever wanted this?)
Modal dialogues have window decorations that inexplicably move the parent window when dragged
Typing in Files starts searching instead of navigating to a file/directory with the typed name
Opening an archive extracts it automatically instead of looking inside
The default gnome applications are also quite inferior to their KDE counterparts (Dolphin is leagues ahead of Files, Kate is much better than Gnome’s text editor). But I guess you could install dolphin on gnome if you really wanted, so I won’t hold that against the DE itself.
Points 2 and 4 drive me nuts. For 2 in particular there must be some rationale, but the amount of times I’ve needed to see something behind the dialog, to have to cancel after having navigated the filesystem… Just bonkers.
That sounds like it should be controlled by a modifier key. Like click and drag just moves the current window while ctrl+drag moves the parent window as well and shift+drag moves all windows owned by that same program. Right click to cancel the whole move operation from the start of the click, then allow dynamically switching modes mid-drag.
Surprisingly recent usage. I haven’t seen bugs in my usual workflows since forever. Maybe I just internalized better?
I definitely haven’t seen any crashes due to plasma
When Gnome 3 first came out, it was comically unusable, but now a lot of the big issues have been fixed and I find it only mildly idiosyncratic. I like the KDE user experience more but I also think KDE is much buggier. I switched to gnome last year after getting tired of dealing with my desktop freezing/crashing and it’s been pretty smooth sailing. My main complaints are:
The default gnome applications are also quite inferior to their KDE counterparts (Dolphin is leagues ahead of Files, Kate is much better than Gnome’s text editor). But I guess you could install dolphin on gnome if you really wanted, so I won’t hold that against the DE itself.
Points 2 and 4 drive me nuts. For 2 in particular there must be some rationale, but the amount of times I’ve needed to see something behind the dialog, to have to cancel after having navigated the filesystem… Just bonkers.
iirc (gnome) tweaks has a toggle for separating dialogs from parents.
That sounds like it should be controlled by a modifier key. Like click and drag just moves the current window while ctrl+drag moves the parent window as well and shift+drag moves all windows owned by that same program. Right click to cancel the whole move operation from the start of the click, then allow dynamically switching modes mid-drag.
When did you last try out KDE? Plasma 6 improved UX a lot. And based on the current roadmap, it’ll keep improving faster than Gnome
Every day from 2021-2025. The UX is already great I just found it very unstable and buggy
Surprisingly recent usage. I haven’t seen bugs in my usual workflows since forever. Maybe I just internalized better? I definitely haven’t seen any crashes due to plasma