I still like the look and feel of GNOME a lot so I spent a little time putting it together that way. I want a simple desktop with small elements to maximize real estate for windows. I also use the small taskbar on my work computer for the same reason. But with my work computer, I do show window titles because I usually have at least 5 workbooks open at once so it’s nice to see which is which when I need to switch between them.
I love KDE’s application launcher. It feels very Windows XP with the way it sorts things. It just makes complete sense.
Century Gothic may not be the most readable font in the world, but I think it has an old school charm to it.
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I recognize many of the deficiencies of Gnome but on balance I still like using it.
I never migrated from Windows or Mac desktop. I got into Linux before WIndows 95 came out and although I had used Mac and Amiga desktops I never owned one myself. I have used tiling wms and plain wms with no desktop environment and I can find my way around on Windows 11 or Mac but I don’t like either as much as Gnome. KDE generally has a better foundation thanks largely to qt but I never enjoyed using KDE. Not surprised it is very popular with the new influx of Windows refugees. To me KDE always had a slightly dated Windows look and feel to it. It is still a very solid choice ofcourse.
Gnome hate became fashionable when they moved forward from Gnome 2 and some people never shut up about it. We get it. Your favorite band aren’t teenagers anymore and decided to make an album you don’t like. It is ancient history. Just use something else guys. Plasma is pretty damn good so use it. Whats the point of a free OS if you can’t accept people want the freedom to develop and enjoy different computing experiences.
I want a simple desktop with small elements to maximize real estate for windows.
Maybe a tiling (or optionally-tiling) window manager would be a good choice then? No elements! :)
I’ve considered this in the past, and I might toy around with it in the future once I get the motivation to
I also recently switched back to Plasma cause Gnome somehow had issues managing open Windows. GTA Vice City launched and ran in Plasma but only gave a black screen in Gnome.
I tend to use Plasma on desktops and Gnome on laptops, and like them both.I’m the opposite, after plasma I went gnome
Better than any plasma experience I tried to craft myself – and it’s the default setting – so I have no reason to come back. But I still could switch, as long as cosmic is good
This literally just looks like gnome with extra steps…
And that’s fine. I said I really liked gnome. The only extensions I had were weather in the top bar and dash to dock. I just wanted it to do a few extra things, and I wanted to play around with widgets. Gnome was also a bit too rigid for my taste. Plasma makes tweaking small things a joy.
For me, ootb Plasma felt too much like Windows. I use Windows all day at work so I want my home machines to look and feel completely unlike Windows.
So… How can you possibly justify that start button?
For the lolz, of course. Like, who is still using the XP start button in '25?
I’m 32 so I was a kid in the 2000s. XP represents a golden age of the Internet to me. A time when every YouTube channel looked different and any random MySpace profile you ended up on was probably playing MCR. Before you had to sell practically every scrap of info about yourself to use nearly any service, and Google wasn’t visibly evil. Ads were mostly “Your friend’s IQ was 44. Can you beat that??” because all the world’s authoritarians were too old to care about the web. You could pretty reliably know you were talking to a person in a chat room, and you didn’t have to do some kind of mental calculus to determine whether it was a bot trying to rob your grandma of all her money in Google Play cards. Pretty well no kid in the 2000s is safe these days. I’m sure most of us said the racial slur or the mental slur or had sexual relations with everyone’s mother after getting shot in Halo. I’m safe. We never had Xbox Live lol But I played a lot of split screen Halo in the living room. Good, innocent times.
Rose tinted glasses and all that, but idk, I feel like we’ll never achieve that again. Everyone was throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck. And the tech was kind of in a Goldilocks zone. Just powerful enough to be cool and exciting, but not so powerful that it gets scary.
Except for those damn PS2s being used for nuclear bomb guidance.
You should have tried Dash to Panel instead of Dash to Dock, based on your preferences. That plus Wintile is what keeps me on Gnome vs Plasmathese days.
🤦
Gnome devs shouldn’t have put the onus of adding settings onto addon developers…
Never going to forgive those fools for having something like “gnome tweak tools” be recommended to so many users without them adding an official implementation.
Hah, yea, good point.
Right!? I was half expecting a maintainer somewhere to start adding some extra recommends or something when it really started to get grim. Happy Plasma user now 🚀
As a (Plasma based) Kubuntu user I was wondering as well. Looks like they tried to emulate the gnome look and feel in the picture. In Kubuntu the default taskbar is at the bottom and the floating application bar doesn’t exist
Totally fine to have KDE set up aesthetically as you please.
They like how gnome looks, not as much how it works.
That looks amazing! Can you tell je how you did it? Everytime i start to tweak with the taskbar/dock/statusbar it comes out chonky and doesnt work. All i want i the same look as you have, but ive never come close!
Check your DMs
I love the “Windows Just No” Button :D
I tried gnome for a bit. I really liked the workflow. But the over simplification of the interface just killed me.
I got tired of it. And took the things I like from gnome and implemented them in plasma. (Swipe for virtual desktops for example)
Yeah, I feel like 9/10 vanilla is best. If the developers of the DE are good it should work clean out of the box.
Yeah, uble that centre of commerce!
How did you get those panel on bottom?
The dock is Latte. I run Debian so this is Plasma 5. As I understand it, Latte doesn’t work in Plasma 6.
I used to switch between plasma and gnome but that stopped with plasma 6. It was so good that it just became my primary. Now gnome feels bad when I try it. Everything looks bad there. No proper fractional scaling support, no hdr support etc etc.
Same. I still really love Gnome with my heart, but it just felt… inferior… compared to KDE 6.
Everything looked sharper, like if I had switched from 720p to 4k, I could access my hardware better (e.g. control the brightness of my monitor, etc.) and much more.
I just switched from GNOME to Plasma in the past week, after a long time on gnome, and Plasma 6 is great. The only thing I miss so far is viewing all my windows on the desktop when I push the meta key - alt-tab seems clunky in comparison.
Any suggestions there?
Meta + w
I believe it’s called “overview” in shortcut section.
Amazing - Thanks for that!
You can also change it to literally anything you want.
Plasma is great for the flexibility (shortcuts), and so easy these days.
I was searching for task switcher, expose, etc. And just completely gapped on searching ‘overview’. (Web searches didn’t show it either, possibly because it’s too simple, so nobody posts about it.)
Next up I might have to play some window tiling (e.g. like i3, sway & hyprland).
GNOME lost the plot when they abandoned the 2.x design philosophy.
It’s been a bumpy road. I have strong memories of Gnome devs explaining to users how wrong they were to dislike Nautilus’s awful spatial mode. And when that guy refused to implement a switch off option because users were wrong to ask for it.
Now really, it’s quite functional once you’ve tweaked with gnome-tools and added vital extensions. You also have to remember useless stuff such as “Video” means “Totem”. I’ll just never understand why they don’t really care about sane defaults.
except that extensions are second class citizens at best, on gnome. Some (or all, sometimes) of them will break after an update.
Nautilus’s awful spatial mode
I looked this up. Yeah, it’s awful, and the defense seems unhinged, really blaming people who dislike it.
I totally agree.
Care to explain what that is?
GNOME 3 introduced the current shell paradigm where you don’t really have a start menu but a variety of searches, integrated indicators, per-app desktops with a dock etc.
Before, it was far more conventional experience like Plasma/Windows/Cinnamon are now. GNOME 2 was forked to be the MATE desktop if you want to check it out.
And most importantly for me personally: they seem to disregard people using multiple windows.
I rarely work in one window, and having a large screen for only one app is pretty stupid.
Gnome feels like it’s intended for small screen devices like tablets.
GNOME 2 was fun and easy. It felt like they were trying to learn from the mistakes of Windows and Mac UIs.
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Looks really good. Which Dock application is that?
Thanks! I’m using Latte for the dock and Tera Circle Blue for the icons.
Huh, I thought Latte dock had wrapped up with 6.
It’s Debian so I’m on 5.
On 6 you can have similar experience to Latte with just the panel minus the animations and some of its customizations
Ah, makes sense.
