I will never get used to Gnomes lack of native support for minimizing windows. I actually had to lookup how they expected users to manage windows, as it was not obvious to me. Apparently you’re supposed to move windows to another virtual desktop to get them out of the way. As someone who has never really clicked with virtual desktop, this doesn’t work for me. This feels like such a glaring omission of a convention that has been around for decades (even in past versions of Gnome).

I was on a call with someone from Red Hat a few months ago when they were sharing their screen, and he threw the windows over to another desktop to get them out of the way, following the design. While he seemed to do it relatively quickly, it looked pretty awkward for something a person would be doing pretty often. It was routine to perform vs a single click to minimize in every other OS.

I know minimization can be added with Tweaks, but it always felt a little hacky and buggy.

I can't stand Gnome. I don't like how they dumped the desktop or the app menu, or really most of their decisions lately. From what I've seen they're trying to cater to some amorphous "new user" instead of just creating a good desktop environment. What is this "new user"? Nobody knows! Well, other than the Gnome developers, I guess. The sad thing is that attempting to cater to "new users" is just... Entirely unnecessary: you can put someone who's never used Linux in their entire lives in front of an XFCE desktop environment and they'll most likely figure it out quite quickly with little help from you. I think that this similarly applies to Mate or KDE as well.

My dislike with Gnome comes from the fact that I need extensions for what I would consider primitive things. Like an app menu instead of the dashboard/app launcher thing they have going. Or the fact that features like minimize are just... Gone. And when you complain, your just either told to do it some very counterintuitive way or to go get an extension. I would get an extension for something truly unique or something that extends the environment far beyond what anyone would expect, but an extension just to minimize a window? Nah, no thanks.

> macOS

This is the most counter-intuitive, user-unfriendly, confusing piece of software that I’ve used in my life.

Insane hyperbole in my opinion. Most of his complaints are that of a power user, and because it’s missing something he liked from Gnome. Fair enough I guess, the stuff he talks about does sound nice.

Later on in the article:

> The macOS itself isn’t all that bad.

I don't know why Gnome et al switched to imitating MacOS – adopting a dock (as a default), ditching an app window tray as on Windows, when the potential Windows-convert market is much larger than Mac.

The Dock can be really jarring for Windows users - they are coming from an OS literally called windows, and the windows are hidden from view.

It also eats vertical space with those huge icons, which is precious given the current popular screen dimensions.

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I agree MacOS has some glaring UX and functionality omissions and Finder is indeed garbage!

What I am missing with Gnome is the global menu I have with macOS. It's just my preferred way of working. This is also what I liked about Unity. Gnome seems to follow the same direction as Windows.

Additionally miller columns in Finder are just awesome and I don't have them with Nautilus. Those two things are honestly dealbreakers for me.

Hey MacOS switchers, welcome. Please know that closing the last window doesn’t quit the application. Quitting the application quits the application. That’s why the icon is still in the dock.

Feel like I've been reading Year of the Linux Desktop™'ers writing this stuff for the last 20 years.

A bit of a backstory. I’ve been using GNUplusSlashLinux for more than fifteen years. Most of the time, I used GNOME, starting from GNOME2, moving to Unity maybe for two years, then GNOME Shell, then KDE Plasma 5 for another two years, and switched back to GNOME Shell again. I’m not mentioning some of my at most month-long endeavors to other DEs, like XFCE, or tiling WMs, because they never stuck with me. So I’ve been there for most releases of GNOME Shell, followed them closely, even used to run Ubuntu GNOME when GNOME Shell became a thing, until it became the default in Ubuntu once again. Though by that time, I had already moved from Ubuntu to a different distribution for a variety of reasons.

I did, however, run Unity on my older PCs, as it was far less taxing on resources than early versions of GNOME3, but then it was discontinued, and long-awaited Unity 8 with Mir never became a thing. So, when I was fed up with GNOME being a resource hog, often crashing, and moving towards Wayland, which didn’t work as good as it was advertised, I decided to try KDE somewhere around 2018...

My backstory: I've been using MacOS X for more than fifteen years. Most of the time, I used MacOS X. Actually, all of the time. The end.

I love Gnome! I understand it's not for everyone, but it certainly doesn't deserve all the hate it receives.

Totally agree. Lots of friends who game have been asking for advice on linux now that they don’t want to update to windows 10. I’ll show them both gnome and plasma, and they’ll usually try kde then switch to gnome because it’s so darn easy to use.

It’s opinionated, the settings app is easy to navigate (with the downside being, tweaks/gsettings is needed), and simple stuff like shutting down/switching audio input/wifi/printers is all stuff they were able to figure out without my help. I do wish gnome would figure out some of the compatibility stuff with Wayland (quick windows on ghostty seem not to work because they won’t implement a specific protocol?) but out of every desktop rn, gnome really is one of the easiest to pick up

People don't use macOS for its window shell but for it's familiarity, ecosystem and underlying technology. There are plenty of windowing upgrades from third-party vendors that improve on it.

After all this years I still think the Applications - Places - System "start menu" was the best way to present available stuff in a DE, in any DE, in any OS, ever. You didn't have to skim through so many submenus to locate something - the main categories were available at a glance. It was pure genius.

I kind of get why they felt pressured to remove it but pretty much every other DE had a start-menu-like thing and they never did any change. It was just GNOME.

I've had this exact experience. I used gnome for just one week before getting a macbook and after 3+ years of MacOS I still its find multi desktop handling absurd and unintuitive.

What makes this worse is that Apple's refusal to expose any public APIs to control workspace behavior so you can't even work around their shitty choices.

Instead of iterating on existing functionality, they launch flashy additions like Stage Manager only to abandon them immediately.

GNOME is underfunded - bugs are not fixed for years, PRs are not reviewed for months. It might look more shiny on the surface, but once you realize something doesn't work - you're on your own.

See for example this: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/4051

Nobody is assigned to fix these.

I never knew what happened to gnome that it got so bad, until I used a Mac and I realized that they just tried to copy it and miserably failed.

It's a great desktop if you don't need to print anything or use an extension for more than a year or so before API changes break the extension. Gnome works "out of the box" as long as you don't try to do anything that's not in the box. That whole expression needs to be changed to "it works in the box".

Off topic from the article, but please stop setting video elements to “auto play”. It makes browsing on mobile a miserable experience.

Reading that and looking at the pictures, it just seems like the parts he likes are the parts that slavishly copy the macOS style.

How is the HiDPI situation, and font rendering? Last time I tried it on my M1 Max with Asahi it still looked substantially worse.

> When you maximize a window, it is moved to its own, dedicated virtual desktop - and I like it.

I know this author and I will never agree on what a good desktop behaves like.

I have no opinion on Gnome but I love my Plasma desktop. However the latest release made it significantly more buggy, which is frustrating.

It's very sad that none of these Linux DEs expose APIs for customization in anything other than JavaScript - I would love to be able to build on Gnome or KDE with something equivalent to windows-rs or objc2

"I need to make a disclosure - I AM BIASED. I’ve been using GNOME for a lot of time, and a lot of things that feel logical to me may not feel logical at all to others. Especially for macOS users."

Personally, I'm in a KDE camp. GNOME was never my cup of tea. But I completely agree that the Linux DE surpassed Windows/Mac some time ago. While Windows enshitified and MacOS stagnated, Linux on desktop kept evolving. And even though I've used Windows and Mac for a long time before fully switching to Linux, I now can't go back.

Okay, I stopped reading when I understood he simply couldn’t change some settings in the system. Expected some deep analysis of the UX. Why would I?