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I don't get why people think Gnome is like MacOS

For the past few days, for the first time, I've seriously tried MacOS and I became distinctly aware that anyone who calls Gnome similar to MacOS has never used MacOS.

If you're just looking at screenshots, Gnome and MacOS do bear a resemblance. Gnome's Dash looks similar to the Dock; Gnome's app launcher looks similar to Launchpad; Gnome's top panel looks similar to the menu bar.

But actually using each desktop, the UX, design philosophy, idealogy, and feel is miles apart. I think the four biggest differences are

  1. No menu bar
  2. Minimizing distractions, so no dock
  3. Interacting with windows is closer to Windows and KDE (fullscreening windows keeps them in same workspace, can interact with a window's content without first clicking to focus it)
  4. Managing open apps is closer to Windows and KDE (apps actually close when you hit "x", with few exceptions, only open apps and favorited apps are in the dash)
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  • Traditionally Mac OS allowed for very little actual customization of The interface. Next To None really. This is also GNOMEs General stance on customization as well. You can get add-on that will allow you to customize a few things here or there. However they won't be officially supported and will likely break with the next minor version update.

    Contrast that with something like KDE which can easily made out of the box to resemble any desktop interface of any operating system that has ever existed.

    • I tried KDE. Asked how I could get an application switcher desktop switcher thingy like GNOME. Got told that's not really possible, so I'm back on GNOME.

      I liked the idea of KDE but I don't think your claim that you can easily make it resemble any OS that ever existed is really true.

      • As a rule you can. You may have found an exception on one small point. Those are almost inescapable. That may have been more of a window manager issue than the desktop presentation. Which used to be more flexible. You could run different WM in the past with whatever presentation layer on top. Unfortunately today mutter is tightly tied to GNOME as kwin is to KDE.

        But it isn't a fight or a war. Use what works for you. Whether it's LXQT, XFCE, KDE, GNOME, Hyperland, i3, Deepin. They're all great.

        Quick edit to mention that Simplicity can also be a feature. I fought with GNOME a lot to get it to work how I wanted. But it was always the extensions that broke. The underlying layers were always simple and solid. For me KDE overall works better. But I'm not going to deny it can be very trying sometimes loading a custom theme and something brakes. For my current pet peeve certain distributions enabling the global desktop menu by default. And Katie has no clear succinct way of finding and disabling that without editing a config file. It's certainly not for everyone and something like hyperland even fewer people. Even if it looks sick as hell. The progress on Cosmic looks great so far too.

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