It's that time again

This is why I stopped using Gnome. After every update most of my extensions stopped working. Some took ages to get up to date or were abandoned. And there was no simple way to enable all extensions that the update disabled, having to manually enable them one by one. Maybe that has changed now? It's been yearsnow... Not that I would go back anyway, tiling managers is where it's at.

GNOME is great but people recommending it to beginners need to make it clear that there is only minor customization, and that major customization / extensions will cause headaches.

Plasma is highly customizable out of the box. It's personal preference in the end of course.

Then, after that, you can introduce them to Hyprland which is EVEN MORE customizable, at the cost of learning the hyprlang and jsonc if you also want waybar.
- And then there is sway. Which makes you cry but respected.

It's your own fault you use GNOME

We all got choices, that's what I like about Linux. KDE seems to run great for most people, for me it always seems to bug out and act super janky (the panel editor in particular would bug out and crash constantly, I could never get the damn thing to where I liked it). If it was more stable for me I'd probably use it, I love customizing my system. I've tried making it work a few times, never seems to click.

GNOME's extensions may break on updates from time to time but my day to day experience with it is much nicer. While more rigid it's a lot more polished and doesn't crash out on me just using the interface. I like the layout of it. I'm glad KDE works for so many of you guys, but I'll stick with GNOME until a better option comes around.

That said, if anyone has a better suggestion for a desktop environment I'm all ears.

When's the last time you tried Plasma? I felt the same way about it as you did until version 6. I've been driving it now since 6.2 and its at least as polished as Gnome but with WAY more features and almost infinite customization out of the box.
Cinnamon. After using Xfce and KDE Plasma for years, and having testing Gnome, Budgie, etc., Cinnamon feels like it took the best ingredients from all of them.
I just don't customise very much, either DE mentioned. I did initially when I was new to using Linux out of novelty, but I noticed stuff breaks the more I deviated from the norm after enough updates. Plus it's such a timesink to begin with. I realised I just wanted to use the fucking computer, not tinker and fight it.
KDE on my office desktop. I like one of the themes CachyOS ships with so I left it at that.
GNOME on the living room PC hooked up to a TV. I think it works better there controlled by a wireless trackpad keyboard from the couch and for purely entertainment purposes. Stremio, web browsing, and gaming.
Kinda same, but I would also always tinker with Plasma endlessly customising every little bit, installed applets and widgets to check if they're better than what I'm currently using. It got tiresome, but I just couldn't stop myself. After a while I installed Gnome and just embraced the simplicity.

The other week had a GNOME dev reply to a thread of mine on mastodon stating that the users desire to select a default terminal emulator was an "edge case" and it was beneath GNOME. then all the GNOME fanboys came out to his defense.

It's an insufferable DE and community.

As insufferable as KDE users always shitting on gnome?
I've generally found gnome users just use it. New KDE releases don't have gnome fanboys bashing it, etc.
But new GNOME releases? Directly the opposite.
Really wish people would just chill.
- New KDE releases don't have gnome fanboys bashing it
  There is a lot less hate for KDE… Because KDE doesn’t break the user experience every time it updates. Gnome is the Apple of the Linux world. The entire dev team embodies the Apple attitude of “we know better than you, and you’re wrong for wanting to use anything except the default settings.”
  You’re essentially getting the “iPhone user seeing all of the hate from android users every time iOS updates” experience. Because every time a new iPhone feature comes out, all of the android users go “lmao iOS didn’t have that feature until now? Android had it three years ago. Apple fucking sucks.”
- At least for a time, many of the big distributions focused exclusively on Gnome, and for KDE users it was kind of frustrating as everything would be all wired up for Gnome, and either KDE wasn't packaged at all and you had to go third party, or it was a clearly second class citizen where the packagers just didn't bother to wire up equivalent features. You would look it up and see how KDE had the same capability implemented, but the packager just hadn't included some dependency or configured something to manifest it.
  Now I feel like the distributions take Plasma more seriously and so it's easier to just ignore whatever Gnome is doing... Except for the occasional horrible UI presented by a Gnome app in your otherwise credible desktop. Since Gnome is both a DE and a UI framework, the UI framework gets to rear its head even if you largely ignore the DE.
  Then of course you have the tiling window managers/compositors, but those projects tend to be less ambitious anyway, and what the audience wants is pretty much what they can get from packages, even if the packagers aren't quite as invested to know what can be done.
- I find that Penis Stroker 2000 never has users bashing it when a new release comes out.
  But every single new release of Scrotum Puncher 5000 that comes out, it's getting criticized. I'm sick of it!!
- Yeah, there is way less hate and mockery towards KDE. Now let's think why that might be
- As insufferable as KDE users always shitting on gnome?
  This 100%
- I've generally found gnome users just use it
  lol
Such a GNOME thing to say
I checked your Mastodon timeline but I don't see the post, only the one where you relate the story.
- I deleted it because the GNOME users were getting annoying.

Just use KDE Plasma

This is what I concluded in the end...
I do at home, can't choose at work (but we keep pushing the people in charge)
- I heard of imposing operating systems (which I'm also against), but never specific distros or DEs.
  at least for technical people who know what they're doing and wont spam the IT support
Kubuntu FTW!!!!
Tried it. You supposedly can customize it any way you want, but after struggling for like an hour trying to make it look clean, I wondered why I was trying to force that. The UI in KDE is not clean. It's messy and has exposed many options I would never use. People love to hate on GNOME but I think they're only doing that because they know it's so popular. And it's popular for a reason.
- I don't hate on gnome because people can use what they want but coming from windows the UX was so unintuitive i had to switch to a different session without a DE to get rid of gnome. I'm sure it's learnable and then depending on your preferences pretty great.
  I also don't think plasma is messy though. To me there's nothing worse than a system hiding options out of the assumption that I don't need them (see also: windows over time, which is a big part of why I made the switch to linux in the first place).
- I have a seemingly yearly tradition where I manage to convince myself to try out KDE then am usually back on GNOME after a week. I genuinely don't get the hate for GNOME. It looks clean, has great defaults (especially the keybinds) and mostly stays out of the way. I don't hate KDE, it's just not for me and that is okay.
- People love to hate on GNOME but I think they're only doing that because they know it's so popular
  You sound like Honey Boo Boo.
  My take is GNOME is Mac-inspired, and KDE is Windows-inspired. I never liked MacOS. Therefore, GNOME does not appeal to me. KDE feels familiar, so naturally I used it after switching from Windows.
What distro do you use with it? So far I liked mint with cinnamon but looking to switch my main PC to Linux and ditch windows on October 23rd.
- With KDE, you can go with Fedora if you like something "closer" to mint experience. I use it with Endeavor OS and I'm very happy
- EndeavourOS
  ☺️such a joy
- I've been enjoying CachyOS myself lately.
- Debian primarily, though I also have arch running on another box. But I basically only run Debian across the board. Almost all stable, with some Trixie and Sid for testing. I also won't touch Gnome unless I'm forced to, so keep in mind I'm opinionated and hold grudges when you see my recommendations.
- I use Arch, but you can't go wrong with Plasma + Debian. Ubuntu has weird bugs which keeps me from recommending it. I wish Mint still had a Plasma edition. endeavouros is Arch with a user-friendly installer, so that's an option as well. CachyOS is great too. Mint is good but Cinnamon doesn't support HDR which keeps me from recommending it to anyone using an HDR display. Debian is probably best seeing as you are used to Mint.
- cinnamint is great. i think you may have already found what to put on the 'main pc'.
  if you're at all interested in 'atomic' variants, kinoite is what is running a couple of kde desktops here.
- I use SpiralLinux (basically Debian with some tweaks). I like it a lot! If you want to stay in the Debian/*buntu lineage, consider it.
no :3
I love how Ubuntu looks and feels
- You mean GNOME? Ubuntu ships KDE too as Kubuntu.

At this point, what did you expect to happen?

Which is why Plasma is better

I like how GNOME looks and functions for the most part, but I really wish the world provide more options instead of whatever design philosophy they think needs enforced.

Obligatory mention that Linux Mint's dev team have forked some GNOME apps into their own XApps project. Part of the reason is so that those apps retain the user's window manager's look and feel rather than GNOME's enforced interface design. That might even be the main reason, but they also throw in their own improvements to the apps where they feel they're necessary.
They've not yet forked all GNOME-looking applications in Mint, and I'm not even sure they intend to, but it's a noble effort.
Yes, it really is called that. Like I've said before, they probably could have chosen a better name, but they chose it before Wayland was a real threat and before Twitter got lobotomised.
- X referred to a display server since long before Twitter was born.
I installed Debian + gnome today for the first time in years, I hate it even more now then I did back then.
If it had a taskbar it'd be a 10/10 for new users though

I think Gnome is the most beautyful Desktop out there. But it's UX drives me crazy. I tried it a few times but never could get used to it. I always needed extensions to customize it to my needs. But that's also what I want to avoid because extensions might break in the future. Therefore, Gnome is simply not the right Desktop for me.

But I'm happy for everyone who likes to use Gnome. The great thing about Linux: We have a choice!

Dunno, I saw GNOME 3 run like molasses on my PC, went "ok, this might be lost cause", went with LXDE and then XFCE, and now I'm like "if it's a beefy proper PC I'll go with KDEPlasma and if it's, like, very obsolete system I'll, dunno, go with XFCE".

GNOME is just opinionated. I get it, it was kinda vaguely modeled after Mac OS, which is kinda an opinionated desktop environment, but the thing is, it's even more opinionated than Mac OS ever was. The thing about (early!) Mac OS X was "hey, we have this slick desktop environment but also some power user features you might want to use. But we're not forcing you to!" (Kinda like GNOME 2!) ...GNOME has been kinda sweeping those under the rug, in my opinion.

Same with Manjaro and the AUR.

So you have an example? It never happened to me the last 7 years.

I'm having a great time on GNOME, even without any extensions at all!

That is sort of the thing with Gnome. If you like it it's great, but if you don't there is nothing you can do to really change it. Like I think it's okay, but there are things I don't like and it is just too much effort to try to adapt it to my preferences.
- there is nothing you can do to really change it
  So far from true
Good for you. I broke my GNOME Pop OS build, I assume because of extensions and pop not updating anything for 2 years. GNOME goes against the Linux philosophy of user customisation.
- They don’t develop GNOME for you, they develop GNOME for them
  They don’t earn more with more users
I used it for a while, because KDE was so buggy. Gnome gives you no functionality and it's still buggy, though.
Once KDE improved I switched to it, though
So you're not on Wayland you say?
- I've been running native Wayland exclusively for ages. I disabled XWayland by running gnome-shell with the --no-x11 flag.
  What makes you think I wasn't?

There are so many things the Linux kernel project does just right. One of them is "never break user space".
Unfortunately most projects completely fail to get why this is important.
I think one of the worst examples is the enormous setback it caused when Python was "upgraded" from 2 to 3, which meant breakage of huge amounts of libraries, that were never fixed, and was extremely detrimental to Python.

The kernel respects user-space, but actual user front ends do not!?!?!
KDE generally does the same when they upgrade to new versions of QT.

The kernel equivalent of shell extensions would be kernel modules. Out of tree modules break all the time. There's no stable in-kernel ABI, just like there's no guarantee that shell internals never change.
python 2 to 3 is actually an enormous change
- You can make improvements without introducing breakage.

There is literally one working todo thingy extension for GNOME. KDE has one included.

Yeah I very much like dislike the culture of Gnome... maybe I'll try something else someday. KDE isn't for me but Cosmic maybe.

It really is a shame that they force you to update to the new version. If only there was some way to continue using the existing Gnome version until the extensions have been updated by their authors.

Just don't upgrade to the next OS version?
I'd you are on rolling release tho, that's on you. Rolling release is by definition the opposite of stable
If you want to update your software broadly, it's a pain in the ass if you need to try to hold gnome and only gnome back.
And many of those extensions get abandoned after the authors get tired of the treadmill of having to redo stuff they already did.
- The funniest thing about this is that, according to a Gnome dev, they decided to not create APIs or anything and keep relying on extensions to monkey-patch code into the gnome-shell process to ensure "developer freedom".
  It's completely mad. I uninstalled Gnome after it crashed on me multiple times, taking either my work or (once) my game process with it.
  On KDE at least IF the shell crashes it doesn't cause all my programs to become unavailable too, I can save whatever I was doing. Its UI/UX is arguably a mess, but at least it god damn works reliably and doesn't come as barren wasteland with missing base features. I would love to love Gnome, but god damn it hell no.
- Yes the volunteer software authors should work to the beat of the drum of the baying and braying users who insist on using cutting edge software before its wider ecosystem has adapted to its novelties. A very good point.
- Shouldn't that only apply if the other software depends on the new functionality in the updated gnome?
Most package managers allow pinning software versions, you could look into that for your distro. Might come in handy in other use cases too.

Running 14 extensions on Gnome, literally never have had an issue, even through major version upgrades with Fedora. KDE and Qt are gutter garbage trash, fight me

Edit: wait I actually got downvoted lol your boos mean nothing

Same experience here. Running 9 extensions without issues. On NixOS BTW.
I am pretty much in the same boat. I think I have had one or two extensions break, but they weren't ones I depended on and they didn't seem that well maintained to begin with.
- You guys are incredibly lucky then. I ran about 7 to 8 extensions and had the whole shell crash 3 times on me over a time of a few weeks, making me lose progress. The journal logs weren't helpful, the gnome-shell just crashed and bailed.
  GNOME only makes it possible to make Extensions via directly patching shell code and refuses to create an API. They can say whatever they want, this way of doing things is inherently unstable and will always break at some point, and it's not primarily the fault of extension devs or users if that happens given there literally is no other way of doing it. Even something as simple as the RunCat extension is potentially able to crash your whole desktop. This is comparable to every single modification you do in KDE being a KWin script (that settings window does have a warning in front of it for a reason). Another comparison: This is also similar to how Firefox did Extensions until they adopted the common extension API in Firefox 3 (?), before then that browser was known to be crashing a lot and become sluggish quickly since any extension was monkey-patching code into it - exactly what Gnome extensions do to work.
  It's one thing to have a clear design idea, but Gnome took away so many freedoms (even basic theming) while merely providing an absolutely ridiculous way for even the smallest customization to then blame users and extension devs when something breaks or becomes unstable. It's no wonder people are upset. System76 outright began to work from scratch, meanwhile Linux Mint is providing libadapta as drop-in replacement for libadwaita to patch basic theming features back into programs that use it.
  If Cosmic drops its version 1.0 and keeps its promises I'd bet a lot on Gnome slowly but surely declining. It does what Gnome doesn't want to.

I've only ever used DEs that aren't gnome. And that wasn't really by choice - it was a workplace. But after hearing about how gnome treats their users... fuck that. I went so far recently as to try to make a nix system that was 100% free of gnome shit and I have actually hard a really difficult time because it has wormed its way into other dependencies.

I use Gnome with extensions and are quite happy. But it's true. the worst part is when they break after a new version comes out.

Fun Fact: You can just add the new version number to some file (can't remember which) for each extension and many of them work just fine. It's from a list of version numbers where they decide whether an extension can be run on a given Gnome Version. And new versions are not automatically added to that list.

It's that time again... Pile more and more dependencies on top of a desktop environment, get shocked when it breaks, and take out your rage on people explaining that it's free dev work and you're welcome to contribute.

Nah. As far as I am aware of, Gnome went "this is it by default, want more customisability - here is API, install or write your own extensions". Which is fine with me. Then they break API without announcement in advance, and their response to community is along the lines of "fuck you, deal with it". Which is not fine with me, and I am not using Gnome ever since discovering it
- As far as I am aware of, Gnome went “this is it by default, want more customisability - here is API, install or write your own extensions”
  Not even that is true. They do not provide an API (specifically decided not to due to "extension developer freedom"), but allow Extensions to monkey-patch code in. That's why it becomes unstable due to Extensions instead of just the Extension (or at least the Extension process) crashing. Imagine every change in KDE being a KWin script, or Firefox still relying on monkey-patching instead of the extension API. It's wild.
  Meeting criticism of this absurd way of doing things in something as important as the graphical shell with "it's FOSS so either contribute or shut up" mentality some people show here is just dumb.
- GNOME is great. Things break sometimes which is a Linux and a software thing. It's free dev work to begin with.

fuck gnome.

This is my professional opinion.

I used to be a Gnome fan. But I hate the direction they took from Gnome shell 4 onwards. Now I use KDE and I'm happy with it.

I never had too many issues with GNOME but didn't install loads of extensions. Looking forward to seeing Cosmic grow and develop further, took a while but finally in beta

Try mediawiki for a change. You'll soon be happy about the few update troubles you had with gnome.

I use a script for paprwm-like behaviour, and is signcantly hamstrung as well - cannot work with multiple screens. Karousel: https://store.kde.org/p/2045724

This is what got me to drop Gnome from my laptop. Karousel is excellent.
- I will use niri wm primarily on most machines, but kde&karousel have some advantages on a notebook.

Obligatory: just waiting a few weeks (Edit: Before updating to a new distro release) will cause you to not move fast and break things.

In Bluefin just use the stable branch which IIRC follows the CoreOS release cycle a few weeks behind Workstation & Silverblue

(might be mixing things up tho)

Also if you are on a rolling release distro, that really is on you, since rolling release is by definition "move fast, break things"

Bugs happen every gnome version change, it's a given, now it's autorotate not working, but it will be fixed. But extensions just need updating, normally they give an update right before the version launch.

But i never had seen the person on the second painel, gnome development works in this way, if you use a tablet on a bleeding edge distro, you are pratically on gnomes QA team hahahhaha

they don't break due to bugs. They break because they are literally unsupported and ignored.