Reading it closely, that's a bit of an oversimplification. The article focuses pretty heavily on functionality over style, where doing the equivalent thing in macos is either silly or near impossible to achieve
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
Said no one ever. GNOME is barely a desktop at this point. You need buggy extensions just to restore basic functionality, which says everything. In many ways, GNOME has become the epitome of a FOSS misfire: opinionated to a fault, driven by a loud minority, and offering users less choice instead of more.
Plasma, on the other hand, has made huge strides in usability, performance, and overall polish. It feels modern, extensible, and genuinely user focused. If anything is going to be the future of the mainstream Linux desktop, it’s Plasma.
Most of the time I hear the “basic functionality” complaint about gnome it’s someone missing a start menu and taskbar. Which makes sense if you are a clicker stuck on the desktop paradigm introduced in the early 90s.
Gnome is very keyboard centric. If you actually take the time to learn it without relying on your mouse for everything it’s actually extremely efficient.
... and misses the fact that not every valid computer use is keyboard centric too.
Sometimes I use my mouse and I do not want to switch to the keyboard and no, my life is not about being most productive and about saving 1/10th of a second if I use the keyboard only (which isn't even possible). I'm human after all and not a machine. I like my mouse. I paid a fortune for it.
Edit:
And it doesn't matter if this is the old way of the 90s and not modern. Being modern/new is no virtue in itself.
I was a GNOME fan in the 00s, then I really liked Unity from Ubuntu, and now in the 2020s I have switched to KDE. KDE is super powerful but (as a technical person) easy to discover options. The basic sound/wifi/system stuff is really easy to access, the global search in the menu is wonderful.
Best part about Unity was that you could hold down the meta button, and it would reveal the cheatsheet for all the other window manipulation shortcuts.
BUT... the person above you did literally say they think GNOME is better and that's fine too.
I like plasma as well, my main complaints with it rn are
- configuring stuff like the task bar has always been buggy, the drag/drop frustratingly won't drop stuff in the right place, I've even had to completely log out to fix being locked in the editing mode earlier this year
- settings app goes deep and it makes it harder to find simple stuff. one example for my friends is when they wanted to turn on gsync/freesync, the toggle for it on gnome is right inside of refresh rate like you'd expect
- I hate to say this because I know it's gnome/gtk's fault, but apps on gnome look much more consistent for me than apps on plasma. gtk apps don't look good, qt apps don't look good, and plasma apps do look pretty good but they're in the minority. It has been a year since I've tried ricing KDE though, so I'd accept if this has gotten better
I don't totally agree with the extensions thing, the only one I use is quake terminal so that I can have ghostty pop up (since gnome doesn't support the protocol needed for that to work natively) and I consider myself a pretty technical user. Even on plasma I like a lot of the gnome apps like nautilus for being opinionated/polished. it's been a struggle to get a good feeling environment on plasma without a lot of tinkering (which to its credit, is doable!) whereas gnome feels pretty good ootb
On Wayland+gnome/plasma I’ve had great luck with games, Firefox is almost there with some bugginess, and video playing apps that use mpv like plex work great. It’s definitely not perfect and you may dive into configuring per app flags to make them utilize hdr, but the easy stuff generally works
A fair point that I hadn't considered. The second quote still consists entirely of things we knew in 2015 before the author voted for Trump a first time and comes across as disingenuous.
... it's strictly better that this guy realized that there's a problem and spoke up rather than staying quiet, or staying a GOP supporter
that said it's very hard to accept that most people are truly proper fucking idiots, and cannot be reasoned with, cannot be shocked out of their confirmation bias.
even harder is to see that many times we are smack dab in the middle of the crowd that's blind to reality.
Check out sweep. Completely unaffiliated, their only offering is the jetbrains plugin so it gets a lot more focus than windsurf. Only downside is that Claude code is still a better agent, but at least its tab complete is some of the best
Not this but similar, Sony’s acoustic surface audio for their displays uses actuators behind the screen to vibrate it. it’s not crazy bass but I’d say it’s on par with regular built in tv/laptop speakers
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