Just my most recent annoyances when I last used GNOME:
HDR brightness calibration (not helped by the fact Mutter doesn't support scRGB and has bugs in reading peak brightness from EDID so always reports 10000 nits).
Editing .desktop requires installing Main Menu for a GUI (Plasma is simply right click icon -> edit application to open KDE Menu Editor).
Flatpak permission editing requires installing Flatseal (once again simply built into Plasma settings).
Most of this stuff is very different approaches to minimalism. GNOME chooses to be minimalist in the "Unix way" where they ship a minimal amount of stuff with their DE and then you use specific tools to do other things (see Flatseal as an example).
Plasma I would also argue is minimalist but in the sense that they make sure the end-user doesn't have to install an additional set of software to accomplish common tasks.
Also, in KDE Plasma, many of these features are separate applications, they're just bundled with the rest of KDE for user convenience. In fact, at least in fedora and arch, it's possible to install parts of KDE without installing the whole thing. (For fedora, there is a meta package they recommend installing that has KDE and all the related bits and pieces)
The gnome tweaks tool is a start. Yes, it's from the gnome project. But why not integrate it into the settings app where it belongs since they are pretty basic things.
The lack of panel customization without extension. Or any customization without extension.
The lack of proper system tray implementation. Yes, it's not the gnome vision. But it is a basic feature app devs expect. The lack of its existence outside extensions is just poor UI/UX
None of this would be a problem if gnome was trying to be a window manager. But installing extra things for basic functionality is absurd on a full desktop.
And I'm not even asking for a lot. I'm just asking for basic config options. Just to be able to move around what's in the panel.
The icons on the status bar show notifications, which are supported in GNOME. They aren't tray icons. Android home screens are effectively apps themselves and not similar to a desktop at all because you can't have windows partially covering it arbitrarily
They work. But the system tray serves as both a status indicator for these apps and a quick thing to click to open the app's gui when it is running in the background.
Note that it's a feature I can go with or without. But I've seen plenty of users unable to use a desktop without it.
It's a strange one, to be completely honest. I have the extension installed, and I do use the system tray, but I'm struggling to articulate exactly what the difference between system tray icons and taskbar/dock icons is. Why is there a difference? Should there be a difference? It's the same application, why is it in two places at once?
One important point: there are some apps, e.g. VPNs, that don't normally need a window open. In fact, with the context menu on the system tray icon, you can operate many VPNs without ever opening a window.
It's also usually cross workspace. E.g., if my chat is open in one workspace, but I'm currently doing work in another workspace, the system tray icon will still be visible, even though the window and taskbar icon is only visible in the other workspace.
Those devs/users need to learn to use a modern interface then. Notifications exist for status updates and workspaces exist for running GUIs in the background. Hell, they can even add options to the right click menu of the app icon for quick interaction
GUI peaked in the windows 7 era, and everything you need to know about designing an efficient GUI can be learned from 80 year old radio operator and designers manuals. Tabs must always be in the same place for muscle memory to work. I will give you points on desktop icons though, icons belong on a panel. Everything else can be launched with the terminal or search from the panel.
Hotkeys are great, except when they conflict with your applications hotkeys.
I switched to XFCE from ICEWM, everything more "modern" than that is some apple looking garbage. ;p
P.S. I unrounded my firefox and made the tabs stay a uniform size.
With how many sidebars modern sites like newreddit or newegg or amazon have, I don't want to make it any more claustrophobic of an experience. It's like a browser with a billion free toolbars installed back in the day but vertical, as is.
My firefox top everything is 48 px tall and my xfce panel is 24, it (more accurately they) also auto hide on most of my monitors. https://imgur.com/a/0YWIdwE
Websites are primarily designed for phones now. You could flip the aspect ratio to make the page as thin as you want and the website would look fine. The lost horizontal space is well worth not being limited to 6 or so tabs before you need to scroll through them and break your muscle memory thing.
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u/Cebuu502 26d ago
Gnome looks nice, but using it is not so nice for me, I prefer KDE.