Linux

Kinda a tangent, but I've been using KDE plasma for a while and have really been enjoying it as a kinda in between of windows style desktop with some more gnome-like features (like workspaces, which tbh I've barely used). Of course both are super customizable, but it seems to me to maybe be a bit easier to customize Plasma? I'm not sure, I haven't used stock gnome as much.

I'm not really using "vanilla" GNOME since I have a number of extensions, but the only one that really modifies the workflow is Tray Icons: Reloaded.

That said, while it's definitely not for everyone, I'm very comfortable with it. I like that everything feels "out of my way" unless I need it, and I find the Activities view to be easier for finding a minimized program at a glance than a taskbar.

I do, except I always enable minimize and maximize because it seems foolish to me to have those disabled by default. It's really smooth and whenever I have too many windows open, the overview makes it easy to find what I'm looking for. Initially I was against hiding the dock in the overview but I decided to give it a try one day and I actually ended up enjoying it not being visible.

What's funny is that I actually end up using the overview instead of alt-tab most of the time because it's faster for my workflow, and the default window switcher for apps with different windows open is BAD.

I've gotten so used to the workflow that I find myself dragging my mouse to the top left corner of the screen on Windows lol and painfully wait the extra second it takes to open the Windows overview when swiping up with three fingers on a trackpad.

I love the gnome workflow. Coming from MacOS it's more familiar to me than a windows layout, but still so much better than macOSs defaults. I usually have 3-4 workspaces open, with a specific "environment" in a single or a few workspaces. E.g a browser window with email, todos, calendar etc and other "personal things" in one, maybe one for a certain project I'm working on, another for a work project, etc. This way I'm always focusing on one thing at a time but can quickly context switch and have my laptop "switch with me". I also make heavy use of alt-tab and Ctrl-tab for window switching. Together with fewer windows per workspace, this makes it super fast to navigate without ever taking my hands off the keyboard. If I forget where things are, a glance at the overview is enough.

It should be noted that I don't use a mouse and if I love touchpad gestures, so gnome is perfect for me. Even using a keyboard only and the very occasional touchpad is very comfortable on gnome. At least compared to macOS and windows.

I tried using it multiple times over the years, including for multiple months on my laptop at one point, but couldn’t get myself to accept it. Even with extensions, I couldn’t accept many of the weird design decisions.

It always felt to me like the Gnome designers wanted to create a combination of Windows 8 Metro and Mac OS: The shittiest Windows UI ever combined with the ergonomics of Mac OS (which is foreign to Windows users) and the lack of customizability of Apple products. Hyper optimized for touch screens even though most Linux users are on a mouse&keyboard or laptop. Even the Steam Deck’s desktop mode is perfectly usuable despite KDE not being as optimized for touch as Gnome.

I like it quite a lot on my projector / media pc, but I wouldn't daily it over sway with custom hotkeys. Cosmic is definitely turning my head tho..

The only change I make is rebinding mod+num keys to switch to a specific workspace instead of a specific application. It makes a lot more sense.

why not try a different desktop-environment/window-manager; there's many to chose from and most will let you customize them as far as you want.

Yes, I love it! Really it's the MacOS-like "Expose" feature that I find to be essential.

I would advise against using workspaces though, I find those actually sort of go against the core idea of it IMO. There are a few things I'd really like added to it, but for the most-part when you get into it it's great.

My main desktop I have 4 monitors (I know, but once you start a monitor habit it's really hard to not push it to the limit - this is only the beginning!) It roughly breaks down into:

1. Primary work (usually a full-screen editor)
2. Terminals (different windows, some for the project, some monitoring)
3. Browsers - documentation, various services, my own code output
4. Communication - signal, discord, what's app (ugh), etc.

The key, literally, is you just press the Super key and boom, you can see everything and if you want to interact with something it's all available in just one click or a few of key presses away.

On my laptop with just one screen, I find it equally invaluable, and is actually where I started to use it the most - once again, just one press of Super and I can see all the applications I have open and quickly select one or launch something.

It's replaced Alt + Tab for me - and I know they've made that better, and added Super + Tab, but none of them are as good as just pressing Super.

The things I'd really love added to it are:

• Better tiling (including quarter tiling). It's a sad state of affairs when Windows has far better tiling than Gnome.
• Super then Search, I'd like it to filter the windows it's showing and shrink/hide the others, along with a simple way to choose one using the keyboard.
• Rather than having an icon for each window, I also want the tooltip information to always be shown (e.g. vs code project) and for standard apps to expose better information for that (e.g. Gnome Terminal to expose its prompt/pwd) and/or have a specific mechanism by which apps could communicate.
• Adding Quicksilver-like functionality to the launcher/search would be amazing. e.g.
  • Super
  • Sp... (auto-populates Spotify)
  • Tab
  • P... (auto-populates Play/Pause)
  • Return
• Session restoration - it just doesn't work at the moment for some reason. Some apps do, some don't. Some go to their correct position/size, some don't.

Yes. With many windows open but I don't use workspaces. Alt-Tab, and Alt-"above tab" is enough to me. And you can always super, first chars of the app name, enter.

Yes I love Gnome workflow. Actually so much that if I am forced to use KDE for example, it feels really archaic and slow to use.

A qualified yes. I love the overview, which is, IMO, the most elegant way to launch applications and manage workspaces of any OS or DE. I also love the general look and fluidity of the environment and how it gets out out of your way when you don't need it. But I preferred the pre-GNOME 40 vertical workflow to the new horizontal workflow.

There are also three must-have extensions that make GNOME usable for me:

• AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support. GNOME can wish away tray icons if they want to, but the tray hasn't gone away and is still necessary for some applications.
• DashToDock. Makes app switching more accessible and adds right-click to close.
• Gnome 4x UI Improvements. Increases the size of the workspace thumbnails so you can actually see what's in them (like it was before GNOME 40).

I like it, even though I'm not sure if I would call it the GNOME official workflow (is that even a thing?). I usually don't get close to having 10 applications open. I tend to work with about 1 to 3 workspaces with various applications based on my needs. Furthermore, I keep the windows non-maximized which helps me condense more information yone screen

I personally find Gnome works best on Laptops using the Touch pad with its Gesture controlls. But yeah there are things like the missing application tray that can be annoying which can only be added with extensions. Which is annoying again. So pure Gnome is the bare minimum and can work, but with extensions it can bekomm extremely good. In my opinion.

Gnome does make it feel like I should have like 3 apps open and anything more is a mental burden. I personally really like the overview though! If I could get gnomes overview as my meta key in KDE it would be killer!

I do. I guess it depends on your workflow though. Gnome tries to get out of the way and is quite minimal. I'm that way too, like to keep my desk uncluttered for example. I couldn't even imagine a task that requires me to have 10 programs open, but if I had to, I guess I would try to group them on workspaces and try to limit the amount. Would be far easier for me to remember that way.

I've tried other DE's and window managers, but they all feel like taking a huge step backwards to me. You should however try to find something that suits you the best, maybe KDE?

I don't like it, I use plasma. Workspaces are great through, I just have my system. Terminal is space 2, browser space 3, communication space 4 and so on

Yes, I like the default workflow. I always have particular applications on the same workspaces, and I close them as I need to. Sometimes I have multiple, usually a maximum of two on one workspace, because I can ALT+TAB through them. I like that the top bar is uncluttered. I don't use the dock at all, but Activity Overview is sometimes useful. I can operate the desktop completely with my keyboard. It's also very minimal without too many options, and it looks pretty. I find it very usable.

The only annoying thing was needing to manually create shortcuts inside of dconf for workspaces 5-10. I really don't know why they force you to do that...

I love Gnome. But I have a pretty simple workflow where I don't use many applications. Generally I have a browser and terminal open and that's it.

I do all my window management inside of Tmux, which is effectively my actual window manager.

I've tried KDE in the past but I've never liked how it feels like a stepping stone for the Windows interface -- not a huge fan of pullout menus. I've been using Linux exclusively for almost twenty years so I don't have any love for that UX.

I used to use a lot of simple/tiling window managers when I was younger and more patient, Gnome feels similar to those in how it has very few bells and whistles to get in your way.

If only maintaining extensions was easier, it feels like every major release breaks every extension for something stupid like renaming a constant. The Gnome team seems to put very little consideration into making the JS extension API stable.

I recently disabled Dash to Panel, and installed Pop Shell. I'm loving it so far, using my Trackpad gestures from switching between workspaces. Granted, I don't really need more than 3 or 4 desktops (Browser, Terminal, Messaging...) and it's not quite vanilla as I have Pop Shell managing tiling for me (but still pretty close!). I also need to try it with my "docked" workflow, using an external monitor and keyboard shortcuts (as opposed to trackpad gestures).

Since I spend 90% of the time in a terminal window or development environment, I find GNOME works fine for my needs (Ubuntu). I generally just use whatever desktop environment comes with a distro. The days of me wanting to spend time tweaking the Linux environment are long gone. I just want it to function to support the actual work I am trying to accomplish.

I use many extensions, but I also like this "keep the vanilla simple" approach of Gnome. Instead of trying to support many different workflows, it does only one, and it does it well. Everything is much more polished, compared to other DEs, simply because there's less stuff. And support for extensions seems to be excellent, since there's so many of them and they often work very well.

as a recent windows refugee, i love gnome. once i got used to the dock being my "taskbar", the entire thing just gets out of my way.

I personally love gnome. But I would not want to use it without my extensions even for a few hours. Yes upgrading they sometimes break with updates but most of the time the developers update for the new version in less than a week. Othr than that I just love the polished look and feel. Everything looks kneatly organized and clean. Ofcourse I have gripes here and there. For example the Software Center sucks even with its sleek look. It fails to get app information or check for updates too often and needs a restart. But I tried KDE too and it just doesn't feel as nice to use. And if you feel Gnome isn't for you than that's great too since with Linux you have so many options. But I will stick with Gnome for the time being.

If no one used it, it would be the first piece of perfect software ever written. It isn't. So, yes, people use it.

I prefer GNOME to KDE and I understand that there's research and philosophy behind some of the decisions, but I just can't get around some of the quirks. "Workflow" itself is fine, with tiling on top, you can get by. But those window decorations. So much space is taken by a completely useless, fat bar at the top of each window even though it's not really aimed at being touchscreen native.

@shapis I agree. I used Gnome for several years before switching to XFCE. Gnome feels like a great DE for people who do not do a lot of things on their computers. I normally have 5 or so workspaces and on each a dozen of apps open. Some apps are workspace-specific, some are available on all workspaces. You are right, multitasking when you do so much is a pain in Gnome. And I really really tried to like it.

Not to mention that you need a lot of extensions to make it useful.

Gnome does great in terms of animations and overall look, but not very practical and feels very non-customizable.

XFCE looks awful out of the box and the lack of animations is quite annoying. But you can make it look good - see our custom distro based on XFCE - TROMjaro. And if you give XFCE a try you will realize how sane it is. You can customize it a ton without being overwhelmed by thousands of options. You right click on panels and apps and you get sane options to move or tweak them.

As for workspaces I personally use them as "names" on the top bar and can switch between workspaces so fast, almost like tabs in a browser.

Not as fancy as Gnome, but boy this is really useful. And practical.

I've also added mouse gestures on my desktop via Easystroke so I can move windows on any workspace via these gestures. So easy.

So I'd say that Gnome looks fancy, and it is very cool for those who do not do a lot of work on their machines and have to switch between many work spaces and lots of apps. And I'd say XFCE is extremely underrated, perhaps because out of the box it looks terrible. Maybe try TROMjaro....see how it goes.

I grew up using Macs and so coming to Linux from that perspective, I like it. It has a similar feel to the Mac desktop environment.

I may take the plunge to a window manager at some point, but for now it works for me.

Using vanilla gnome and comparing about empty task bar is a bit strange.

I hate vanilla gnome but love it once I've tweaked it. I definitely have to arrange workspaces how I like them though. 2 side by side terminals on wkspc1. 2 side by side file browsers on wkspc 2. However many browser windows on 3. Whatever main program I'm using on 4 and maybe PDFs on 5. Gnome makes it a breeze to fly around the workspaces on a laptop.

Decided to try GNOME when i switched to fedora, it's good surface level but the ugliness is in the details