> I never understood why KDE was so popular with their childish naming scheme and some of the bloat that came in 4
And I could never understand why GNOME is so popular with its desire to be a tablet interface and complete disdain for the very concept of user customization.
Gnome 3 is kind of awesome as a keyboard driven system too. It's only really when you try to navigate with the mouse rather than keyboard shortcuts that it feels worse than more traditional DEs. Laptop trackpads with multi finger gestures feel right at home as well.
The massive and uncustomizable window titlebars suck though.
I don't get why people think GNOME has a desire to be a tablet interface. It has not. It is just repeated ad nauseam by people, who never used it.
Sure, it sucks at 14" 1376x768 displays, but 14" 1600x900 or fullhd -- you know, what you could find a poweruser using? It's perfect, without having 125% scale or whatever.
> I don't get why people think GNOME has a desire to be a tablet interface.
That seems obvious. Because GNOME threw away GNOME 2, which people liked, and decided GNOME 3 would be a copy of Unity, which was supposed to be a tablet interface, and which distinguished itself only in being terrible?
Unity was supposed to be netbook interface, not a tablet one. Tablets (as we know them today, not tablet pc, which sucked) were not yet a thing then.
Gnome 3 decided not to be a clone of Unity, but not to be a clone of Windows 95. If you want a Windows 95 clone, you have a wide range of offers. If you do not want that, the choice was much worse. Gnome 3 improved that for those, who didn't want Windows 95 clone.
Incidentally, the only people who think Gnome 3 is terrible are those, who cannot let Windows 95 concepts go. Everything that is different, is going to be terrible, simply by the virtue of being different.
> Unity is a graphical shell for the GNOME desktop environment originally developed by Canonical Ltd. for its Ubuntu operating system. It debuted in 2010 in the netbook edition of Ubuntu 10.10.
Hi, long time GNOME user by force here. I find it very difficult to believe an interface with a full-screen app switcher, slide to unlock, and massive title bars and buttons compared to every other desktop UI is intended to be anything other than designed for tablets first.
All of these are touch-centric concepts and have no reason to exist where keyboard and mouse is the primary input method.
> very difficult to believe an interface with a full-screen app switcher, slide to unlock, and massive title bars and buttons compared to every other desktop UI is intended to be anything other than designed for tablets first.
If you take a note, Gnome development trails hardware development, it does not lead it. There is a lot of hardware features it still cannot use and which have much higher staying potential, ergo are much lower risk to implement than a tablet interface: HDR, fractional hidpi scaling, VRR comes to mind.
At the time when Gnome development was conceived, there were no tablets, no mass market for them, with the exception of tablet pcs, which were clunky and expensive and definitely not popular. What Gnome does with massive title bars and buttons is optimizing for a hardware that did exist then: higher-resolution, but not hidpi yet, displays.
Most software at the time was written for 96 dpi, but these displays were slightly higher (14" full hd is 157 dpi; 14" HD+ [1600x900] is 131 dpi, 14" WSXGA [1440x900] is 121 dpi). The kind of sizing Gnome uses optimizes for this kind of hardware, without having to support "proper" fractional hidpi scaling. So yes; it was cheap, minimal way to support popular hardware (and in a way contributed to a late real hidpi support). If you use Gnome on such a display, the sizing is exactly right; unlike Windows, which was tiny at these displays and was a cause why many mainstream users preferred the low resolution 1376x768 ones.
> All of these are touch-centric concepts and have no reason to exist where keyboard and mouse is the primary input method.
They are not touch-centric at all; did you ever use ipad or android tablet? Floating windows are not optimal for touch use. Tiling WM with a gesture support is much more suited for this use.
As a long time Gnome user, you probably learned keyboard shortcuts. What you consider missing there? Gnome is one of most keyboard oriented UIs available.
That's a fine reason for chunky, toy-like bars and buttons on the sub 1080P displays of yesteryear but a really shitty excuse for continuing to use that sizing when even throwaway computers nowadays have full HD displays.
Are they truly incapable of changing the widget scaling based on resolution and/or input method?
As to the keyboard shortcuts, I am familiar with them, but that's table stakes. Every mainstream DE can be driven more or less comfortably with a keyboard. That doesn't excuse the use of a full-screen, context-destroying application switcher/launcher that even Microsoft realized was a bad idea on the desktop nearly 10 years ago with the launch of 8.1. Said company even realized that touch and mouse are fundamentally different input methods and adjust UI accordingly! If only the Gnome developers were so up to date!
This is really weird. Almost no one push GNOME tablet or 2 in 1 style laptop like Surface. Red hat is a big sponsor for GNOME but they also not seems to pushing tablets. Windows 8 and successor was somewhat reasonable shift because MS has been pushed tablets.
And I could never understand why GNOME is so popular with its desire to be a tablet interface and complete disdain for the very concept of user customization.