For me it’s KDE on desktop, GNOME on laptop.

I’ve been daily driving the pre-alpha since January, it’s definitely got a bit of jank, but it’s in really good shape. The alpha should be pretty usable, and I think by the beta it should be pretty much good to go.

The problem is the Gnome team doesn’t give a flying rat’s ass about maintaining a stable api. I’ve never bothered with extensions because even the most basic stuff only works for one or two versions. The neovim team is pretty committed to backwards compatibility and following standards for interoperability like LSP these days, so it’s much easier for third parties to maintain a large set of extended functionality at this point. If they acted like the gnome team, your status bar plugin would break every other update.

I use several, but the ones that I consider to be basic functions are caffeine, tray icons, places status indicator, removable drive menu and extended volume indicator. That last one is a nice example of my frustration, because it can’t be installed on the current gnome version anymore, and having to open settings to switch my audio output is terrible. Every distro upgrade have been the same experience, and I lose some functionality

If the goal of a DE is to attract users, Vanilla GNOMEs implementation fails to be attractive to most people as it is too foreign from established standards. Extensions are something that are actively not supported officially by GNOME, so using them would not fix the fact that a user expects a minimize, maximize, and close buttons and will not have them on vanilla GNOME, they will not have a Windowed start menu on GNOME, nor a System tray or traditional taskbar. What this user is saying is not “wrong” as they are saying the developers of GNOME want their DE how they want their DE, and people who prefer a more traditional desktop will most likely not like Vanilla GNOME because of that fact.

No one is entitled to random free custom development work.

Meaning gnome devs themselves are not entitled to the free custom development work of the third party extension devs, and therefore gnome is actively taking advantage of the third party developers(Third-party developers feel undervalued & exploited, potentially leading to burnout and abandonment of projects) while all round making it harder for them to maintain the extensions(GNOME’s decision not to provide a stable API for extensions makes it challenging for third-party developers to maintain their work across GNOME versions).
This is where KDE Community is different, they actively support, communicate, collaborate, etc. with 3rd party devs to build a strong relationship & a strong ecosystem.
In fact, Gnome devs are all around abrasive to the entire Linux ecosystem, including but not limited to the Wayland development team & the development teams of other desktop environments(GNOME’s design decisions, such as only supporting CSD & lobbying Wayland to mandate CSD & the controversy over the accent color protocol, have led to conflicts with the entire Linux ecosystem), their own user base(GNOME’s communication style is dismissive & unresponsive to community feedback), application developers(GNOME’s decisions sometimes force other projects to adapt or create workarounds, as seen with the server-side decoration controversy, further complicating development efforts), third party developers, and even amongst themselves(There are reports of conflicts even within the GNOME development team, suggesting internal tensions).

He did not get anything spot on

This comment implies that Microsoft design choices are better which is hilarious

Not that guy but phrases like “basic functionality” are just hard to pin down. What you need for your workflow and can’t live without is probably irrelevant fluff to a whole other class of folks.

I haven’t run into anything I need a third-party extension for yet, so I guess it works for some of us, although admittedly I do very few things on that machine so I could easily be missing something vital for most people.

Is the meme wrong?

Yes, it is.

basic functionality that should be in gnome in the first place

Who gets to decide what’s “basic” functionality? Each desktop’s team has their vision for what they want to implement. Something that might be basic to one person might not be in someone else’s vision or…

the devs don’t want to implement

…is being worked on but needs design. GNOME is design-oriented. It doesn’t matter how much you scream that something needs implementing if no one designs how that implementation will work and why it should be implemented in the first place. It’s not about “not wanting”, it’s about making sure that when something is implemented, that it’ll work well both now and in the future.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻) ANARCHY (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)

Their “dominance” is the choice of the distributions. Gnome is opinionated, and I respect that they follow their vision. To me this is free software working as intended, people are free to fork Gnome if they want something that the devs don’t want. And apparently, many distributions think Gnome should be the default. Maybe it shouldn’t, but that’s up to the distros to decide.

I though you were on gnome

See, while I understand that the “the system should be invisible and get out of the way so people can do things with their computers” philosophy isn’t for me, I entirely understand it as not only valid, but preferred by most people. –

– It’s just that Gnome’s approach to “getting out of the way” is at best counterproductive? I used Gnome for like 3 months in 2022, figured I’d give it a try, I’m always down to try new stuff. And I felt like I was just constantly fighting against it, having to do configuration stuff and install third-party addons not as a funtime activity because I like to make my computer look prettier, but because if I didn’t, shit just refused to work. It was only much later that I learned that the reason I had to keep wrestling Gnome is because the peeps behind it had actively decided that the things I needed to do were stupid and didn’t need doing.

You’ll see me praising Cinnamon in a different comment. Cinnamon, a cousin of Gnome’s born of Gnome 2, is what I’d call a DE that gets out of the way. It doesn’t have all the moving parts that KDE does, and that is to its credit. Because it has everything it needs to have and no more but also no less.

As I said – Same reason I love it.

That system control panel app with all its billions of options and everything being customizable and change-able is very good if you are a user who a. WANTS to customize everything b. Either knows how or is willing to learn.

Most beginners aren’t after that. They want something that is somewhat familiar and that works well. And while, sure, Plasma’s defaults are pretty good… I can totally see a newbie user opening up KCM and immediately becoming overwhelmed. Another user here even mentioned how much time they wasted because all those choices actually got in the way of them getting stuff done

Also what is the difference between a system tray and a control center?

Functionally, there isn’t one. Both serve the same ultimate purpose: To be an area where background services and system functionality can be accessed quickly and easily, while staying out of the way of whatever you’re doing in the foreground.

The tray is just an older, arguably more primitive metaphor for the same thing: “Just give every service and app its own icon, and make it so that icon can be clicked to access its options and features”. It’s simple, but it works.

The control center is more elegant, like, really, it is. It saves screen real estate and such. Giving you a little scrollable window where every controllable thing has its own little area. But that is contingent on the application itself implementing that functionality. When an application expects an old-fashioned tray, Gnome’s control center just tells that app to go $&#* itself, when they could, if they wanted to, just add a corner on the control center for “legacy apps”. But they don’t wanna, because they think they know better than everyone else.

Easy access to a few key functions is nice, IMO. Though helping someone on their computer and seeing half the taskbar occupied with two dozen system tray icons makes me vomit just a little, so I get it.

Oh no, I entirely agree with the system tray being a leftover from an older era. The Control Center is actually super elegant. But it doesn’t do to come up with a nicer, more elegant solution while telling all legacy support to go &*&$ itself in the same breath because it’s no longer your problem.

That’s some Apple bollocks, and if I wanted to deal with Apple’s shit I’d get a Mac.

So you like windows style UI. Great, good for you.

Yeah. It’s mainly based on the fact that Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distros are wildly popular

I think it’s more peak moron. Morons everywhere.

GNOME 1 & 2: The dock is in the bottom by default. It can be moved elsewhere if the user prefers it.

GNOME 3+: The dock is wherever we think the user is likely to find it. Maybe it’s in the bottom. Maybe it’s nowhere. Maybe it’s everywhere. Verily, who can even begin to understand the mysteries of the brain?

i have that desktop and it’s called windows, not gnome

I mean. Yes. But Gnome 2 was actually good. It was before the Gnome team caught the “cutting out literally everything for seemingly no reason” disease.

Before they started thinking they knew better than everyone else.

I use MATE for this very reason