I installed Gnome 46 on my Pop! OS 24.04 and i whas shocked at how many stuff got removed this time. Where did the dock go ? when you boot up the machine and login the activities tabs open, there is the dock located but as soon as you hit one of the screens the dock is gone. I hate this function, why do i need to be in the activities to get access to my dock ? pressing extra mouse buttons...so useless.
So I had to manually install the dock (dash to dock) using gnome extensions BUT firefox installs the plugin but cannot open anything. So i had to manually install it. I installed it manually but for some reason i cannot configure it, probably missing a app or something.
Now i wanted to lower firefox to the dock, the only option i have is to close it....where did this _ mark go too ? it's not anywhere in the settings.
Yeah it seems so, not my thing. Gnome does have a few new features, but removing those basic things i am glad system76 is creating their own DE. I really do understand why they made that choice.
Aravisian once told a user they were helping that they did not believe GNOME was for them. I kept my sarcasm to myself at the time, but seriously: who is GNOME for anymore? That's not rhetorical. The only audience I can think of with a reason to prefer GNOME would be people who've used nothing else and don't want to adapt, but if they're making changes that intrusive, the user is stuck adapting anyway. I really like Plasma, but I can understand others not wanting it. What I can't grasp is why an end user would want GNOME over one of the alternatives.
(I can somewhat understand distributions using it as it's been around forever and so much is built on GTK, but augh.)
Reasons to like using Gnome D.E. (Pros) followed up with my rebuttals (Cons) as a balanced viewpoint:
Minimalism: Gnome is minimalist in its approach which is appealing to some people. They see Tools and Accessories as "clutter". There are many that want as much free space as possible, perceiving the screen space as 'real estate' and anything taking up area in that takes away from screen real estate.
My Rebuttal: You need tools to work and screen real estate is there to be used, otherwise it is useless. As easily, I can point out that empty space is wasted space.
Basic: Gnome offers a basic desktop making it easy to use. You do not have a ton of confusing settings and configurations to deal with. Gnome is ready to go in a very basic form, right from the start.
My Rebuttal: I do not equate 'basic' to 'easy.' An example would be that in Gnome, to reach Root, you must jump through some strange hoops. On other desktop,s you need only Up Arrow twice to reach Root.
Gnome seems restrictive to limit the user to me, more than it does made basic for easy use.
Aesthetics: Gnomes integration, CSD's and widget layout offer a very classy appearance with well-blended area coverage gives Gnome a strong aesthetic. Gnome's Shell allows for a multi-facet approach to desktop design, giving it a sleek and streamlined interface.
Tools and settings are tucked away out of view instead of spread across the screen in small icons and minimal interface allows less distraction for the user.
My Rebuttal: Gnome looks good as long as you stick with monochromatic elements and flat themes. Add any depth and color and the lack of polish becomes very glaring. Widgets overlap, titlebars can vary in size... While monochromatic themes can hide this; if the Trends Shift away from Monochrome, then Gnome is trapped and isolated in its baked in theming (Which... is why LibAdwaita became relevant as time passed).
Hiding tools behind hamburgers and hidden menu's may be less distracting or they may be less easy for the user to find and adjust. I like my tools where I can reach them.
Well checking videos on youtube about vanilla gnome 43. It seems it's working the same way in 46. You need to use the activities tab to get access to your dock. It seems i got used to pop os customization. Nevertheless the way gnome is designed is really weird. Why need to do all the extra stuff to get access to your stuff. Very weird and i dislike it alot.
Oh, You have installed Vanilla Gnome! That is the default Gnome Desktop without anything added. There You need a lot of Stuff adding by Yourself - especially Extensions. For the Extensions, you should take the Extension Manager. the website with the Plugin is a bit ... at least in my Experience ... not so good.
Vanilla Gnome doesn't have a Dock by default on the Desktop, only the Top Bar, And by default, You only have a close Button. min and max, you have to activate in gnome-tweaks. The Activities Button isn't removable.
But that is nothing new. That is simply Vanilla Gnome.
I installed Fedora 41 (which comes with Gnome 47) a few days ago and was surprised at the same thing. I think Gnome should include, at the very least, the Dash to Dock extension by default.
I like Gnome's overall simplicity, but on every distro other than Zorin (which comes heavily modified, so no credits to Gnome), it's too barebone for my taste, leading me to develop a liking for KDE Plasma (even though I think that has too many options. ).
Try to toggling the "Title bar" setting under the "Customize Toolbar" view (right-click on an empty spot on the window bar to see the option). It might change the window decoration so it might seem a little out of place with other apps, but it might allow you to do so.
That would be me, for sure. I rarely customize anything beyond the wallpaper, icon set or theme colors. Although I've started to take things a bit further recently with XFCE, but still very few minor adjustments.
It's not like I'm against having more customization options, but I never struggled when using Gnome. The only exception to this being not being able to use the desktop... although that's easily solvable and, to be honest, it's always frustrating to have a million icons that "I would clean up later".
What I'm definitely against is change for the sake of change. Particularly on the extensions API... the whole point of having a minimalistic setup is that you can build upon it to be whatever you want. Why make that harder for developers?
When You like that, you should be exited for Gnome 48. There will come a new default Audio Player. That is Minimalism at it's best! The Player is already as Flatpak available. You can install it from the Software Store if You want test it; it is called Decibels.
I'm in the same boat. I never feel the need to customize things more, but I also agree with the OP. Gnome is too barebone, even for me. It's good that a couple of extensions are all I need. But I can see how that would be frustrating to an average, particularly new, user.
Coming from Windows at least, Plasma 6's defaults are extremely friendly. I will admit that going into the settings can be intimidating, as there are a lot, but most people I know will be less intimidated by "click this, then this," than "go find this extension and use this gsettings command."
Admittedly Plasma's system tray starts out with too many icons. Otherwise, it's an empty desktop with a Windows 9x-ish taskbar and start button. I don't think that's much more distracting. Also I'm not trying to make this GNOME vs. Plasma; I just like it enough that I haven't felt any interest in spending the time on Cinnamon, Xfce, Cosmic, what-have-you. My points are less "Plasma does it better" and more "GNOME is not unique in this."
"Don't want to adapt" was meant as "don't want to learn a new DE," not "don't want to do customization." My desktop is 100% stock Zorin. Left side dock, application grid appearance. I switched it to dark mode, and kept the nighttime mountains wallpaper. I have ONE extension installed, to allow proper system tray icon functionality. If it weren't recommended in the Linux install instructions for Proton VPN, I wouldn't even have that. I'm less interested in changing the look of my desktop than functionality. I like that Plasma makes it easy to relocate my documents directory, for example. I'm not big on widgets and things, but I like how easily Plasma lets me just say "no, I don't want this icon in the system tray, hide it," or "this icon should always be there if the program is running."
Those are the kinds of customizations I value, and the idea of having to go out and assemble my DE from extensions piecemeal is just super unappealing. This is before we get into things they've removed, which don't affect me yet as a relative newcomer yet to lose anything.
OKOKOK I want to do rebuttals too. So this is me agreeing with Aravisian's rebuttals and adding my rebuttals to his rebuttals.
My Rebuttal: herbstluftwm seems pretty minimal to me and takes up a lot less space than Gnome. So there! Gnome D.E. is obviously bloat and people that like minimalism are already using their favorite window manager anyways.
My Rebuttal: herbstluftwm is extremely easy to use and you know exactly what everything does because: you're the one who set it up like that. No time to set anything up? Don't. Set your preferred Mod key and launch everything from terminal (Mod Return). You're not going to get much easier than that.
My Rebuttal: herbstluftwm offers quite possibly the strongest aesthetic I have ever encountered in anything hoping to pass as a desktop environment. I am of course speaking of the well known and universally detested default shade of green. The strong aesthetic of: "It doesn't matter. You will never actually see your workspace anyway. Every inch of it will be covered with your work, as usual."
My Overall Rebuttal and Wisdom: Some people like Window Mangers, and some people like Desktop Environments. And while it does make a certain amount of sense if an individual user wants to beef their window manager up a bit like a personalized mini desktop environment, it makes absolutely no sense to take a resource hogging full desktop environment and try to turn it into a window manager, forcing people that prefer to use desktop environments into a really weird predicament.
I've found that XFCE + i3 works great for me. I have all the benefit of a window manager while retaining all the niceties that the DE has to offer, like the panel and settings manager. I assume other window managers work just as well, i3 is just the only one I've tried.
This is, to me, where a person needs to peer in between the cracks.
Gnome developers claim that they aim for minimalism.
IF that is true, then why is Gnome so heavy?
On top of that, Gnome tweaked and optimized the Gnome D.E. experience to make it behave as lightweight as XFCE, maybe even Lighter in the latest Gnome versions.
So impressively, that ZorinGroup opted to Drop Zorin OS LIte.
Unnnntil...
The latest benchmarking shows that Gnome D.E. only behaves that lightly when Stock Gnome is used - Briefly.
Once you let the machine run, add any extensions, change any defaults, .etc, it begins to throw its weight around. Heavily. After an hour of usage, it bogs down to where XFCE, LXDE-Gtk3 or other D.E.'s can run laps around it.
Misleading Benchmarking, much?
Yeh me too with herbstluftwm, I don't want people to assume I dislike other wm, it's just that herbstluftwm is the non DE I'm most used to as it comes as one of the defaults on antiX and is the one I've used the most. They also have IceWM, joeswm and fluxbox. All super wm and highly customizable.
Exactly! Except, as you later point out, that by strategic misleading benchmarks they can look as light as XFCE et al, the standards of lightweight desktop environments. So to cut the competition?
*EDIT just to point out that I mainly use the default Gnome on Zorin. I have no problems against it. My rebuttals are just to suggest that if you are making a desktop environment, you want to keep your target audience - People that use desktop environments! - in mind, and not try to produce some stripped down affair that they could have got for less than half the footprint from any window manager available today.
I'm actually aware. My earliest experiments with Linux, as I've mentioned elsewhere on the forum, were in '98 or '99. I installed KDE (not Plasma at the time; I still think they screwed up calling the company KDE and and taking the name from the product) by hand on Slackware and preferred it vastly over GNOME even then.
A few years ago @Aravisian posted stuff about gnome. I did not understood what he meant with “gnome stripping stuff/hiding options for users”. I used Zorin 16 and Pop OS 20.04 back in time, for me those distro’s didn’t miss anything and where working fine. They where using gnome (not sure which version). I did not get his point back then. Now i see how hard distro’s are working to make gnome user friendly.
It’s ridiculous how gnome is shipping their DE.
I remember from my early linux days back in 2014 i used to add alot of extensions to get things going how i wanted them. BUT my system crashed alot after that, people asked me if i used extensions. I said yes i use a few. They told me to pin point which one whas causing the crashes and i needed to disable them one by one.
So gnome offers extensions but they also love to break them, creating system instabilities and so on. That’s the number one reason i dont want extensions installed, the only 2 i have now installed on my main pop os machine are the compiz and magic lamp from zorin. I know those 2 wont crash my system.
If i use gnome 46 and try those extensions for gnome 42/43 it’s possible it will cause crashes. Also i really dislike how vanilla gnome is getting released, not a big fan of it and i admire system76 for their choice to create their own DE.
I never had vanilla gnome installed, i just installed it because cosmic is still in alpha 5 stage and does not yet offer all the settings. But i whas in shock how vanilla gnome is and it’s settings.
Big credits to Zorin for how they handle things with their distro, all the customizations and so on (same counts for other distro’s). They make it user friendly. Vanilla gnome is user unfriendly!. The zorin team can save so much time to not follow the gnome way, all the plugins that needs to be installed or designed. I really hope zorin would switch over to another DE in the future.
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My earliest experiments with Linux, as I've mentioned elsewhere on the forum, were in '98 or '99. I installed KDE (not Plasma at the time; I still think they screwed up calling the company KDE and and taking the name from the product) by hand on Slackware and preferred it vastly over GNOME even then.