GNOME would not be my choice for this

Posted Apr 20, 2025 5:12 UTC (Sun) by DemiMarie (subscriber, #164188)
In reply to: Diversity? by ceplm
Parent article: EU OS: A European Proposal for a Public Sector Linux Desktop (The New Stack)

GNOME had two significant problems here. First, it is very different from Windows, making training more difficult. Second, it is significantly less customizable and lacks stable extension points.

Generally, I would only go with GNOME if I was fairly confident that vanilla GNOME would be sufficient. I don’t know if that is the case here. KDE is not perfect, but it is much more customizable in a way that is likely to keep working in the future.

GNOME would not be my choice for this

Posted Apr 20, 2025 7:08 UTC (Sun) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link]

TDE is a fork of KDE 3, originally by Timothy Pearson, and now developed and maintained mostly by Europeans.

In my experience it is the easiest Linux desktop for Windows users to transition to.

https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

Disclaimer: I run one of the TDE mirrors but I do not speak for the developers.

GNOME would not be my choice for this

Posted Apr 22, 2025 13:33 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (2 responses)

Exacly. When your user population has used Windows previously, it is either KDE or XFCE of the major desktops. (Maybe also Mate or Cinnamon, but they are less widely used, so may have less certain support going forward).

GNOME would not be my choice for this

Posted Apr 24, 2025 10:59 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link]

Cinnamon is what the Windows XP UI should have become, before Microsoft first pissed in the pot with 7 and then flushed it altogether with 10. (Trouble is that there's now a dumbed-down generation who don't know how to have more than one "app" open at once).

GNOME would not be my choice for this

Posted Apr 24, 2025 16:29 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

MATE is very nice, and hews to widely understood desktop window system mechanisms.

GNOME 3 is confusing to at least some non-techy users. Core aspects of how you use it have very poor discoverability (the desktop equivalent of Vi really). It doesn't seem to have been designed with much HID testing to guide it - unlike GNOME 2.0 (which MATE continues from), which was informed by extensive HID testing sessions carried out by Sun Microsystems.

GNOME would not be my choice for this

Posted Apr 24, 2025 14:09 UTC (Thu) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (1 responses)

I think the particular desktop environment is largely irrelevant here. Most desktop environments (lead by Gnome) completely lost their game and lost to web browsers in the same manner Microsoft lost in much bigger game Windows API game [1]: by constant changes, unstable and poorly documented APIs, mostly anybody outside of the Gnome team itself, abandoned any efforts to develop Linux desktop software unless they have to (or they are Mozilla, LibreOffice or somebody else large enough they can invest in constant changes in API). Now (following the trend in the rest of the computer world) mostly everybody uses their Linux desktop machine in the same way people use their Windows or Mac machines: starting Firefox/Chrome and forgetting there is anything else.

Yes, I run Sway (actually I maintain my own tiny micro-distro https://sr.ht/~mcepl/moldavite/), but it is mostly irrelevant, because I use mostly Firefox and terminal (foot in this moment) and not much else these days. I was suggesting Gnome because it is the most common one, but it is just Firefox/Chrome launcher anyway, so it really doesn’t matter that much which DE is selected.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-l...

GNOME would not be my choice for this

Posted Apr 24, 2025 14:59 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> I think the particular desktop environment is largely irrelevant here. Most desktop environments (lead by Gnome) completely lost their game and lost to web browsers in the same manner Microsoft lost in much bigger game Windows API game [1]

Uh... that link dates from *2004*, when Gnome2 and Windows XP (ie supposedly "peak UI" for both) reigned supreme.

> by constant changes, unstable and poorly documented APIs

The other problem wth your argument is that web API churn is *vastly worse* than anything done to/with native Linux or Windows APIs.

> I was suggesting Gnome because it is the most common one, but it is just Firefox/Chrome launcher anyway, so it really doesn’t matter that much which DE is selected.

That's pretty much true of everything now -- What effectively ended *all* (general purpose) desktop environment interest was the rise of smartphones and the "cloud-first" mentality, to the point where nearly all new-ish "native" applications are now just thin wrappers around a full browser engine running a web application.