McGovern: Handing over [LWN.net]

McGovern: Handing over

Posted Feb 16, 2022 13:55 UTC (Wed) by brielmj (guest, #156441)
Parent article: McGovern: Handing over

I'm happy that GNOME exists. It provides me a kind of good working desktop with Wayland on a 4K monitor, even on my exotic distribution (GNU Guix: no systemd, not FHS conform). Scaling, fonts etc. work fine at this HiDPI monitor :)

But if you leave wayland/HiDPI aside I have to admit that my "productivity" differs greatly from DE:
sway/i3 > MATE/KDE/XFCE > GNOME3/4
GNOME is okay for some browsing, but I wonder really how to work with multiple windows. They just fly away and you loose the focus, so I have to click very often. Its not as easy as under Windows, sway or MATE/KDE/XFCE to split the monitor for two windows beside each other...

Citing the article:
"We’ve become the default desktop on all major Linux distributions."
I'm not sure if that is positive (financially) for everyone. At work I thought about replacing our openSUSE Leap admin workstations with payed SLED, but the only offer GNOME as a full fledged DE. My colleagues work with Windows and KDE@Leap. I doubt they will be really happy about the GNOME workflow, neither I will...

McGovern: Handing over

Posted Feb 19, 2022 9:49 UTC (Sat) by hailfinger (subscriber, #76962) [Link] (2 responses)

> "THE default desktop on ALL MAJOR Linux distributions"
(emphasis mine) is a really bold claim.
I do consider openSUSE to be a major Linux distribution. GNOME is one of the (three) default desktops on openSUSE, the others being KDE Plasma and Xfce. Admittedly, the openSUSE market share varies depending on which region you look at.

McGovern: Handing over

Posted Feb 19, 2022 10:45 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Further to my last comment, it appears that SLES now supports *only* Gnome.

So it looks like the three "big" distros (as in commercial money-earning) now do not support anything other than Gnome. (That's Canonical, RHEL, SLES).

Much as I like openSUSE, along with Fedora and Debian, they are community shoe-string projects, and while they may have a lot of mind-share, it's probably a lot less than their market share.

So actually, I think it's even worse - all *important* distros *only* support Gnome :-(

Cheers,
Wol

McGovern: Handing over

Posted Feb 19, 2022 13:27 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Which one gets installed if you just say "gimme a desktop"?

That's THE default.

(If you can't say "gimme a desktop" but have to explicitly choose one by a user interface gesture more involved than just "keep hitting OK", you don't have a default desktop at all.)