I made this post because I really like the design of GNOME, and although i’d like customizability, it is mostly enough for my everyday needs. But I want to understand why people may choose other desktop environments…or why you would/would’nt use GNOME.

  • @Spectacle8011AEnglish
    25•11 months ago

    What I like:

    • I like GNOME 40 more than GNOME 3 because it’s prettier.
    • I like GNOME in general because it’s stable with pretty, high quality bundled programs.
    • I like the UX. It takes all the good things about the macOS UX and makes them better, while taking all the bad things and making them less stupid.
    • I like that they completely separate the dock from normal window management, so I never hit it when my cursor reaches the edge of the screen.
    • I like that you can set Nautilus to use one-click to open folders, even though that is cribbed from Dolphin. (Even if I use lf most of the time)
    • I like the simple IBus integration that lets me setup my Japanese IME easily.

    What I dislike:

    • I dislike that I need a system tray extension for some software.
    • I dislike how in-your-face the notifications are and that they can’t be stacked.
    • I dislike that I need to use Dconf to set shortcuts for workspaces 5-10.
    • I dislike needing GNOME Tweaks to set autostart software/daemons—this is a basic feature, not a “tweak”.
    • I dislike not having an easy way to port my settings for GNOME to a new computer. It’s annoying to have to set all this stuff up again compared to Sway, where I clone a repository and copy some config files over.
    • I dislike the new screenshot tool in GNOME 40+. It automatically saves photos to a directory, rather than letting me copy it. Come to think of it, I also dislike that it doesn’t support the same screenshot protocols Sway does for grim and slurp, which is my favorite screenshot workflow.
    • @eneff@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      5•11 months ago

      export settings on old pc:

      dconf dump / > dconf-settings.dump

      import on new pc:

      cat dconf-settings.dump | dconf load /

      • @Spectacle8011AEnglish
        2•11 months ago

        Oh! Super handy, thank you! I was just considering how I might use dconf to get this setup.

        I haven’t tried it out yet but it seems like it would work well!

        • @eneff@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          3•11 months ago

          Glad to help! Just keep in mind that what you’re doing there is dumping the entire dconf settings tree and applying it as is. That will include a lot of things you don’t want/care about, including state data of certain applications. You should probably sift through the dump file and throw stuff out before loading it again, but I’m sure you’ll figure it out.

          • @Spectacle8011AEnglish
            2•11 months ago

            I’ll keep that in mind. The main thing is changing keyboard shortcuts—I like most of the defaults in GNOME. In theory, this should actually be easier to port over to new computers than Sway, because I only need to import one configuration dump.

            I mean, I probably could have written a Makefile or something for my dotfiles repository but I’m lazy…