I really liked Fedora as the primary distro I would go for and I like the look of gnome in it, but i could not figure out how it could have such a horrible user experience in 2024.
What am i talking about..
Firstly, there are no min/max icons on the windows. Only close. So you have to sherlock your way through the internet and find out you need a third party extension that will enable this basic functionality, which has been part of any mainstream operating system for decades as absolutely basic standard for window managers and absolutely no person in the world who has ever used a computer would expect NOT to have it available in their operating system.
Second, it has a top bar that is like on a mobile phone and has no real functionality on desktop(ie. it shows time and not much else). In order to see the task bar, you have to press top-left icon that will bring it up. And it is not a task bar, it is just a dock ala apple mac os. So in order to switch between applications, you have to use tab or get into this desktop section by clicking on said icon(possibly win-key or some other functional key). This takes so much time and requires so many actions that I am probably simply too retarded to imagine a person who came up with such behavior and on top of that other people deemed it to be so good to make it the default behavior in the entire gnome project.
When you sherlock through the internet yet again, and waste many more time, yet again, you will find there is yet another third party extension what will allow you to transform this hidden dock into constantly visible dock, maybe even make it look like a proper task bar by removing that useless top bar.
These are mere two examples. I simply cannot imagine how in 2024 linux is still so incredibly stupid when it comes to desktop. I've been using computers since 1996, am no it/tech newbie, but this just takes my breath away.
Can someone explain why that is going on?
And yeah, I tried KDE as well. That was issue-less from the get-go, like any desktop environment is supposed to be. My gripe is with gnome due to its popularity. I would expect it to be long dead when the user experience is worse than a $2 philipine whore.
I'm mostly with you on this one. They should be present by default. Now I can't speak for Fedora, but on Debian there are two configuration apps called "Settings" and "Tweaks." Tweaks will let you configure the top bar of windows along with a few other options. It would seem to me to make sense that Settings and Tweaks should be one app, but whatever...
> Second, it has a top bar that is like on a mobile phone and has no real functionality...
I think this is a matter of taste. I tried KDE and stuck with it for a while, but it seemed a little to hard to configure and I wasn't happy with what I ended up with. This surprised me as I was familiar with KDE's reputation for configurability.
Now on Gnome, I have configured it to show the task bar when I touch the left edge of the screen. Configuring this was too difficult, but it wasn't any worse than figuring out how to configure the task bar the way I (mostly) wanted it on KDE. With Gnome, I got the behavior I wanted. With KDE, I never quite got there.
As someone who likes heavy keyboard centric flows, but still likes using a mouse, gnome feels like it was made with me in mind.
The keyboard navigation in the overview feels just as good as it does with a mouse.
I certainly hate it, personally, and won't use it. It makes everything difficult. But there are quite a lot of people who love it, and that tells me that my opinion of it is due to a difference in taste, not a question of quality.
What I do is to configure the first 5 function keys to switch to the 5 apps I use most frequently. f2 (not Ctrl-f2 or Alt-f2, but plain f2) for example switches to my browser.
> Firstly, there are no min/max icons on the windows.
> Second, it has a top bar that is like on a mobile phone and has no real functionality on desktop(ie. it shows time and not much else).
> yet again, you will find there is yet another third party extension what will allow you to transform this hidden dock into constantly visible dock
> I tried KDE as well. That was issue-less from the get-go, like any desktop environment is supposed to be.
I am not excited by GNOME, but it works pretty well and is both easy to and very highly-configurable. I wonder how many of your complaints are due to how it differs from the desktop environment you're used to. Also, you can customize all this -- a lot of the time with just GNOME Tweaks and no third-party extensions.
It didn't matter that nobody liked the new interfaces. It was dismissed by developers as "people are resistant to change", and that really was the beginning of this paradigm that developers know better than users what they need and the world we now live in of tolerating what is available and people being herded into behaviors by UX designers.
A lot of other decisions have been made to fundamentally change the Linux experience since then as a result of the normalization of this, the most popular init system, systemd, subverted our existing ones, we have all kinds of deviations from the Unix way, and some are good I think but generally, administering a Linux system went from something a single person could do and understand the entire system in their head to something that requires continuing education and niche specialization. Systems evolve, yes, but Linux is basically fundamentally different than it was in those days, it's still got the monolithic kernel and the basic Unix like structure, but managing a system is now much more complex than it used to be.
I don't think I know anyone who uses gnome. If you're just trying to get the usual desktop type experience you're used to, you can use KDE, XFCE, MATE (which is a fork of gnome2), I recently checked out LXDE and found it to be utterly fantastic so far, it usually looks 95-ish out of the box but themed it looks nice and modern. If I were to recommend a "normal" desktop with a full suite of basic software I'd recommend that. Or, you can build something from components, that's what I usually do these days since DEs come with a lot of stuff I don't need, I like Wayland so I use either labwc for the classic desktop windowing and stuff, or sway for tiling and I'll tell you, tiling is where it's at once you get the hang of it. Those mobile phone looking full-of-extra-steps-to-get-to-anything environments like what youre talking about are absolute trash as far as I'm concerned.