Gnome is better macOS than macOS
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heated
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Gnome
Macos
Linux
Desktop Environments
Operating Systems
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Nov 23, 2025 at 9:58 AM EST
16h ago
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Nov 23, 2025 at 10:00 AM EST
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It’s opinionated, the settings app is easy to navigate (with the downside being, tweaks/gsettings is needed), and simple stuff like shutting down/switching audio input/wifi/printers is all stuff they were able to figure out without my help. I do wish gnome would figure out some of the compatibility stuff with Wayland (quick windows on ghostty seem not to work because they won’t implement a specific protocol?) but out of every desktop rn, gnome really is one of the easiest to pick up
Plasma, on the other hand, has made huge strides in usability, performance, and overall polish. It feels modern, extensible, and genuinely user focused. If anything is going to be the future of the mainstream Linux desktop, it’s Plasma.
Gnome is very keyboard centric. If you actually take the time to learn it without relying on your mouse for everything it’s actually extremely efficient.
... and misses the fact that not every valid computer use is keyboard centric too.
Best part about Unity was that you could hold down the meta button, and it would reveal the cheatsheet for all the other window manipulation shortcuts.
BUT... the person above you did literally say they think GNOME is better and that's fine too.
- configuring stuff like the task bar has always been buggy, the drag/drop frustratingly won't drop stuff in the right place, I've even had to completely log out to fix being locked in the editing mode earlier this year
- settings app goes deep and it makes it harder to find simple stuff. one example for my friends is when they wanted to turn on gsync/freesync, the toggle for it on gnome is right inside of refresh rate like you'd expect
- I hate to say this because I know it's gnome/gtk's fault, but apps on gnome look much more consistent for me than apps on plasma. gtk apps don't look good, qt apps don't look good, and plasma apps do look pretty good but they're in the minority. It has been a year since I've tried ricing KDE though, so I'd accept if this has gotten better
I don't totally agree with the extensions thing, the only one I use is quake terminal so that I can have ghostty pop up (since gnome doesn't support the protocol needed for that to work natively) and I consider myself a pretty technical user. Even on plasma I like a lot of the gnome apps like nautilus for being opinionated/polished. it's been a struggle to get a good feeling environment on plasma without a lot of tinkering (which to its credit, is doable!) whereas gnome feels pretty good ootb
I guess this is a matter of taste, but personally I strongly dislike the way MacOS works here.
The Dock can be really jarring for Windows users - they are coming from an OS literally called windows, and the windows are hidden from view.
It also eats vertical space with those huge icons, which is precious given the current popular screen dimensions.
--
I agree MacOS has some glaring UX and functionality omissions and Finder is indeed garbage!
But, it doesn't waste any space at all. Because it's always hidden, unless you trigger the overview.
This is one Windows gets wrong too, in fairness.
W11 killed the ability to move the taskbar to the left/right side of the screen. That's a real pain on ultrawide displays where you have absolutely miles of horizontal real estate and relatively limited vertical space.
Fortunately, ExplorerPatcher exists and can restore the functionality.
Car analogy. If the most popular brand puts a steering wheel in the front left, then it makes sense to do the same even if a joystick has better UX.
Additionally miller columns in Finder are just awesome and I don't have them with Nautilus. Those two things are honestly dealbreakers for me.
Yes, I would love that in Nautilus, but I'm not very depended on GUI for managing files, so not a big deal for me.
I even started to think that perhaps Apple has an active patent on it or something.
(this happened with the Genie Lamp minimise effect on Compiz/Beryl- why it needed to have at minimum 3 "waves" before it minimised the window; though you could obviously patch it out).
FWIW I found Ranger (TUI) and Pantheon (ElementaryOS) that supports it, if you're still looking.
1. Sometimes a program has no open windows. Understanding when its menu shows up in the menu bar is confusing at best. Explaining to another user "oh, you are in [such and such program already] even though there's nothing there -- click File then Open" is silly.
2. Sometimes a program has two or more open windows. Sure, File/New makes sense in this context, but anything that acts on the current window is not visually linked to the window and is thus confusing.
3. With the advent of multiple monitors, global menus are even worse. Which monitor should they live on? Always primary? Both? There is no right answer.
4. Old-fashioned title bars tell me which window belongs to which program. Global menus try, but only if I'm sure which window's menu is currently displayed, and it does not let me identify a non-selected window without interrupting myself to select it.
5. Opening a menu that's part of a non-current window takes one click. With global menus, it's two clicks.
6. One might imagine that they conserve screen real estate, which is maybe slightly true in our brave new world of notched viewports, but it's barely true and is avoidable. And Apple doesn't seem to care about efficient use of screen real estate anyway.
I’m a heavy keyboard user so rotating apps and windows in apps means I always know where I am and don’t even notice the costs you’re talking about.
But what I absolutely love is the menu search. I would love to see GNOME (well GTK I guess) add menu search. Also bring back the ability to bind hotkeys by typing while hovering a menu item while you are at it!
I was on a call with someone from Red Hat a few months ago when they were sharing their screen, and he threw the windows over to another desktop to get them out of the way, following the design. While he seemed to do it relatively quickly, it looked pretty awkward for something a person would be doing pretty often. It was routine to perform vs a single click to minimize in every other OS.
I know minimization can be added with Tweaks, but it always felt a little hacky and buggy.
Gnome is very different from more common desktop environments, but if you accept to try and work with it the way it's designed, it can be productive and enjoyable.
Like the person to whom you're replying, I don't *want* another workspace, virtual desktop, or anything of the sort. Ever. So a system built around a model of "simply move to a new workspace" doesn't work for me. Period.
There is something of “if the room is too messy don’t tidy it, just move to another room” in it that bothers me.
I'm currently on i3 right now and I have 10 static workspaces (6 occupied):
1. Emacs frames (5 of them)
2. Browser
3. Terminal
4. Terminal (temp), but more often have calibre there, and other random gui tools.
6. Music player (cmus)
9. Password manager (keepass)
(Personally I rarely hide anything, I just have a messy stack of a zillion windows all the time... but I suppose that's not for everyone.)
I like keeping work contexts in the same workspace. For example:
1) Email, videoconferencing, internet browsing 2) Coding and simulation 3) Writing
(Which personally is what I want. I hate it when multiple windows are grouped together just because they happen to be instances of the same application. For me that has nothing to do with whether or not they are related to the same task!)
As someone who uses Gnome simply because IMHO the alternatives like KDE are worse, I came to the conclusion that these people do not work on desktop computers. It feels like an interface designed for tablets and laptops you operate by some swipe gestures.
Ubuntu already does this with their build.
There are even extensions, that opens new windows to a new workspace automatically.
But of course, I have few complaints about how multi-monitor workspace are handled in Gnome, I prefer how i3 handles workspace.
Just opened 14 workspace on it. Opened up terminals, text editor, disk usage tool on all the workspace.
gnome-shell is sitting on 154mb, and Firefox is 1.7GB. And I am not seeing any unacceptable performance degradation at all.
Put them in same workspace, memory usage seemed to increase slight to 168mb but no unacceptable lag.
I put all the window back on individual workspaces again, now memory usage went down to 163mb
Which version of Gnome are you using? Older version of Gnome had an issue with workspace switch, which has been fixed over a year ago.
You do realize, Surface Pro 3 is a 10 year old laptop, which only have 4GB of RAM, and iGPU, and I have opened up 14 workspace, with multiple applications. And, obviously it had some lag, but it never became unusable.
I just can't stand too many windows open in a single workspace, I get anxious, and close window, and then I close an important window and get lost.
With workspace, I don't have to close any window, go to another workspace, and keep working. If I remember something, on some other window/app, I can just move it to the current workspace.
So, now come to the point with too many window, traversing them become a huge pain. So, for that, I use `rofi` with window list option, so, I can just fuzzy search and jump to any window.
Switching by search is absolutely must if you are working in workspace and have too many windows.
I try to keep my projects in separate workspaces, and terminals related to the project in secondary monitors, and IDE on the primary, that's all organization I have
Forget what I do in Windows, been a couple years since I daily drove it.
I wonder if that's because I've used macOS and Gnome more than Windows for the last decade -- because its confusing as hell to cmd/alt-tab back to an app or click it in the dock and for its window to not appear because you minimized it rather than hiding it. When that happens, it usually takes 30 seconds until I realize the app is hiding in the task bar or dock.
I know habits and workflows can be difficult to adjust. But an alternate paradigm can be as useful as the one you're used to.
I use macOS at work, and I've used Windows in the past. I still never use a minimize option. Maybe I'm weird, but I've never understood the use for it.
With Gnome, no issues at all. With that said, I prefer KDE far more than Gnome due to its configurability. With v5 I can deal with the eye strain, hoping v6 is better. In the old days, with KDE v3, after 15 minutes my eyes were bleeding.
See for example this: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/4051
Nobody is assigned to fix these.
Who would be assigning people to the issues? People scratch their own itches or work on what their employer needs them to do.
That's precisely what I meant - there are no employees that are assigned by their employer to ensure GNOME works. That's why the comparison with macOS makes no sense.
My dislike with Gnome comes from the fact that I need extensions for what I would consider primitive things. Like an app menu instead of the dashboard/app launcher thing they have going. Or the fact that features like minimize are just... Gone. And when you complain, your just either told to do it some very counterintuitive way or to go get an extension. I would get an extension for something truly unique or something that extends the environment far beyond what anyone would expect, but an extension just to minimize a window? Nah, no thanks.
I think in the case where you want GNOME to work more like windows 95 installing a few extensions is a completely reasonable ask. The fact that you can is still a plus.
I personally find GNOME to be the best experience. I'm just stating that GNOME also caters to people with a decade+ of Linux desktop experience.
This is the most counter-intuitive, user-unfriendly, confusing piece of software that I’ve used in my life.
Insane hyperbole in my opinion. Most of his complaints are that of a power user, and because it’s missing something he liked from Gnome. Fair enough I guess, the stuff he talks about does sound nice.
Later on in the article:
> The macOS itself isn’t all that bad.
I kind of get why they felt pressured to remove it but pretty much every other DE had a start-menu-like thing and they never did any change. It was just GNOME.
I know this author and I will never agree on what a good desktop behaves like.
I have no opinion on Gnome but I love my Plasma desktop. However the latest release made it significantly more buggy, which is frustrating.
What makes this worse is that Apple's refusal to expose any public APIs to control workspace behavior so you can't even work around their shitty choices.
Instead of iterating on existing functionality, they launch flashy additions like Stage Manager only to abandon them immediately.
A bit of a backstory. I’ve been using GNUplusSlashLinux for more than fifteen years. Most of the time, I used GNOME, starting from GNOME2, moving to Unity maybe for two years, then GNOME Shell, then KDE Plasma 5 for another two years, and switched back to GNOME Shell again. I’m not mentioning some of my at most month-long endeavors to other DEs, like XFCE, or tiling WMs, because they never stuck with me. So I’ve been there for most releases of GNOME Shell, followed them closely, even used to run Ubuntu GNOME when GNOME Shell became a thing, until it became the default in Ubuntu once again. Though by that time, I had already moved from Ubuntu to a different distribution for a variety of reasons.
I did, however, run Unity on my older PCs, as it was far less taxing on resources than early versions of GNOME3, but then it was discontinued, and long-awaited Unity 8 with Mir never became a thing. So, when I was fed up with GNOME being a resource hog, often crashing, and moving towards Wayland, which didn’t work as good as it was advertised, I decided to try KDE somewhere around 2018...
My backstory: I've been using MacOS X for more than fifteen years. Most of the time, I used MacOS X. Actually, all of the time. The end.
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