Ranting About Desktop Environments

[DungeonCrawler]

So called modern desktop environments make me want to bang my head against a brick wall.

This means you, Plasma! Gnome, you are just as guilty.

Plasma and Gnome have gone in polar opposite directions and both are equally bad. Plasma is horrifically bloated and Gnome strips functionality that most users consider to be practical and essential.

On the plus side, power management in Plasma is flawless. But to get flawless power management I have to carry around a warehouse that I do not need and vehemently do not want. Gnome has an outstanding screenshot application but does not even let me move the task bar from the top of the screen to the bottom without installing an extension.

Plasma is over the top bloated and Gnome is stripped of features most people want. How did we get here and is it possible to fix?

Plasma and Gnome both have an Airplane Mode which is great for laptops.

Xfce works great on desktops and for many years when I try to “upgrade” to Gnome or Plasma I always go back to Xfce because it is perfectly functional and DOES NOT GET IN THE WAY. I could be happy with Xfce but it does not have an airplane mode for laptops.

LXQt seems promising to me. I like the Qt version of pcman-fm. It makes me smile where Thunar and Dolphin are only tolerable. I hope LXQt continues to develop because it seems to be the only desktop that is not bloated.

Some of the frustration is mitigated by the fact that I prefer to do a lot of things in the terminal and when I have a good terminal the rest of the DE doesn’t matter so much but it just drives me crazy.

Once I discovered that Kitty has built in support for image previews I pretty much ditched any GUI file manager in favor of a Kitty terminal with Ranger which is fantastically easy and efficient. Nothing beats vim key bindings for file management. Maybe I should switch to a tiling window manager but that possibility is mucked up by the ongoing transition from X to Wayland.

I plan on taking Cosmic for a spin when it gets to the beta stage so perhaps that is my future DE.

Anyway, I just wanted to vent a little bit. For anyone who waded through this mess of a post, thanks for listening.

[rugyada]

Looks like you would need a FrankenDesktop.
IOW, nobody -and nothing- is perfect

[DungeonCrawler]

So true.

[LeeTalbert]

I fully agree with your take on Gnome. I really like plasma because it does everything I could ever want in a DE.

My laptop is 10 years old now, and plasma has been sluggish. Hyprland, without blur, has been wonderful for me. I only enable the parts that I want and copying others’ config files gave me an airplane mode button that works just like plasma. Maybe give Hyprland a shot then come rant about it later?

[zeroability]

If you wanted to go “old school,” their repos have rpms for OMLx:

https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

[DungeonCrawler]

It’s on my to do list. I just started with the main Plasma spin.

[bero]

This guy I Don't Care for Gnome - woltman.com captures most of my thoughts on GNOME better than I possibly could.

He misses 3 things I’d like to add. One goes well with the usability things already discussed in the link: It’s GNOME’s faulty use of language. Who thought it was a good idea to order buttons in a way that goes against the way we use language? What’s the last time someone asked you “Do you want to meet me this week? No or yes?” Chances are, never. It would always be “Yes or no?”. The type of question is called a yes-or-no question for a reason. And that’s not just true for English, but (at least) German, French, Russian, Italian and Spanish. Probably simply every language out there. But of course GNOME goes out of its way to make a horrible UI yet again - “Do you want to delete xyz.txt?” “[No]” “[Yes]”.

And of course despite the fact that it tries to do nothing and cut any options, GNOME still takes up more memory than Plasma (which admittedly could be a bit leaner).

The other two things aren’t user visible – it’s the code (which is REALLY bad - you can’t look at GNOME code without getting a serious headache), and the fact that they brainlessly follow every hype put out there. They started with “write everything in C, higher level languages stink”. Then they moved to “ok, so our C API sort of sucks, we don’t want to do C++ because that would be admitting Plasma did something right, but PyGTK is the answer to every problem in the world! Rewrite the world in Python!”. From there it was “Ok, so PyGTK didn’t work out all that well, but Vala for sure is better than anything on the planet! Rewrite the world in Vala right now!”. And of course from there it was “Vala has been abandoned, but we always knew Rust was the best thing out there!”
Something following every hype (and every end of a hype just as quickly) will never be a good or stable development platform. There’s a reason why you still see GTK 2.x applications when GTK 5.x is about to be released. They aren’t even trying to get everything on the current versions of libraries.

If my tin foil hat were in reach, I’d argue Microsoft and Apple developed GNOME to make Linux on the desktop look bad. Certainly if they had done such a thing, there’s no way they could have come up with something more suitable for their cause than GNOME.

[WilsonPhillips]

Gnome. I have tried to use it and I just can’t. I hate it with all my heart. It makes me feel like I am sitting at the kids’ table at thanksgiving and all I got was a happy meal. Did I say I hate it? Yeah, I hate it.

[bero]

Glad to see I’m not the only one who sees the truth about GNOME. Did you know it stands for Gates’ Nasty Obsolete Microsoft Environment?

[AngryPenguin]

accept that there are desktops that don’t have to look and behave like Windows

[2disbetter (Rocking Rock 5.0 on a Framework 13 (12th Gen Intel & 13th Gen Intel)))]

I used to ignorantly think that KDE was just not very good. I always thought it looked old and not very polished. Of course in discussion with several people here and in my own use of Plasma on OM, I have come to realize the error of my ways.

Gnome is not just horrible software, but an absolutely horrible organization. Committees do the worst engineering, and Gnome is a testament of this.

I really like KDE. The only thing I wished is that the greeter window would work with fingerprint sign in.

[pastorczo13]

I am a big fan of lxqt, but I mainly run awesome wm. I use a mixture of apps.

[DungeonCrawler]

Regarding what 2disbetter said, I absolutely agree. I didn’t mention Gnome’s toxicity to keep the thread shorter and to try to be technical and not political but I absolutely agree.

So I’m going to use Plasma for now. I have to get my skill set to a high enough level that I will be able to set up a window manager.

[AngryPenguin]

@bero

And of course despite the fact that it tries to do nothing and cut any options, GNOME still takes up more memory than Plasma (which admittedly could be a bit leaner).

Leaving aside this gibberish, I will address one clear issue.

Gnome 47 Wayland live iso vs plasma 6 wayland live iso

Memory usage from system monitor: 1.6GB vs 1.5GB
Memory usage from fastfetch: 1.54GB vs 1.46GB

So these few dozen megabytes are supposed to be proof of anything, according to you? Kind of funny.

So since we are having such fun let’s take a look at CPU usage.
See, plasma constantly reaches several percent CPU usage with only the system monitor and console with fastfetch enabled with constant jumps to 20-something percent. While in gnome with it enabled it is only a few percent.

To sum up, it may take up several megabytes more memory, but CPU usage is much smaller.

[LeeTalbert]

Idk, I see a couple of hefty spikes on your gnome system monitor…

[AngryPenguin]

of course the spikes are when you run some application or execute a command in the terminal then it will jump regardless of the desktop used.
I’m talking about observation, run the monitor system in kde and watch how the CPU usage constantly jumps and how it doesn’t go below a dozen percent.

[LeeTalbert]

I have two OM installs, and idle is never over 1% cpu usage on either gnome or plasma. One is a ryzen 5600x on znver1 repos and the other is a ryzen 7600 on x86_64 repos.

Edit: idle for the 7600 is really just a guess because I have immich, jellyfin, qbittorrent, vpn, and browser all up and running. So ‘idle’ while not actually doing anything with those is slightly over 2%

[LeeTalbert]

I decided to install gnome on my 5600x pc. No noticable difference in resource consumption. The only difference is that one is ugly and the other is plasma.

On my laptop I never used gnome, just plasma and lxqt with both x11 and wayland. I had better battery life on wayland. Switched to using Hyprland on my laptop and have even better battery life.

Join the Hyprland cult, we have blur and rgb window borders.

[AngryPenguin]

@LeeTalbert

Join the Hyprland cult, we have blur and rgb window borders.

There is an idea to release an iso with Hyprland but it requires creating a configuration for OMV or importing ready dots. I don’t have time for everything lately, but it’s something I would like to do. It would be ideal if there was someone willing to work on the configuration.

[LeeTalbert]

I am very new to dealing with hyprland configs, but if I get mine to a point that I feel is polished and functional I will certainly share it.