For the past few days, for the first time, I’ve seriously tried MacOS and I became distinctly aware that anyone who calls Gnome similar to MacOS has never used MacOS.

If you’re just looking at screenshots, Gnome and MacOS do bear a resemblance. Gnome’s Dash looks similar to the Dock; Gnome’s app launcher looks similar to Launchpad; Gnome’s top panel looks similar to the menu bar.

But actually using each desktop, the UX, design philosophy, idealogy, and feel is miles apart. I think the four biggest differences are

  1. No menu bar
  2. Minimizing distractions, so no dock
  3. Interacting with windows is closer to Windows and KDE (fullscreening windows keeps them in same workspace, can interact with a window’s content without first clicking to focus it)
  4. Managing open apps is closer to Windows and KDE (apps actually close when you hit “x”, with few exceptions, only open apps and favorited apps are in the dash)
  • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    4 days ago

    As a rule you can. You may have found an exception on one small point. Those are almost inescapable. That may have been more of a window manager issue than the desktop presentation. Which used to be more flexible. You could run different WM in the past with whatever presentation layer on top. Unfortunately today mutter is tightly tied to GNOME as kwin is to KDE.

    But it isn’t a fight or a war. Use what works for you. Whether it’s LXQT, XFCE, KDE, GNOME, Hyperland, i3, Deepin. They’re all great.

    Quick edit to mention that Simplicity can also be a feature. I fought with GNOME a lot to get it to work how I wanted. But it was always the extensions that broke. The underlying layers were always simple and solid. For me KDE overall works better. But I’m not going to deny it can be very trying sometimes loading a custom theme and something brakes. For my current pet peeve certain distributions enabling the global desktop menu by default. And Katie has no clear succinct way of finding and disabling that without editing a config file. It’s certainly not for everyone and something like hyperland even fewer people. Even if it looks sick as hell. The progress on Cosmic looks great so far too.

    • superkret@feddit.org
      6·
      4 days ago

      Yeah, my experience has been that default Gnome is rock solid, while default KDE can already show some visible bugs, and breaks in frustrating ways the more you customize it.

      • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        4 days ago

        Yep that pretty much goes for everything. And not everyone wants to have to deal with that. Me I’m okay. I’ve got KDE looking and functioning exactly how I want. But I think it’s safe to say that if you are recommending something for someone starting out or not sure what they’re doing there’s a reason mint and GNOME get mentioned a lot.

        Even if I’m personally frustrated with the gtk hassle and issues. Finally, after nearly 20 years. GIMP 3.0, the version that upgrades GIMP from GTK 2.0 to 3.0 will be out next year. And with gtk 4.0 being released in 2020. Soon to be 5 years ago. Things are looking good for GIMP 4.0 by 2050. Our grandchildren will probably love it. And gtk 6 or 7 should be out a few years before that. I kidd, I kidd. Maybe.

          • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            4 days ago

            I doubt it does yet. Xwayland smooths out things considerably for now. But definitely not perfect considering mouse spasming and the ms solitaire effect.

            Don’t think that will take quite as long considering QT can and does. Just lots of testing for regressions etc now that distro are defaulting more and more to Wayland.

            All this still seems to take forever though lol. I’ve used GIMP since before 1.0. KDE and GNOME since at least 1.X and blender since it was a fresh shareware port of the original Irix software.