I don't know why Gnome et al switched to imitating MacOS – adopting a dock (as a default), ditching an app window tray as on Windows, when the potential Windows-convert market is much larger than Mac. 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 th…
To be honest, I do not like the dock either, but for different reasons.
But, it doesn't waste any space at all. Because it's always hidden, unless you trigger the overview.
IDK about anyone else's experience but workspaces are not cheap on seemingly any system. Gnome on Linux, MacOS, Windows, all seem to have unacceptable performance degradation the more workspaces you open. I assume that this is because some frame buffer is being kept alive in all cases, but for the love of God, why?
Well, I'll do a small experiment, working on my Surface Pro 3 (Yes, you read that right) which I am using as a Thin client to my desktop. 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 inc…
I'm paying attention, and I have respect for the experiment, but something is wrong somewhere. Conceptually I love workspaces, having tried innumerable forms of spatial window management, and I have tried them across multiple OS's and I always run into this problem eventually where the system lags switching between them (despite apparently low resource usage across the board). For some ungodly reason despite the effort and money involved, OSX is the worst at it. Somewhere greater than 5 workspaces, each managing a fairly small amount of work, it lags like crazy on a powerful machine (M2, 64GB RAM). Gnome will just hang until the workspace has "finished" switching. Windows will switch quickly but will flash every app white until it reloads whatever context it needs to show me the right pixels. I know that workspaces exist somewhere in no man's land between "normal people" (what's a workspace?) and "power users" (who have thirty context-specific keyboard shortcuts for their desktop layout) but it's insane how badly they (anecdotally) perform across platforms. Not that your experiment isn't valuable, I certainly appreciate literally any amount of effort going into this problem, but I do wonder if I'm doing something specific to trigger the problems I'm seeing.
Personally, I'm in a KDE camp. GNOME was never my cup of tea. But I completely agree that the Linux DE surpassed Windows/Mac some time ago. While Windows enshitified and MacOS stagnated, Linux on desktop kept evolving. And even though I've used Windows and Mac for a long time before fully switching to Linux, I now can't go back.
I would much prefer if MacOS got rid of the global menu. I've contemplated it for literally decades, and my opinion has only gotten stronger. 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…
100% agree. Will never understand the love for the global menu bar, it makes no sense.
I mean, it does take less space (compared to having one per window)
I would much prefer if MacOS got rid of the global menu. I've contemplated it for literally decades, and my opinion has only gotten stronger. 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…
100% agree. Will never understand the love for the global menu bar, it makes no sense.
You don't have to like it, but the global menu bar is at the top of the screen which means you just fling the mouse to the top and then go left or right, instead of having to get to the right vertical.
I can't stand Gnome. I don't like how they dumped the desktop or the app menu, or really most of their decisions lately. From what I've seen they're trying to cater to some amorphous "new user" instead of just creating a good desktop environment. What is this "new user"? Nobody knows! Well, other than the Gnome developers, I guess. The sad thing is that attempting to cater to "new users" is just... Entirely unnecessa…
Do you really think a desktop needs to be stuck on the 30 year old start menu, task bar, desktop icons paradigm forever? It's fine if you want to stick to that, but the rest of us have found that using a mouse for everything isn't the most efficient way to work with our computer.
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 think the above post must refer to how it works in MacOS. In Gnome, the app quits when the last window is closed (by default at least). I guess this is a matter of taste, but personally I strongly dislike the way MacOS works here.
This is not a macOS issue, it’s an app developer issue. If the app developer likes the behavior that the app still runs after closing the last app window, this is how the app will act. Some newer Apple apps close the application when the window is closed.
What I am missing with Gnome is the global menu I have with macOS. It's just my preferred way of working. This is also what I liked about Unity. Gnome seems to follow the same direction as Windows. Additionally miller columns in Finder are just awesome and I don't have them with Nautilus. Those two things are honestly dealbreakers for me.
I quite dislike the global menu of macOS. It means that you need to switch windows to see the menu for the window, which can result in a lot of tedious mouse movement. 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!
it’s less tedious after you realize you can just fling the mouse to the top, you don’t have to hit a specific vertical to get there.
That's literally the default behavior in macOS, with some exceptions.
I think the above post must refer to how it works in MacOS. In Gnome, the app quits when the last window is closed (by default at least). I guess this is a matter of taste, but personally I strongly dislike the way MacOS works here.
Oh... :/ I guess when I read that I interpreted it as being directed towards people switching from macOS to Gnome. I haven't booted into a system running Gnome in a while...