Desktop alternatives

Ask Fedora
1

I asked my loyal ai the following “considering kde is crap (we can all agree on that) what alternative is there for the gnome desktop?” and it suggested

  • COSMIC (by System76)
  • Pantheon (from elementary OS)
  • Budgie (from Solus)

I’m not getting in a debate which one is best as clearly this is a matter of taste (hence my strong words on kde, which even my AI frowned upon) But I wouldn’t mind testing them out.

What would be the best way to test these in a real live scenario — my current desktop — without breaking what seems to work ok-ish now the gnome-desktop?

2

Download each one as a Live ISO, install to USB, boot from USB stick.

I use Ventoy for this kind of thing. Lets me pick and choose with everything on one USB stick.

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3

Thanks yeah, could do that. And thanks for the tip.

But I want to test it in my daily workflow. Which include work done with OnlyOffice/Collabora/KeepassXC/Thunderbird/Firefox/Chromium/Vivaldi/Nextcloud Sync/Cryptomator/VSCode/XDebug/Docker

I see there is a Fedora 42 Cosmic Live. I´ll give that a try in Boxex-box.

4

Download the isos and install them as virtual machines (gnome boxes or Virtual Machine Manager or virtualbox). Installed system will be faster and persistent compared to live system.

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5

I just tried Fedora COSMIC in a Boxes-box. That didn’t work well:

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or :

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7

one of those ideosyncracities with gnome: Boxes comes with 3D acceleration switch “off” for whatever reason.

Switch boxes to list view

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As right clicking in thumbnail view does not work in boxes.

and select the three vertical dots at the virtual machine and switch 3D acceleration “on” as cosmic needs at and why would you turn this off in the first place but for some niche case:

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8

In my opinion you get an “alternative” when KDE Plasma comes with the whole QT ecosystem and Gnome with the GTK ecosystem. Other DEs that rely on GTK cannot be “alternative” to Gnome because they need to run applications that are developed mainly (when not exclusively) for Gnome. Whatever decision is made around GTK and Gnome must be followed by the other DEs. So I see those DEs more like “mods” or “derivatives” of Gnome.

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9

I have always liked MATE - even back when it was called GNOME…

Seriously, been a GNOME user since 0.8 beta but once GNOME 3 hit, hated it. Have tried every release thinking maybe they made it better, but nope.

MATE lets me stay in my GNOME2 days. It works, and it works well, and no bullshit like needing to edit a css file to get scroll bars back.

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ISOs and LiveUSB sessions in a VM would be quickest though.

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11

But we have still scroll bars? And if you want them to be constantly visible, then it’s just a matter of going to accessibility settings.

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12

It might now just be a matter of going to the accessibility menu, but historically it wasn’t in production releases.

It’s all part of the new (21st century) GNU/Linux developer philosophy of “we know what’s best for the user, not the user” that is the reason why I ditched Mac OS and Windows for GNU/Linux in the first place.

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13

Providing sane defaults and not exposing all of the world’s preferences isn’t new, in fact it’s as old as computing is (even older if you want to look at other things).

14

Try the spins iso’s

15

Hiding the ability to choose the filesystem is however new. And there are good reasons to choose ext4, even for newbies (ext4 is faster and thus preferred by gamers).

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16

I think it was already said that ability to choose alternative filesystems _is_ going to be more intuitive. And abour performance claims, do you have any benchmarks?

17

No, no benchmarks, I don’t game.

The real reason I like ext4 though applies to newbies as well — on virtually every operating out there, there are drivers for mounting ext4. That can come in real handy when there is a hardware failure and you need something off of the drive.

Granted, in the past with ext2 Red Hat did custom feature patches that often weren’t supported even by other distros let alone operating systems, but it seems they stopped doing that.

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18

It’s sometimes about other things than benchmarks… like CoW straining I/O on really old disks, or that you already use something else and don’t need the “features”.

There are for btrfs too… which I have used a lot of times before I switched to Kinoite.

GNOME defaults are definitely not sane for me. AND you need to be able to change without fickly extensions.

It’s not GNU/Linux, it’s just a general “trend” everyone is following, and GNOME wants to attract “new” users and thus misled into “we know better“… the devs are problematic though…

The extent of GNOME’s “defaults”

That doesn’t affect the UX much from the user’s perspective though… the problem with GNOME is the rigidity and fixation, with KDE too many nuts and bolts to handle, not the framework. There are sufficient apps in either framework with varying levels of rigidity and customizability apart from the DE apps.

LiveUSB for quick testing, VM for thorough testing, why not just dualboot it if you are ready? It is mostly quick and easy, and easy to delete too…

By chance, if you use immutable variants, you can change DEs just as easily as dnf swap, via rpm-ostree rebase or bootc switch, no issues, can rollback, packages files all untouched.

(I have done it, have tried GNOME, KDE, COSMIC, and Budgie long ago that way … preferred immutable “Kinoite” KDE spin where KDE is much more comfortable)

19

Thankfully you can always visit Tweaks (or whatever alternative GUI tool you like), Dconf editor or extensions. I like light mode, so I use Luminus or Light style (depends what I feel more like).

GNOME offers its own workflow. If someone doesn’t like it… then they can use alternatives🤷🏻‍♀️ it’s not “we know better”, when you visit hardware store you shouldn’t expect them to also sell other things, like mattresses.

If that was true, then various bizarre GNOME rices wouldn’t exist, nor distributions wouldn’t be able to customise it how they want.

Btw,

I was replying to a comment specifically talking about performance.

20

For things which are taken for granted on other DEs

Of course, I can edit a CSS file too…. which is what Dconf is like (but more rigid), and how well do extensions survive an update (subjective for the extensions used)?
Tweaks is fine, but really? KDE/COSMIC/MATE etc… have it in-ready.

You do not expect them to choose the specifications for you, when your requirements are pretty much different.

They might know the specifications better than you, they definitely don’t know your requirements better than you.

I agree this is subjective, but that applies to GNOME’s design too… You like it, I don’t, we both have valid reasons. You don’t find an issue because it’s how you’d like anyways, the issue is apparent when I come into picture who finds friction.

  • The “rices” require effort to maintain, are the foreground. Most would like the DE to be the background for their actual work. This is heavily subjective, most don’t want to rice as much as they enjoy seeing one.
  • Distributions develop or use extensions, as far as I know most (Zorin, what else?), and/or else control the versions via dependency relations in the package manager.
  • That’s what I did when I tried to cook up a custom mini-distro for specific purposes using GNOME as DE, creating my own metapackages in my own (copr?). Released new versions as soon as my handpicked extensions were ready for new GNOME versions.

It is about performance, but sometimes benchmarks don’t tell what’s actually the “free” result after subtracting all the background (sub)factors