Fedora 35 is out: GNOME 41 desktop, polished UI, easier-to-install closed-source apps The Fedora project has released version 35, complete with GNOME 41 desktop and easy installation of proprietary software like Teams, Zoom, and Spotify. Fedora project lead Matthew Miller told us 35 "is a kind of polish release. We've got a lot of nice new features in it but it's not as many as the previous two releases." …
As this is a 'polish' release I guess that the Fedora team gave up on polishing the turd that Gnome has become.
It just gets in the way so I resort to XFCE. I just wish it would stop trying to second guess what I want to do and in doing so, delay or even stop me from doing what I wanted in the first place.
Why the Gnome team keep trying to badly re-invent the wheel is beyond me. At least there is the simplicity of XCFE to fall back on.
Yes, I know that I'm an idiot for trying every new release of the turd but perhaps one day I'll get the sort of usability and function that Gnome 2 gave me.
And yes, I know that it will never happen.
Agreed.
If you truly like Linux / UNIX, then just try to move to the command line for as many things as possible. Tinkering with amateur DE projects is not a good use of time for anybody. The CLI is consistent and has been for decades. This is the #1 requirement I have for interfaces that I interact with.
The whole underlying GUI system is crumbling which is going to also have a negative impact on Xfce and Mate in time. Just avoid all the mess if you can.
The big ones aren't really amateur, KDE supporters include Qt, SUSE and Canonical.
Unlike the AC below I'm pretty happy with Plasma. Menus at the top of things, sensible task bar (which on my laptop lives on the side to eke out screen height), nautilus interacts with files generally sensibly (though I often use the terminal anyway, because being able to instruct the computer what I want done is part of why I use Linux). Not as clunky as the "lighter" ones like XFCE, not as mad as Gnome Shell. Happily also using MATE on RHEL7, I'd probably get along with Cinnamon if I tried it, but I really try not to care to much about the desktop manager so long as it's not Motif-clunky or Clippy-infuriating.
I really don't care that much. Windows 8 I just made sure I could get desktop mode and got along with it for the times I had to use it. Gnome has been the only one that really insisted on tripping its users up.
As a person who has been using Linux as my exclusive OS for about 20 years now... Gnome is f-ing awesome.
Traditional Linux desktop has always suffered the "nine click to crap". Meaning that, yes, you can beautify it and spend a lot of time tweaking it and get it all very cool looking and put nice screenshots on Reddit to impress imaginary people.....
However as soon as you hand it over to an actual user then they are going to find a broken something within about nine clicks of screwing around. They are going to find ugliness.
Stuff like your "awesome" dark theme destroying the ability to see radio buttons. Broken bluetooth crap that worked just fine before your "tweaks" and "fixes" to pulseaudio. Text that ends up being unreadable because the font you choose broke developers assumptions. That fancy custom WM with your special bindings completely breaks the ability to manage floating windows sanely.
The list of embarrassing nonsense is virtually unending.
And this traditional linux desktop "experience" is exactly what you'll get with XFCE or Mate or KDE or pretty much any number of DEs out there.
What I need in a desktop environment is very simple. I need to have my browsers, a decent PDF reader, a decent terminal emulator, a working podman install, easy ability to run virtual machines in the background, and a very modern version of Emacs. That's it.
The rest of it... when it comes to notifications, setting time, installing printers, connecting my bluetooth headsets, connecting to wifi access points with a captive portal or any number of mundane nonsense like that. I need that to "just work". I don't want to bother with it. I don't want to deal with it. I don't want to configure it. I don't want to hunt down drivers or read wikis on how to do it.
These are all solved problems.
If I have have to be prompted to use sudo or, especially, some application running as root on X11 to do any of these things I will instantly hate everything to do with that software and distribution. That is beyond unacceptable. It is not 1997 anymore, FFS.
The closest to a sane desktop I have ever found on Linux is Fedora Workstation running Gnome. Sure as hell not going to get this running something like XFCE on Arch.
Gnome is awesome? Gnome is horrible.
I left it on a 2-in-1 to become comfortable with the "popular" desktop and I have to say Gnome has lost itself.
By default, turning the machine off with a mouse is an exercise in determination... move mouse to top right, click, click... and click. That's the longest journey to powering off a machine I've ever experienced, so I initially changed the power button setting to solve that.
Where's workspace sessions? The only way to save the workspace is to apparently put it in sleep mode. Oops about the initial power button setting (it's now set to suspend).
I could go on and on about the tight coupling of Snap, the control of multiple desktops, the apparent "in your face" importance of the software updater, etc... but I'll leave it there.
I use 3 different desktops normally (KDE being my preference), but I'll never use Gnome on anything but that 2-in-1. To be honest, KDE has for a long time been my preference but, years ago (10+) I used Gnome frequently. It was never a flashy desktop but, I remember the time when it was == to other desktops for usability... and it's no longer that.
Sad to see downvotes on what Linux boils down to as a simple consistent effective CLI of text pipeline tools.
Json Yaml Csv ... You can process and do meaningful things.
Stuff i do with Csv sorting unique word count convert date formats. The typical excel wont even have the ability to do.
The CLI is amazing for doing tasks. One time or repetitive.
Tmux or screen takes care of "windowing" and multitasking.
I run a desktop to open up 20 term windows :-P
Some people also like sadomasochism. What they do is their business.
Interestingly so many people have relied on the dbus method exposed by org.gnome.Shell.Eval, for instance zoom screen sharing, which has now been crippled.
If you really want to understand and enjoy something there is nothing better than pulling it apart and then putting it back together as you want to. This is the main point of open source.
I think the Gnome devs at this point are unable to come to terms with the fact they made a terrible mistake but continue to flog the dead horse anyway. Still better to know what the enemy is up to.
KDE's devs are still randomly throwing buckets of UI elements at the screen with no regard for how someone is going to use their mess. Avoid!
I find Cinnamon and XFCE to work the best, although XFCE does lack coherence. Tthe zip programs distros bungle with XFCE file manager and Cinnamon are flat out crap a single thread in 2021! come on, do better and no I don't want to use the command line.
No we shouldn't have to resort to using the command line, that should for server and last ditch only never on desktop.
> No we shouldn't have to resort to using the command line, that should for server and last ditch only never on desktop.
Whilst I do (or did) agree with that. I don't think we are going to have a choice. This area of open-source is certainly not improving. This is why I decided to adapt instead.
"No we shouldn't have to resort to using the command line, that should for server and last ditch only never on desktop."
Exactly! This is the one, fundamental issue that has kept Linux off the public-at-large's desktop for the past 2 decades - the belief from F/OSS enthusiasts that users must adapt to the system, rather than the other way around.
Even Linus from LTT touched this subject, just yesterday as a matter of fact
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8uUwsEnTU4
click on the link back to the full video if you wish to see further context / content. Linus adopted a challenge to try Linux for a while and he is posting his honest opinions of it. One opinion, that the fandom and the fandom's insistence on CLI, is what keeps Linux behind on the desktop.
And because the current Linux user base believes that being "Unix-like" is a benefit from the DE perspective, Linux's issue on usability will always BE an issue.
CLI should be an option. NOT a requirement. Period. The supporters who believe otherwise are the problem keeping Linux from general user adoption. CLI should be last-ditch, all hell has broken loose and you need to try this, OR super-duper power-user option, ONLY. A "regular" user should never have to go there, unless and until they choose to.
You don't think that e.g., Windows or MacOS users are not obliged to "adapt to the system" - systems which are both considerably less configurable and offer considerably less choice over the DE than Linux? That sounds disingenuous to say the least. Isn't it rather that users of those systems have simply adapted to the systems they use because "that's how computers work", and are not even aware (or could not care less) that there even exist alternatives which offer greater choice and adaptability?
Regarding the CLI, it so happens that I use it heavily (including for file management), because of the nature of my work (research scientist and scientific software developer, frequently working on desktop + a bunch of remote servers). Of course that is far from an average usage case, but it seems to me current Linux distributions and DEs aimed at more mainstream usage are just fine for the "average user". (I did in fact install Linux - can't remember the distro - with XFCE for my elderly mother some years ago because it was a major pain with Windows to fix things remotely when she broke stuff - which was frequently. She hardly noticed, except that stuff broke less; and I don't recall ever having to use the CLI to set her up.)
Personally, I never resort to using the command line on my desktop. I use it (heavily) because it is the most efficient and effective way to do what I want to do on my machine.
Of course other folks' mileage may vary, but I'll confess to minimal interest in that. I'm sure they will find OSes/DEs that suit their needs. Sure, I'll recommend Linux to people who I think might benefit from it, but I find it difficult to care about the extent to which it does or doesn't gain traction as a desktop OS. I genuinely don't get why that seems to be a big deal to some people.
I have Gnome on my Surface Go. I mainly installed it because it has the best touch UI, but once you get used to it, it's actually pretty nice whilst using the keyboard and trackpad too.
Personally, I pretty much use the keyboard all the time. If you take the time to learn how to navigate Gnome using the keyboard, you can be lightning quick with it and it's pretty efficient. Opening apps, switching workspaces, switching apps etc. is really quick. I do the same when I use MacOS. I use the keyboard mostly to get around and run apps. I never click an apps icon in a launcher.
I think using shortcuts is the best way to navigate around Gnome. Your hands never need to leave the keyboard and it's way quicker and easier than clicking menus or launchers. I would have thought CLI users would be all for that. Just because it's a GUI, doesn't mean you have to use a mouse.
Am I alone in feeling like RedHat and Fedora resemble Linux less and less with every release? That it was a platform people built database and web servers, firewalls and mail servers. It seems like with each release it is more tuned to running on the personal laptops of the respective dev team members. At least the changes to user homes haven't been pulled in yet. At that point you may as well call it Lennux instead of Linux.
Great, they succeeded in building a zoom client into a Linux desktop. What a stellar release. Can it set up a multi-homed network config that can fail over between two dual stack WAN connections without pain brought on by fiddling with the network config files and command line kung-fu? No, it can't.
More people work in an office with two network connections than Zoom of linux and don't have a second non-Linux device.
Linux isn't going to break out past Windows and OSX anytime soon, it may taste of crow when you admit it, but there it is. The projects are being mismanaged if their priority is primarily on enhancing a desktop experience while letting the areas that Linux has been strong in die on the vine. Want more people to benefit from Linux? Package it so people can use it for useful things that it can be better, faster, and cheaper for. Open source WAP/Firewalls, VMs with embedded database and webservers, Open NAS hardware.
Everything they have been building has been going the other way, trying to reinvent the wheel by deploying a clone of an app that already works fine and better on the OS's most people are using.
> It seems like with each release it is more tuned to running on the personal laptops of the respective dev team members.
It probably seems like that because you haven't realized yet that Server is a separate product from Workstation.
Fedora Workstation is specifically designed for development and administrative workstations. And the news for Servers are boring as hell. It's a lot more interesting to talk about Wayland remote desktop support versus minor changes between systemd releases.
....then you REALLY, REALLY want to use elementary OS!!!!
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Please, please leave Fedora/XFCE to people like me who love it to death.....please leave us alone.............
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....and when you've tried elementary....and stopped whining.....we can all get a bit of peace!
"I think having Fedora Linux available in WSL would be good for users."
Yes?
Which part did you not understand?
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... the way Microsoft wants the WSL stuff presented is kind of weird ... ... they need you to agree to the Windows App Store agreement ...
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Good for users?
Don't be daft.
O.
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