GNOME 48 beta is another nail in X11's coffin The next version of the default desktop for most of the big Linux distros is in beta. Here's what to expect next month, or soon thereafter. GNOME 48 has entered beta testing, which also means that it's in feature, API, and UI freeze. In other words, nothing substantial should change from now until its release, which is …
Years ago, I spent many a happy hour playing with xorg.conf to have something resembling a working display. However, I haven't done that in a very long time. These days, I install Linux Mint Mate, and It-Just-Works.
I guess Wayland is coming. But in the meantime, X11 works for me, too...
> Mileage may vary, though.
> I've had Linux Mint Cinnamon (X11) running a 144Hz Asus 27" monitor alongside a 27" 60Hz Samsung through a GTX1050Ti for months now without issue.
X11 works Ok, actually I use it in all my computers (4) and a RPI. Also in my experience is more reliable than Wayland (that's why I still use it), but it lacks a key feature, a DPI setup for each display. I a have a standard HD external monitor (1920x1080) attached to an Asus laptop with high DPI display (3200x1800), it's a nightmare (it always was). As a workaround I ended up setting the same resolution in both screens (the resolution of the external monitor), but it is not the ideal setup.
Yup thats because X11 can only draw at a refresh rate equal to the screen with the lowest refresh rate.
Gnome + Wayland is currently the best (if not only) way to get proper multi monitor multi refresh support.
I havent tried the latest KDE but other DEs with Wayland support still have an issue. Probably the hold outs using XWayland.
Wayland's nuking of XInput pretty much nerfs reasonable tablet support.
And as gtk-4 slowly rips out basic things like "place a window at this coordinate on this display" to bend to Wayland, the UI experience is slowly but surely becoming worse and worse. "Hey you can add that back with a gnome extension" is not an answer.
> it manages to get just about every desktop feature wrong.
Personally, I agree, but I am now coming to understand it.
Playing with a GNOME phone makes some things clearer to me:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/03/furiphone_flx1/
On one hand, it's remarkable that thanks to the relatively modest Phosh, a full desktop GUI scales down remarkably well to a small form factor handheld. It does work. It is a bit clunky but if I used GNOME on the desktop I'd be more used to it.
On the other hand, the history is instructive:
https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/
I have had _so many_ denials of this from the GNOME team, along with angry abuse, I think there must be something to them.
But in brief:
1. MS threatens Windows-alikes
2. GNOME kicks off big redesign; beta screenshots show something weird and text-heavy
3. Ubuntu told to go forth and multiply.
4. Ubuntu ships very Mac OS X-like Unity; Apple itself ships the OS X- and Dashboard-based iPhone
5. GNOME takes many cues from both, UI gets much more icon-based.
The key thing is this. While Unity apes desktop Mac OS X, global menu bar, window controls, and all that, it keeps Windows-style keyboard UI. That's why I like it.
But most users now don't know the keyboard UI. They find desktop UIs complex and opaque. They do weird stuff they don't understand. Windows 95 was tiny and simple and clear but it was 30 years ago. Win98 got way more complex because MS frantically kludged IE in there so the DoJ didn't split them up.
KDE copies that kludged design.
ME/2K, then XP, then Vista, make this even more complicated.
No wonder the kids don't understand it.
So GNOME goes the other way. It copies iOS. Vestigial top panel inherited from OS X, but no menus in it. (Huge waste of space but that doesn't matter to them, it seems.). A very limited dock that's just a favourite-apps bar. Apps are siloed from each other. You have separate virtual desktops for each full-screen app, because window management is hard so it's deprecated. Phones don't do things like minimising apps so nor does GNOME. You flip between full screen apps with trackpad gestures.
Very oddly to me, younger Mac users I know use macOS like this too. Full screen apps, no menu bar, trackpad gestures to flip between virtual desktops. I've been a Mac user since 1988 but the way my millennial mates use macOS baffles me.
Things like middle-clicking title bars to send to back in traditional Linux desktops are weird old people stuff, so it was removed. Then title bars, and menu bars in windows, were removed.
To me, and IMHO, it feels like it's a desktop for people who grew up with iPhones and find desktop UIs confusing and cluttered.
To them, it's simple and clear, because they don't know how to drive a 20th century GUI and all the little extras are just clutter to them. Remove it and what's left is nice and pretty and refreshing. No rows of little icons with statuses and stuff. Just a nice clean empty panel with a clock in the middle where it is on a phone.
To me this feels crippled and confining and limiting. To my colleagues in their 30s, my desktop with an efficient vertical panel and a keyboard-dominated UI is a visually overwhelming nightmare.
I think it's a bit like how I feel when I encounter someone who doesn't grok folders and keeps everything right on the desktop.
But, using it on a phone, I begin to get it. In landscape that panel is an empty waste. In portrait it's not.
It's aimed at reducing visual clutter, hiding that away, bringing a restful minimalism to the desktop.
There's no consistent keyboard UI because they see keyboards as for entering text, and the Linux pros live in terminal emulators anyway, so they mainly know horrid 1970s text editors like Vi and Emacs with their own nightmare keyboard UIs. Those simply _do not apply_ to the general desktop.
But there are hotkeys for quick searching, and if you don't know what all those modifier keys are for, the mysterious "Ctrl" and "Alt" and "Opt" and "Cmd" and so on, then Winkey + 2 letters seems efficient and easy.
To me it feels like my hands were amputated and I'm tapping with 2 stumps. (As I nearly lost my right arm in 2023, this is a very strong image for me. I do not use it lightly.)
The whole wave of standardisation that swept through UIs in the 1990s, bringing harmony to the OS and all the apps, and a universal keyboard UI that's great for both power users and for people with motor and visual deficits, never came to Unix. They don't even know it's missing.
Then title bars, and menu bars in windows, were removed.
It's annoying me more and more... even Mint can't provide a consistent UI (good, bad example: Thunderbird's most recent update has removed the context menu entry 'delete' from text in the menu to a graphical flat button. WT actual F? And other applications - though not all of them - replacing menus with hamburgers, and text with pictures.)
The heiroglyphs used by the ancient Egyptians were a good idea - until alphabetic writing was invented a two or three thousand years ago. Returning to heiroglyphics has always struck me as a retrograde step...
It's annoying me more and more... even Mint can't provide a consistent UI
True dat. I use Mint XFCE which is generally very nice but spoiled by creeping GNOMEification causing, as you say, inconsistencies. Will I have nice clear menu titles top left or two identical hamburgers top right? Who can say, this week?
On the other hand, if I right click on a message in Thunderbird I still see the "Delete message" option. That's 115.18.0 ... perhaps I have joys awaiting if/when I upgrade from LM21.2. I tried 22.1 and found it so horrible that I downgraded again.
The Thunderbird issue arrived with 22.1, which is why I am now using Evolution after a long long gap. Though that has its own issues: how can it _not_ know how to scoot through the pile of IMAP messages received and automatically populate an address book? _And_ refuse to believe that the Thunderbird address book exists and/or is usable?
But you've hit it right on the head (without knowing? :D)
"To me, and IMHO, it feels like it's a desktop for people who grew up with iPhones and find desktop UIs confusing and cluttered.
To them, it's simple and clear, because they don't know how to drive a 20th century GUI and all the little extras are just clutter to them. Remove it and what's left is nice and pretty and refreshing. No rows of little icons with statuses and stuff. Just a nice clean empty panel with a clock in the middle where it is on a phone."
That's it exactly. There is an entire section of the young population that does not use a "computer", their computer is their phone. That's it. Just like there are also entire sections of the population that think the iOS iPhone / iPad UI interface "Just works" and is "intuitive", completing ignoring disconnected experiences like constantly moving Back / Done keys from the right to the left side of the screen, done seemingly without any sort of reasoning whatsoever; these people embrace limited functionality as it is seen as 'convenient'.
So this is deemed "The Future". Billions of people now have access to smartphones and, more and more, this [limited] UI interface experience is how they see "computers". We, the older experiences folk, see this as existentially limited. Those people see it as "freeing" as "so easy!" - the dumbing down of computer interactions is a benefit for them, they see less need to get involved in the experience in any way, to simply be fed what they have been told is "The Way" and happily and merrily comply.
Maybe it'll all make sense when AI and perfect voice recognition makes navigating the UI functionally obsolete :P Who knows lol
> But you've hit it right on the head (without knowing? :D)
Cheers. Yes, it _was_ intentional.
I used to see it as a strangely castrated, cut-down desktop interface, but now, my view has changed somewhat. I now see it as more like a phone interface that scales up.
That isn't what I want. I prefer Unity's richer, more easily keyboard-driven UI, which for me works better on a desktop with multiple screens and a mouse. I think Ubuntu's 2010-2014 era plan was a much better one: a unified look and feel which is rich and powerful on a desktop, but which intentionally doesn't let you totally reconfigure it in order to keep it coherent and consistent with scaled-down versions for tablets and phones, which quietly drop the features that really need a keyboard and mouse.
I think one of Canonical's big mistakes was trying to do an Ubuntu phone, and trying to crowdfund it. Phones do lots of vital stuff like messaging and banking and payments which won't work on an all-FOSS platform. Leave that 'til later. Instead IMHO they should have focussed on on a FOSS _tablet_ which doesn't make calls, doesn't need to run closed-source signed apps etc.
A more open and more expandable tablet, say with 2 card slots and an onboard upgradable SSD, and a bunch of USB ports so you could attach it to peripherals and use it as a computer, would have been a much better plan, in my view.
I don't need all those apps on a tablet. But I do want to have the ability to have it connected to a mouse, keyboard, screen and charger, all at once.
There was an opportunity there, but they missed it.
This is a really insightful response. Although I think whilst you correctly identify this can be a generational thing, there's an element of how people naturally approach their PC as a tool that's as much nature as it is nurture.
Although I think it's also possible I just want a teleprinter and I was born 50 years too late ;)
>> "It's aimed at reducing visual clutter, hiding that away, bringing a restful minimalism to the desktop."
Nail on the head - I've written a post further down (no doubt far less salient than yours and busy accruing downvotes ;) ) where I think I'm reaching the conclusion that that's what I want and what I've always wanted from a GUI... the bare minimum to add something useful or be a bit faster than just using a CLI alone and for it to butt out of everything else. I still switch away from mouse to keyboard frequently (for instance, browsing a deep folder structure in a file manager, I'll use the top bar and type / tab complete my way through instead of clicking on folders).
>> "To my colleagues in their 30s, my desktop with an efficient vertical panel and a keyboard-dominated UI is a visually overwhelming nightmare."
Visually overwhelming can actually drive me to the point I very literally stop doing any meaningful work. I end up just 'checking the status' of everything in a loop.
>> "Phones don't do things like minimising apps so nor does GNOME."
I must turn that back on subconsciously! All of mine have the minimise option and I swear I don't remember changing it.
"it's also possible I just want a teleprinter"
Save some paper and hang a dumb-terminal off a serial[0] port. Send it a login prompt, and bob's yer auntie.
Or simply use <ctrl><alt>F1 to pop into a handy virtual console.
F2, F3 etc. might also have virtual consoles running on them. Consult the usually mostly self-documenting /etc/inittab for how many. If you have 3 virtual consoles, F4 will be the GUI you boot into. If you have 4, then F5 will be the GUI. Etc.
Yes, you can hang one GUI off F4, and a different GUI off F5, and a third off of F6 etc. and hot-key between them. I only do this for demo purposes ... waste of resources, IMO. (This all assumes you're not running a particularly brain-dead "consumer oriented" distro ... ).
[0] Note that despite Saint Steve's best efforts, you do in fact still have serial ports. See the "S" in USB.
"Win98 got way more complex because MS frantically kludged IE in there ...
KDE copies that kludged design."
I don't think KDE has IE hidden in there.
Personally I find KDE quite understandable. It's the odd Gnome-related application sneaking into a distro that gets confusing.
> I don't think KDE has IE hidden in there.
You miss the point.
No, instead KDE has a copy of the web-style BS that "Active Desktop" had: single-click icons, toolbars and gadgets everywhere, filer windows that render their content as HTML.
Which led to KDE putting a huge amount of effort into its web rendering library KHTML, which resulted in Konqueror, but also was forked by Apple to make WebKit for Safari, and which was in turn forked by Google to make Blink for Chrome, ChromeOS and Android.
All because KDE copied Win98 _without understanding why MS did things that way._
I think they probably knew exactly why, it wasn't secret. They just thought it was likely to be the future anyway.
And to be fair, we are now in a future where almost all line-of-business applications have an entirely browser-based interface.
It's even running on a fork of the code they wrote to do it!
> horrid 1970s text editors like Vi and Emacs with their own nightmare keyboard UIs
You're only brave enough to say that because you know both sides will never put aside their rivalries, stop fighting each other and turn on you instead!
(Of course, I blame the Emacs lot for that situation.)
>>"most users now don't know the keyboard UI. They find desktop UIs complex and opaque...:
Part of it, I think, is most users don't do enough with a keyboard, beyond typing text, to remember the needed keystrokes. People also don't like to learn new ways to do something they already know how to do.
I think some of these things have been picked up from phones. As Liam said, what makes no sense in landscape makes sense in portrait. On a phone there isn't space to provide a conventional menu bar so wrapping it up into a long drop-down format makes the same functionality available and useable irrespective of the icon at the top. It would also make sense in the side bar of a complex GUI. OTOH in landscape I want to see a menu bar and under no circumstances do I want to see a ribbon.
I see no reason why the menu structure can't be defined as a non-visual object and interpreted by a TUI or GUI interface of the user's choosing - even a ribbon.
I like doing ssh -X for various things so will hold on to X11 as long as I can. For one thing this allows running a browser under a different user account so that I can e.g. run the web version of Telegram keeping its cookies so that I don't have to log in every time while the regular browser can be set to work in a sane way as far as privacy goes (i.e. not to keep cookies and like / delete them at the end of each session).
I have to assume those quick to move toward abandoning X11 for Wayland do NOT use Nvidia, as Nvidia drivers have been mostly rubbish for any Linux Wayland desktops until quite recently, and then still iffy at that. With the dominance of Nvidia in the GPU market share, x11 won't die until Nvidia finally makes drivers work right for it. Because Nvidia has already said there is no major priority for them to support all the graphics features needed for Wayland, it will remain a second-class citizen, thus any distro and desktop that moves away from X11 is directly tying their success to Nvidia to fix their drivers long-term.
As a KDE user, it's made Wayland mostly unusable until the latest beta 570 drivers for me, to the point I'm look at my next system being AMD. Trying one of the latest KDE Plasma desktops, kernels, and drivers with Wayland got me at least 6 crashes in 24 hours, but otherwise rock solid on x11. Have fun Gnome team.
Similar experiences here. Didn't suffer crashes, but Ubuntu 24.04 GNOME with Wayland running did not play nice with the GTX 1050TI in my test setup, with lots of odd graphical glitches and monitor dropouts almost akin to a failing GPU. Switched to Linux Mint instead and its been rock-solid with no issues for at least six months now....(more fool me I guess for buying Nvidia. It'll be an AMD purchase next time).
Thanks for that!
I'm only my second month into having ditched Windows for Kubuntu on my desktop, and despite test switching to Wayland every time I see an update, it's been a shitshow even just for Plasma, never mind trying to run Proton/games.
Despite having used nvidia for ever (3090 now, at least it doesn't melt and catch fire at the connector), if AMD manages to NOT mess up their upcoming launch and actually *have* a launch and not fake one like nvidia, I could be looking at switching.
A lot of my CUDA code will need rewriting though :(
AMD announced a few months ago they did not intend to compete with "high end" consumer GPUs so no equivalent to your 3090 is on the horizon.
Best will probably be a 070 equivalent or similar. Anyway, best hold onto that 3090 -it's going to increase in value given all the metals restrictions now being imposed by China (yea!).
Hmmm ... another long-standing KDE user here, using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a Nvidia-powered laptop (so I have the latest-and-greatest KDE, Plasma & Nvidia drivers installed). I've not had any issues running KDE under Wayland, its been pretty much rock solid. However SUSE do seem pretty good at getting desktops to work the way you would expect, so this may be a reflection on their capabilities than Wayland.
Saying that, I tend to mostly stick with X11 since (1) I normally auto-login to my account when I power the laptop on, a use case that Wayland simply cannot handle for some reason, and (2) I honestly don't see what benefits Wayland brings to the table over a mature, well-defined and widely-used technology such as X11 (which I have been using for over 35 years now).
Let me be blunt: I'll use whichever desktop will support my library of games.
As soon as Gnome messes with that NVidia stack, they're gone in favour of someone who supports it.
For the whole library, not their idea of which titles are worthy.
Face it, Gnome: Your fate lies not in your own hands, but in those of the third-party developers at Valve on the Steam/Proton team and NVidia on the driver side.... if they fail, you fail, and you get deleted.
Drag&Drop files maybe? As in email attachments etc? Works fine on my KDE desktop with Firefox/Chromium..
I'll stick with the desktop that works for me, thanks... The garden Gnomes and Waylands are, (as seems to be the riposte politique du jour) "for the birds".
I'm not a Gnome user because I think the One-and-Only theme looks like an unfinished wireframe. It does, however, leverage Wayland very nicely on laptops. Quite fluid and smooth. Less advantageous on desktops clicking around with a mouse, I think.
I'm not an "app store" user. But I am a Fedora user. Gnome Software ending RPM support and relying on flatpaks would encourage my continued avoidance. I'm still looking for a reason to prefer flatpak packaging versus RPM packaging.
I'm not a keyboard person. I liked Unity but never found the HUD and the other bits useful. (Unity leveraged Compiz to make a click on an icon in the dock get you an expo display of all workspaces. These days, everybody has an expo display but I've found nothing that can be triggered like that.)
One of the first things I do after an install is remove packages I will never use. That cleans up clutter and simplifies using whatever desktop it happens to be.
It instantly recognised my 144Hz monitor, which I'd never managed to get working under X11. Gnome is very usable these days in my opinion, despite unnecessarily hiding menu bars in a hambruger menu when I have huge screen real estate. I tried KDE again and just getting the menu into a sensible config was just a nightmare of a bazxillion config options.
Slack still doesn't work properly under Wayland, which is poor
I really like GNOME. To the point it's the UI I'd pick over anything I've ever used. For the way I think/work, I just find I can 'zip about' it better than any other OS/Desktop I've used (Ubuntu 22 or 24, very little customisation done). It's a bit sad, but it's almost made me enjoy using a PC again.
There, I said it!
Before you fly to that 'down arrow' and add one more use cycle to the microswitch on your mouse, that's not supposed to be a 'I love GNOME because it's great and you're all wrong!' - I'm just trying to understand how I've come to quite like something that generates so many derogatory comments (including a tech at a client looking over my shoulder and saying 'wow, you use GNOME?') when I get along fine. Genuine question that pops into my head every time I read a Linux Desktop article and it's comments.
I came GNOME as an utter newbie - the first time I'd tried to use Linux as a desktop for the day to day and I picked it out for my OpenSUSE install (can't remember why now, but it wouldn't have been an informed decision, I was too busy being angry at Windows 10). I have to confess the thought hadn't really crossed my mind that Linux had a single viable desktop environment, let alone several.
Prior to this, I'd have considered Windows 7 as my favourable pick. I now find it very frustrating going back to Windows 7.
Have also been using KDE and Mate Desktop (is that some descendant of an old GNOME?) a fair bit too. I'm not really keen on either, things just take me that little bit longer to find/do. MATE had a theme called 'Redmond' IIRC which I shoved on on a couple of systems just to make the layout familiar, if not intuitive.
Maybe I just happen to be the type of user they target so it's been easy to gel with it? I don't like having more than about 8 Windows open in the background, any more I lose track of what I'm doing. I tend work with 1 foreground window maximised per monitor and use the super key to flit between if needed. Dock menu is hidden as I barely use it, just 'super' and type what I want - whereas it drives me nuts hiding the Windows task bar (I've not done so since I was trying to work on a 640x480 Windows 95 system and needed the space back). I don't generally like to tile windows and I don't have any nvidia kit to fret over.
Have an upvote :)
I've tried a bunch of things and Gnome is fine - it gets out of the way and lets me do stuff. It's the default on some distros and I don't have a problem with that. It's opinionated, which can work both ways. I don't have nvidia, so my desktop experience isn't dictated by whether a driver is working properly or not.
That said, you don't have to look too hard to see some obvious bugs/features like how it steals focus when there's a pop-up/toast visible - which is crap when you're on a big screen.
KDE is also OK.
Cosmic looks interesting...
I quite like ChromeOS, so I know that makes me a bit odd - it sits in a middle ground between Windows and Linux from a UX perspective.
I think most people here can agree that Windows is getting worse, not better.
I should probably also mention that I really am not a fan of MacOS, despite loving the hardware and some of the other software - it would be far better WITH gnome! :D
It's nice to have choice on Linux, because ultimately we're all different and like different things.
haven't really had to worry about the desktop since i was using dialup. found that kde was easier to use when i wanted to connect to my internet provider which at the time was using a modem over a telephone line. gnome just didn't work or at least i was unable to convince it to work but kde did. now with a cable modem and an ethernet connection it doesn't seem to matter what i use. not really concerned about the desktop features as long as the apps i need run.
> Gnome is fine - it gets out of the way
Good for you.
For me, it is the exact opposite. It gets in my way. It wastes my screen space with that big empty useless panel. It doesn't understand the common keystrokes I have been using since the 1980s. (But Xfce does and Unity does.) I have to waste time searching and clicking when I could be using my keyboard to get stuff done efficiently.
I don't live in terminals. I don't have any daily terminal apps. Right now I have no terminal open at all. But I have 6 GUI apps open, and I can see 4 of them at once on my 2 screens.
"It's nice to have choice on Linux"
I completely agree and I'd very much like the choice for modern GNOME to stop shitting all over my MATE desktop.
I personally find GNOME to be unusable - it's a frustrating and horrible experience for me but I'm perfectly happy to accept that it works brilliantly for others.
However they've taken a very deliberate decision to remove all backward compatibility with traditional UI concepts in favour of their own mobile/touch-centric interface which means that a significant number of other desktops now have a bunch of applications which do not obey the theme of the desktop and have hamburger menus and all that other nastiness.
Unfortunately this pretty much shatters the illusion of choice and even XFCE has caved in and gone down the Wayland and Hamburger Menu path.
> I tend work with 1 foreground window maximised per monitor
Yes, that sounds like the usage model it's aimed at.
I don't. I usually have things auto-tiled or just slightly overlapping. Right now I can see Waterfox, Panwriter and Ferdium. Behind Ferdium is Chrome with 2 email accounts open in it. Right now, my top panel is showing a main menu with 8 headings, and 15 different status icons including a system monitor. But it's in monochrome and is not distracting at all.
GNOME actively hinders me using a computer like this. It forces me to make extensive customisations because I don't have a phone-like workflow, and then it breaks every OS upgrade. So it's not for me.
But simple _is_ good and this level of simplicity seems to suit a lot of people. That's a good thing. Just not all of us like it.
!But simple _is_ good and this level of simplicity seems to suit a lot of people. That's a good thing. Just not all of us like it."
Some of the younger staff in one of the offices I frequent seem to like using Windows 11 with apps maximised and keep switching between them and seem to have no concept of keyboard shortcuts[*]. They all have the same company issued laptop, lid closed, plugged into a USB-C/Thunderbolt 32" curved screen, most of which is large left & right white border, depending on the app or file currently open. The older, more experienced users will mostly have two apps snapped to half the screen each and a 3rd one open on the *open* laptop screen below the desktop monitor. It really does seem to be a generational thing. I wonder if those younger users would be happier with a smaller screen so they didn't have to move their heads left/right so much? ;-)
* I do wonder what they get taught in school IT lessons as most will type in a user name, reach for the mouse, click in the password box, then enter the password. They don't even know the simplest keyboard shortcut of all, Tab/Alt-Tab to move between fields, links etc. "work smarter, not harder" doesn't seem to stretch to using a computer efficiently. I'd not be surprised to find they "lose" 20-30 mins per day unnecessarily switching between keyboard and mouse. I have occasionally show these people some basic k/b shortcuts and always seem to come as some sort of revelation to them. And these are mostly clever people doing some quite complex jobs :-)
I've become a Gnome guy, or maybe its Fedora guy I don't really know.
I would be a Cosmic guy (PopOS! version, not the well meaning Fedora attempt) but I haven't quite cracked Printers, specifically WiFi printers - Gnome and/or Fedora makes that happen without thought.
I'm very much from the world of never really getting on with the Windows 95 Start menu paradigm - even though I suppose Gnome's app launcher is just that but simple.
My day-to-day reality is living in a web browser plus some light programming, hobbyist game development, classical file management, calendaring, proper email and note taking - its been 40 years of computing and that's basically it plus the occasional db sniffing and installing random things to make sure they do what I think they do outside of whatever is going on in cloudland.
One feature I'm still not sure doesn't exist in the macOSish touch pad gestureverse is why there isn't a simple alt-tab equivalent that simply swaps the last 2 applications - the fully jazzy super overview is just mind bogglingly overcooked if you happen to have 10 windows milling about.
It’s almost as though different users doing different jobs on different hardware have different requirements/preferences for how they interact with a computer and that forcing a single model upon them in the interests of consistency was a bad idea.
Who would have thought it?
Speaking as a person rather than a standardised unit of productive capacity I’m all in favour of this kind of choice and think it’s long pst time developers finally started writing/designing applications to conform to the UI guidelines of whatever platform/desktop/whatever the user wants to run them on rather than using ever larger hammers to impose The One True Way on their customers…
So no downvote from me.
> Elementary is the high level interface for Enlightenment window manager whi
No it isn't.
Elementary uses the Pantheon desktop, built using Gtk and GNOME tools such as Vala.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/04/elementary_os_8/
Enlightenment uses its own libraries and toolkits throughout.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/28/enlightenment_reaches_027/
They are 100% unrelated.
Yes, Tizen uses Enlightenment and it's not the only thing, but Elementary has nothing to do with it.
I used to be a UNIX admin and I had to configure X-windows running on SunOS.
I have been using Linux since Mandrake 5, many years ago.
Nowadays I run Linux MINT and I have not the slightest idea what the window manager is - it just works perfectly to my taste. I think it's Gnome, but it might not be. I suspect I'm fairly representative of most Linux users in that respect.
I've been using Linux exclusively on my home computers for over 20 years, and I still don't know what a "desktop environment" is for. I have a window manager (Openbox) and a panel (XFCE4panel) and that's it. I run Gnome applications, XFCE applications, LXDE applications, even KDE applications: whatever suits my purposes.
GNOME works fine for me when I try it, I'm flexible with UI's after all these years of using many things (started with TWM and FVWM) but overall I've always preferred the flexibility of KDE.
These days I'm using COSMIC though, it's a nice middle ground, providing a decent amount of customizeability. Also writing apps with libcosmic is a delight, with the ELM model.
I sit back a bit these days and wonder at just how good Gnome has become. I am heavily in the keep it simple and keep it stable camp, I just wish for the laptop that would have a go at a solution for trackpad scroll speed control. Yes, it may be hacky, but KDE Plasma has made it work for a few years now. libinput can do it.
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