I like GNOME because I don’t want customizability.

OK, I like a bit of customizability, but I’m not a designer and trying to make things look consistent and nice is a pain. I once spent days making an icon theme work in Xfce (the freedesktop standards for naming icons are not followed by anyone… (meaning both Xfce and icon themes))

I use GNOME as is and accept it and everything is swell.

Also I use a laptop and I’m addicted the three-finger swipe window preview…

What I like:

• I like GNOME 40 more than GNOME 3 because it’s prettier.
• I like GNOME in general because it’s stable with pretty, high quality bundled programs.
• I like the UX. It takes all the good things about the macOS UX and makes them better, while taking all the bad things and making them less stupid.
• I like that they completely separate the dock from normal window management, so I never hit it when my cursor reaches the edge of the screen.
• I like that you can set Nautilus to use one-click to open folders, even though that is cribbed from Dolphin. (Even if I use lf most of the time)
• I like the simple IBus integration that lets me setup my Japanese IME easily.

What I dislike:

• I dislike that I need a system tray extension for some software.
• I dislike how in-your-face the notifications are and that they can’t be stacked.
• I dislike that I need to use Dconf to set shortcuts for workspaces 5-10.
• I dislike needing GNOME Tweaks to set autostart software/daemons—this is a basic feature, not a “tweak”.
• I dislike not having an easy way to port my settings for GNOME to a new computer. It’s annoying to have to set all this stuff up again compared to Sway, where I clone a repository and copy some config files over.
• I dislike the new screenshot tool in GNOME 40+. It automatically saves photos to a directory, rather than letting me copy it. Come to think of it, I also dislike that it doesn’t support the same screenshot protocols Sway does for grim and slurp, which is my favorite screenshot workflow.

What I hate is CSD… using it with CSD is sad for #xfce user :'(

gnome 40+ has a great workflow
coming from windows 10, it was different at first but now it feels just natural

GNOME is opinionated and beautiful. Lots of focus on reasonable design instead of massive amount of customization. It also has a great app ecosystem and documentation. I love it.

I like the overall design of the Gnome Shell (top panel) and the workflow with different workspace. I like it so much that I actually copied it in KDE. What I don’t like is the look and feel of GTK apps. They’re often so limited or the advanced options aren’t clear at the first look.

I can never stick with gnome/gtk because it’s been impossible for me to get a consistent theme/look across my apps.

Newer gnome/gtk has its DPI jacked so that the title bar, buttons, etc. are far too huge for my desktop or laptop, with the only fix being to tinker with the theme config files. Older gnome apps don’t have this issue, but their themes are incompatible so good luck finding a matching theme pair. Non-GTK apps would get stuck with the newer title bar — I swear it would be >100px tall. And doesn’t gnome/gtk 4 have an even newer theme interface that’s incompatible with 2/3?

I’ve since moved to openbox and tiling managers; they actually bother to get this right.

I admire their uncompromising stance on feature creep and polish of the core functionality.

I’m a simple man, all I need 95% of the time is keyboard shortcuts to switch between maximized browser and a maximized terminal emulator.

Compare and contrast KDE, where you have three infinitely configurable screen zoom plugins, and I’ve never seen 3/3 working.

I use gnome 4 because it is the most “out of the way” DE. I disable the dock and use an extension to hide the top bar, so there is literally nothing on my screen but the program(s) I’m using. I haven’t found another DE that let’s me do that (hiding the dock/taskbar doesnt count, cause it still comes up when you get the mouse too close which is super annoying).

I also like the window presenter thing, which I first started using with KDE. I prefer gnome’s implementation though, since it is the same key to bring up the window selector and the app launcher. I often want to switch to a window only to find it isn’t open, or I want to open a program that already is open but hidden behind other windows, so it makes sense to put them together. I also can’t be bothered to learn more than one hotkey. I’ve tried to obtain this overall behavior in KDE, but I found it was a whole lot of configuration just to get what gnome already does, so I might as well just use gnome.

I found the “touchscreen-y” interface bothersome at first, but I’ve gotten used to it. The biggest issue is not showing a large number of app entries efficiently, but it’s pretty trivial to remove the entries you don’t actually need with alacarte.

Gnome’s default apps (like the newish gnome text editor) are getting too simplistic for my preference, but again it’s super easy to swap them out.

I use a vanilla Gnome without extensions - Arch Linux.

• clean desktop
• I don’t want distraction desktop with tons of infos…app like NextCloud must running without infos about syn etc.
• for productivity need clean and optimal desktop with tiling windows
• 3 or 4 working desktops
• and keyboard shortcuts

Most important for me, less blotware, functional, clean and minimal distraction - minimalist desktop.

Using it because it’s the least buggy DE i’ve tried so far. With a few extensions the workflow isn’t too bad either.

I love the design of the applications in general tho, in the sense that they do one thing and one thing only and there aren’t a billion options trying to cover every use case without doing any of them well.

I remember my first time installing Ubuntu as a teenager and the fact that the desktop environment was Gnome made me hate it. At that age and time I wanted something familiar and Windows-like. Since then, 13 years ago, I always hated Gnome (and Ubuntu) and I don’t feel like that is going to change any time soon.

The new SteamOS opened my eyes to KDE Plasma and now I am running Garuda on my main desktop. Eventually I plan to switch to Arch and “make my own distro” or just use SteamOS once it gets official desktop release.

The only reasons i stopped using gnome is the lack of system tray and the window switching workflow when using a mouse.

gnome 4 is fine. i come from macs and chromebooks, so a minimalist desktop with an app dock is familiar. KDE, XFDE, etc are too windows-y for me.

I like GNOME but there’s something so frustrating about how much it’s lacking out of the box. It feels like you have to fish out a lot of extensions to make it comfortable to use, and these extensions often break each update. Not having native support for a taskbar to quickly show/minimize the apps you have open… Just why?

Luckily a lot of distros do add those features out of the box like Zorin/Nobara, but otherwise I’d just go for Plasma. A lot of Gnome feels like it’s copying Mac for the sake of copying Mac which I don’t like very much, but maybe I’m biased because I mostly use and got comfortable with Windows-style UI. People compared it to Windows 8 and I totally agree, the way they want you to use Gnome feels more like it’s made for tablets than desktops.

Gnome is pretty good otherwise, it’s just their team makes weird decisions and never seem to change their stance.