GNOME isn't for you, and that's okay!

GNOME doesn't need to centre power user needs and wants to be good.

Published Sep 1, 2024

Recently, there was an article from John Woltman about their disliking of GNOME that caught attention on social media. I'm not interested in writing a rebuttal to it largely because it's personal preference and opinion, even though I strongly disagree with many points risen in their article but also because it's symptomatic of a general problem in the FOSS community, and how GNOME is perceived by many people in the Linux community, and I'd like to take the opportunity to defend GNOME here and talk about how it deserves to stand on it's own merits from the position of a user of GNOME, as well as the position of an app developer in the ecosystem.

There is a very strong and vocal contingent who believes that for a desktop environment to be good, it needs to follow very similar designs and interface patterns to older versions of Window, and offer many customisation offerings, otherwise it's bad and their developers hate their users. I personally think this is a very short-sighted approach, and ignores the benefits of alternative takes on desktop computing and the downsides of older designs.

Quality UI > Customisable UI

I personally believe that a well crafted and thoughtful interface, that is opinionated and intentional in what it does is better than one that offers many different ways to use it, but aren't consistent in their quality and may or may not be a good user experience depending on their needs. Having too many preferences is a band-aid solution to solving real issues with interface design. Things fundamentally should be good to begin with, and if something isn't right, it's a bug that needs to be fixed. Having multiple different options also means if you want to make sure things work well, you also have additional testing to do and design decisions to make. This leads to more bugs and issues down the road.

GNOME balances this by offering an opinionated default interface, that is easy to adjust to and learn, but keeps preferences to things that users might genuinely have a preference or need for for (accent colours, wallpapers, accessibility features, etc.) available in a way that's easy for developers to test and easy for users to understand, rather than offering multiple half baked layouts that mimic different systems, but don't feel very good to use.

I'd recommend people read Choosing our preferences by Havoc Pennington, who historically has been a key figure in the GNOME Project.

No, GNOME isn't designed for smartphones

Contrary to seemingly popular belief, GNOME doesn't make design decisions exclusively to accommodate smartphone and tablet UIs. While there is both an effort to make apps adaptive for different form factors, including mobile, and an effort to bring GNOME Shell to mobile, the core GNOME desktop experience is designed for a desktop.

The default GNOME experience is designed to be distraction free, and accomplishes this by using a modal design with two states: the "desktop" mode with the user's windows and applications, and the overview, which has the search, overview of workspaces, and a dock-like bar called the Dash at the bottom of the screen in the overview mode. In this case, GNOME has chosen to prioritise people who might get easily distracted (such as people like myself with ADHD), or otherwise prefer to focus on the task at hand over people who want to quickly switch between and open new apps (which is still possible in GNOME by getting used to shortcuts).

The top bar is designed to be less distracting than a traditional task bar, by only showing relevant information to what the user is doing such as the workspace overview in the left, the time and date in the centre, and a group of status indicators on the right. Clicking on these elements will open the overview, calendar/notifications and quick settings for things like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and brightness. This allows users to quickly get to things that might be relevant to them at once, but don't want to get distracted by things. At the same, time, GNOME is conscious to not overwhelm the user with indicators for things that don't make sense to have them. Once again, GNOME has chosen to prioritise people who are distraction prone over people who want to see every single thing going on at once.

Finally, a common source of derision in Adwaita, GNOME's design system, is that it often uses bigger padding and generally bigger elements compared to other design systems. I think this is a good thing, as it makes it easier for people who struggle with shaky hands, people who find it easier to read bigger text, or simply people who have higher density displays as well as people using touch screens. In this case, GNOME has chosen to prioritise these users over those who want to see more on the screen at once.

Overall, while having better interface designs for touch screen devices is a good thing, and isn't something that GNOME developers are shying away from, a lot of design decisions that GNOME makes aren't just to make it work better on a touchscreen device. They're conscious decisions that make GNOME easier to use for more people, including those with disabilities, over power users who are generally well catered for in other desktop projects anyway.

GNOME doesn't need to copy KDE, both are great anyway.

I think that finally, what a lot of users in the power user category that criticise GNOME for not having enough options, or being too phone like don't understand, is that GNOME isn't targeting them at the end of the day.

For people that want to be able to craft their experience, KDE, more specifically their Plasma desktop, is great and offers many different ways to tailor their experience. I don't personally use Plasma because I find it buggier, less refined and harder to use than GNOME, but I know many users would prefer Plasma for it's options, and it's great for those users. I think that KDE does a lot of great work on making Plasma, and I'll happily support them working on it even if it isn't for me.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I don't think it's a good idea for GNOME to go back and offer a lot of customisation, or to concede ground on it's controversial design just to accomodate these users, because then it wouldn't be GNOME and what makes GNOME special. At the same time, there are other desktops and projects, like KDE Plasma, that do accomodate these users, and I think they should be pointed in that direction instead.