Why Gnome?

[Matthew Crews]

On 11/9/20 5:58 AM, Steve Litt via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> A recent thread got me thinking: What does Gnome offer that any old
> environment with a panel (the thing they used to call a "taskbar" in
> win98)? What can you do with Gnome that you can't do with LXDE or xfce?
> 
> I'm unable to use Gnome because I init with runit rather than systemd,
> but I'd still like to understand how Gnome makes life easier for people.
> 

I've used Gnome for quite some time on my Fedora setup. I like it
because of its distraction-free design. It gets out of my way and lets
me focus on work, while at the same time looks pretty.

It has a few major things going for it.

* Excellent keyboard-only navigation
* All of the major components are well integrated with each other
* Frequently updated (6 month development cycle, with bug fixes between
each major update)
* Several major distros and their corporate sponsors contribute to it
directly (Fedora, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian, to name a few)
* One of the best DEs for the visually impaired (so I'm told anyway,
that that with a grain of salt)
* It's pretty, especially the most recent versions.

Its obviously built around GTK applications, but QT-based applications
work just fine. And of course if the terminal is your thing, you can
open a terminal.

The workflow definitely takes getting used to, especially if you are
used to something more akin to Windows. A few of the default settings
are a bit batty too. It took me a solid month to get used to the
workflow, but that was over a year ago and now I don't even think about it

The mistake people make with Gnome is that they try to turn it into
something its not with extensions: give it a launch bar a la KDE Plasma,
remove the top bar, that sort of thing. At that point it defeats the
purpose of running Gnome in the first place.

The only extension that I consider absolutely vital is an extension for
adding tray icons, since some applications require the system tray.
Otherwise I'm content with a pure vanilla experience.

My 2¢

-Matt