I agree that GNOME and KDE are gorgeous and very polished in many ways. However, I have had some problems in GNOME, Fedora, or Open Suse:
fractional scaling is not immediately available in Fedora or OpenSuse, at least to users who don’t know how to use the terminal [Edit: Thanks, DannyBoys for pointing out that Ubuntu may have fractional scaling enabled by default and that experimental fractional scaling on GNOME can be activated, at a battery cost]
the track-pad two-finger scrolling is painful (compared to a Mac) to me and to people who have used my laptop with Fedora or OpenSuse
sometimes it’s hard for me to get software, especially outside of .debs. For example, in Fedora I had trouble getting Signal Desktop installed from a source that I felt comfortable with (maybe this speaks to my ignorance in how Fedora packages are set up and distributed more than the reality of insecurity, but even this is part of the issue: I couldn’t find any reassurance). To be fair, Open Suse gave me that reassurance, because I understood that YAST was somehow more directly tied to the source (I could be wrong, but that was my impression). However, YAST’s software download software is a far cry from the kind of UX that the GNOME Software app is or the Apple App Store.
Despite these problems, I do have to say that GNOME is absolutely gorgeous. It’s precisely the kind of user-centricity that I want to see in Linux.
However, the end-users aren’t the only users. There are also developers! For example, I remember listening to the developer of the Mojo language talking with Richard Feldman, and the developer said that the development of the Swift language made it clear to him that Apple is aggressively user-centric. I don’t doubt that there are many problems with Swift as with Apple products in general, but I don’t see that kind of discourse in Linux coming from the main maintainers. Instead, there seems to be a vanguard arguing for a better developer experience (such as writing kernel code in Rust), and they find loads of friction. Heck, key developers are leaving Linux!
Edit: Clarified what is strictly my interpretation.
Fair enough. Now that I think about it, maybe the developer experience in Apple products are not universally lauded.
For example, I remembered Pirate Software saying that he didn’t develop for Mac because it was a pain, including having to pay Apple $100 yearly to distribute code without issues. Additionally, I remember my brother meeting a Spotify developer, and the Spotify developer said that Apple makes great hardware but lackluster software.
At the same time, it seems like Swift is not a hated language. The 2023 and 2024 Stack Overflow developer survey reports that, even though few people use Swift (~5% of developers), there’s ~60% of admiration for the language.
Yup. Modern MacOS is only pleasant to use if you have absolutely no preferences on how your computing environment should work and am willing to completely accept the walled garden.
I’ve been using fractional scaling on my laptop with GNOME since I installed it about four years ago. It’s a bit heavy on battery usage but it’s worked as expected for all this time.
Oh. I see I was wrong. Amazing. I should look into that! How did you enable it? I did a quick search and found I just need to do gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"; is that it?
I’m sorry for having said something untrue. For example, DannyBoy points out that GNOME and whatever Ubuntu uses do have fractional scaling.
However, is my experience untrue? Was I lying when I said that my track-pad two-finger scrolling is frustrating? Furthermore, it’s not unusual for people at work to try my track-pad and it being way too sensitive or too un-sensitive, but no in between.
Was I lying when I said that, for me, it’s hard to get software? Was I lying when I said that maybe this is a skill issue on my part, but even that is indicative of a lack of easy ways of getting reassurance in the way that Apple makes it easy to find software in their App Store?
Was I lying when I said that, to me, GNOME is gorgeous?
Was the creator of the Mojo language lying when he recounted his experience developing Swift?
Was I lying when I said that developers are leaving Linux?
I agree that GNOME and KDE are gorgeous and very polished in many ways. However, I have had some problems in GNOME, Fedora, or Open Suse:
Despite these problems, I do have to say that GNOME is absolutely gorgeous. It’s precisely the kind of user-centricity that I want to see in Linux.
However, the end-users aren’t the only users. There are also developers! For example, I remember listening to the developer of the Mojo language talking with Richard Feldman, and the developer said that the development of the Swift language made it clear to him that Apple is aggressively user-centric. I don’t doubt that there are many problems with Swift as with Apple products in general, but I don’t see that kind of discourse in Linux coming from the main maintainers. Instead, there seems to be a vanguard arguing for a better developer experience (such as writing kernel code in Rust), and they find loads of friction. Heck, key developers are leaving Linux!
Edit: Clarified what is strictly my interpretation.
Only if by “customers” you are referring to how they constantly find new ways to fuck you over.
Fair enough. Now that I think about it, maybe the developer experience in Apple products are not universally lauded.
For example, I remembered Pirate Software saying that he didn’t develop for Mac because it was a pain, including having to pay Apple $100 yearly to distribute code without issues. Additionally, I remember my brother meeting a Spotify developer, and the Spotify developer said that Apple makes great hardware but lackluster software.
At the same time, it seems like Swift is not a hated language. The 2023 and 2024 Stack Overflow developer survey reports that, even though few people use Swift (~5% of developers), there’s ~60% of admiration for the language.
Yup. Modern MacOS is only pleasant to use if you have absolutely no preferences on how your computing environment should work and am willing to completely accept the walled garden.
Otherwise, it’s a hellscape.
I’ve been using fractional scaling on my laptop with GNOME since I installed it about four years ago. It’s a bit heavy on battery usage but it’s worked as expected for all this time.
Oh. I see I was wrong. Amazing. I should look into that! How did you enable it? I did a quick search and found I just need to do
gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"; is that it?I believe it was enabled by default on Ubuntu.
congratulations
none of that is true
I’m sorry for having said something untrue. For example, DannyBoy points out that GNOME and whatever Ubuntu uses do have fractional scaling.
However, is my experience untrue? Was I lying when I said that my track-pad two-finger scrolling is frustrating? Furthermore, it’s not unusual for people at work to try my track-pad and it being way too sensitive or too un-sensitive, but no in between.
Was I lying when I said that, for me, it’s hard to get software? Was I lying when I said that maybe this is a skill issue on my part, but even that is indicative of a lack of easy ways of getting reassurance in the way that Apple makes it easy to find software in their App Store?
Was I lying when I said that, to me, GNOME is gorgeous?
Was the creator of the Mojo language lying when he recounted his experience developing Swift?
Was I lying when I said that developers are leaving Linux?
apart from the Mojo thing you it wasn’t clear that this was only your experience, and none of which are accurate or useful observations
It sounds like you really value skill, precision, and usefulness.
GNOME is not user-centric. GNOME is GNOME-centric.