Why GNOME Won the Linux Desktop - 6 reasons

The GNOME desktop is the default of most of the major Linux desktop distributions in the world. Why is that? Especially when only half of Linux users (when polled) use it? Let's explore.

0:00 Why is GNOME the flagship?
1:27 Funding and Investment
3:15 Sponsor: Brilliant
4:52 Accessibility
6:07 Reactions
7:23 Testing & Research
8:43 Simplicity
10:44 Cycle of Adoption
11:50 Closing thoughts

#gnome #linux #switchtolinux
This video was sponsored by Brilliant.

Links:

[ShaunakHub]

Lack of customization (i.e. much more difficult to break/ mess up) seems to be one of the major reason why most enterprise level distros have chosen it. Imagine you are an IT admin in an organization with 100s of systems running KDE and every user is trying to customize it on their own way (and eventually breaking up one thing or the other) - pretty scary!!! But that is the same reason I love KDE. Although I don't have much against Gnome because you can make it work with a few extensions, but unfortunately they break after every update 😞.

[adriansileanu]

I believe that GNOME is the choice for those who want to put some distance between their desktops and Windows like desktops. So if you are searching for something which truly doesn't look like Windows, GNOME comes naturally.

[RipCityBassWorks]

I think default experience is also key. It takes just a couple of minutes to get gnome set up to my workflow (dash to panel). For KDE, it generally takes closer to half an hour with all the settings upon settings that can be tweaked.

[babyboomertwerkteam]

GNOME originally won for one reason only - it was the first desktop to be fully free software. The first two "free" desktop environments - KDE and Xfce - used proprietary toolkits (Qt and XForms, respectively). GNOME usurped the GIMP Toolkit, which was free software to begin with. Funding, UX research, and accessibility came later with the involvement of companies like Eazel - ex-Apple engineers who created Nautilus, Sun Microsystems who contributed a lot of UX research and accessibility development, and of course Red Hat who funded and supported the project very early on. A set of high quality, easy to use applications with a consistent user interface was the result of all this work, and why GNOME 2 especially was such a success.

[svyatoslavgrishin]

It’s arguable. Gnome desktop looks like it’s designed for tablets rather than laptops. KDE plasma is more functional and convenient in use.

[Mastarfiin]

you nailed it! I Love a lot about KDE BUT GNOME makes my experience just so much easier. Seems like I can just do everything easier/faster in GNOME.

[voidmind]

Valve are now paying some developers to enhance KDE. You could say KDE now has some steam behind it :)

[mannkeithc]

I have used Gnome and KDE on a variety of Linux distros including Ubuntu, Manjaro, Endeavour OS, Fedora / Nobara, Mint and Redhat, and always end up gravitating back towards Gnome, because it better suits my workflow. Gnome Vs KDE is a very personal choice because they are both good desktops. I like how the KDE desktop offers great levels of customization, plus some excellent apps such as Kate, but this customisation flexibility has also been a great source of frustration to me, when I have inadvertently turned something on, that I don't like, and it has taking me ages to work out how to revert it. Gnome extensions and tweaks don't always offer the same level of customisation granularity you get with KDE, but they are simple to enable, configure (when config options are offered), disable, and remove, and sometimes you need to enable the right mix of extension and tweak the theme and icons to get the desktop that's just right for you. Gnome also offers a great lock keys state indicator that simply works, whereas the KDE equivalent was more problematic to get working and the interface was not so polished. And course, if you are feeling reckless, Gnome has the dconf editor!

[propjoe]

I've used all the major desktop environments and at this stage, GNOME is the only one I'm interested in using (with a few extensions added). I personally appreciate SOME customisation options but desktops that advertise themselves as "completely configurable in every way" just leave users confused half the time. GNOME is fantastic for my workflow and I won't be changing from it anytime soon!

[FunBotan]

Vanilla gnome is still ass, everyone just installs dash-to-panel and a couple dozen other extensions because that's still easier than changing the DE altogether.

[bleack]

"I use Linux, but I'm not a developer so I'm fixing that"
That's literally one of the biggest problem with Linux desktop. The expectation that the user is a developer

[danpeer]

Gnome is great! I would have preffered it! Yet I am currently a KDE user because (a) no stuttering on KDE animations like we have with Gnome (tripple buffering is yet to be desired in Gnome) and (b) KDE window browser (dolphin) is much better than Nautilus

[jovianlitany]

Gnome 3 has had to come a long way to not look butt ugly. I like the innovation of it, but hate all of the visual padding and the bloat when compared to competing DE's. I like what Cinnamon has done with it, and KDE is still my choice so far. For me, It has just recently (Gnome 40) changed into something compelling. Keep in mind, it is still way better than the Mac OS or Windows experience.

[xrobertcmx]

Who said it won? Ahh, The desktop Wars, only eclipsed by the vitriol between emacs and vi users. Those where dark days.
Years ago, QT was owned by Trolltek and this created serious concerns for business users when looking at deploying KDE. Nokia buying it and the fork sorted a lot of that out, but it gave GTK the lead it needed.
Yes, the pro market is Gnome. But OpenSuSE is KDE, as is Manjaro, Kubuntu took 2 min to launch (still have an early mail order disk), and KDE landed on the Steam deck...that is going to alter the landscape.

[hamobu]

Gnome has been pushed because of political and ideological reasons. If people had to buy it, it would have gone out of business ages ago. When Microsoft came up with Windows 8 they had to recognize their idiocy and switch back to normal desktop. Gnome never had to do that. They just rammed down their stupid workflow vision down everyone's throats. When gnome 3 came out Linux desktop market share stopped growing.

Like no minimize and close buttons on windows. Can't save on desktop. No system tray. Useless bar on top that doesn't tell you what windows are open. What are they thinking? Sure I could eventually learn to use it but my poor ex wife never could. It's just pointlessly different.

[jeremyandrews]

Well, there are the obvious reasons, like the fact that it was the first fully open-source desktop, and the fact that Red Hat was pushing it so hard. Other reasons are simply related to the GTK toolkit itself. A lot of GNU developers preferred GTK being based on C rather than Qt being based on C++. It's also worth noting that GNOME 2/GTK 2 was actually really good and wasn't nearly as ugly, touchscreen-focused, and lacking customization options as modern GNOME, so those who might have otherwise opposed GNOME becoming such a dominant force had no reason to push against it at that time. It also really doesn't help that projects like MATE and Cinnamon are basically unofficial GNOME ESRs that keep the more traditional look alive for as long as possible, and give those unhappy with upstream GNOME a temporary reprieve before they are forced to embrace whatever GNOME did that they hated anyway, simply because the maintainers of MATE and Cinnamon don't have the chops to maintain a project like GTK on their own, and will thus be forced to follow in GNOME's direction sooner or later no matter how bad it looks. In fact, if you want a preview of future versions of MATE, you might as well just look at GNOME Classic today. I think by far, one of the biggest problems today with trying to use anything other than GNOME, though, is that most major web browsers use GTK, and your cursor will be forced to look like Adwaita if you use anything else, which means you're stuck either installing GNOME so you can tweak the look, being stuck with Adwaita, or trying to configure the appearance of GTK stuff without a control panel. The thing you'll find quickly on Linux is that whether you like GTK/GNOME or not, most of the apps you'll need/want are using GTK and look terrible on desktops that aren't either GNOME itself, forks of it, or at least GTK-based and thus dependent on it.

[theena]

I am not sure it 'won'. Vanilla gnome is not for me - it feels like it is built for a touch screen mobile experience and not necessarily for keyboard-centric usage that some people, myself included, prefer. I will always be a KDE person but recently I moved to popOS and I have to say, System76's fork of gnome - and the new rust based cosmic DE that they are testing - will become standard. It is as close to perfect a middle ground for someone like me who likes tiling and keyboard centricity when I am interacting with the OS, but without the insane levels of complexity that KDE opens up because of endless configurability.

[DSTechMedia]

I'm definitely on team Gnome. BUT I find it amazing how popular Gnome is despite it's devs making some very counter-intuitive design choices such as the decision to try remove 3rd party app-indicators from the system tray. This is a UI element that is fundamental to almost any OS going back at least to early Windows days. Even today Ubuntu has to ship the "app-indicator extension" to put this back. The same is true of maximize/minimize buttons.
But they are brilliant in having consistency for UI design throughout the apps and OS. You encounter the same things everywhere, and so you become familiar with it.
When 3rd party devs also utilize this design, the user already has a decent understanding of using their app.
It just makes sense.

[debasishraychawdhuri]

Using Linux has nothing to do with being able to code. You should be able to use Linux for anything you want, it is not supposed to be only used by programmers.

[unknown_codec_]

Ubuntu Gnome is the best version of Gnome, I like to use the customized version but I don't like vanilla Gnome, why no app dock? Why no desktop icons?