In Defense of GNOME(s)
Shut the fuck up, NERD.
I really love using Linux as an operating system, but one thing that's consistently bummed me out is certain sections of the enthusiast community that's grown out of its userbase. Now, basically every "nerd" community has its problems—basically stupid assholes attaching themselves to a particular interest or affinity group because they're too socially defective to be accepted into normal friend groups, who carry their lack of maturity, thin skin, low emotional intelligence, and disturbingly high susceptibility to groupthink into the various niche spaces which they inhabit. That's bad, but I've noticed two particularly annoying tendencies present in the Linux community:
- The tendency to turn to vulgar tribalism when it comes to certain softwares and technologies, and
- The tendency to favor endless tinkering and "workflow optimizations" over, you know, actually getting shit done on your computer.
Both of those tendencies rear their ugly heads in various forms (hate around Wayland and systemd, the desktop "ricing" community), but they combine to achieve new dimensions of pig-headedness when it comes to the GNOME desktop environment. I sort of get how it started; the user experience between GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 was very different and the transition between the two was rough, to say the least. Lots of folks jumped ship at that time—hell, rather than use GNOME 3, Ubuntu made their own desktop environment for the distro. It was a strange time, and coincidentally the one where I found myself dipping my toes into the world of Linux.
My first experience using GNOME 3+ on my personal computer wasn't terribly good. If I remember correctly, I was trying out Fedora via a USB live disk. Having started on Red Hat and later Ubuntu, I found the user interface to be counterintuitive and confusing at first, so I didn't bother with it for very long. A few years later, I had a new laptop I wanted to run a Linux partition on, and I decided to throw caution to the wind and try out Fedora again. After taking a little time to adjust, I found that the desktop environment was actually pretty easy to use. It seemed quite a bit more polished than before, and I really liked how clean and simple everything looked. I ended up using Fedora with GNOME on it for some time, until one of my roommates at the time spilled chili on it and I switched to using a Macbook for a few years.
Fast forward to 2022, and I decided I was going to build a desktop PC with Linux as the OS. I picked Fedora as my distro, since I had a good experience with it the last time and the idea of getting the latest software every six months appealed to me. After installing, I begun to reacquaint myself with the latest version of GNOME, and I was really impressed. The simplicity and cleanliness from before was still there, and everything had a very slick, modern feel. The featuring of "virtual desktops" (I prefer calling them "workspaces") as a basic element of the workflow, rather than an optional feature or afterthought, was really cool and, having finally taken the time to learn Vim, I really liked how easy it was to navigate the desktop without taking my fingers off of the keyboard. It was really cool!
Over time, though, I noticed something: people were really fucking mad at this desktop environment. Like, really mad. At a desktop environment. Now, it's not like there weren't some valid complaints in there: GNOME keeps a lot of customization options out of the hands of regular users (particularly those who either don't know about or prefer not to use extensions) and the very opinionated way it's designed means that users who don't like or don't want to learn the intended workflow are going to have a rough time. Also, since the devs don't want to create a bunch of technical debt and minimize the amount of bugs they introduce, they can be slow or reluctant to add certain features you might want. And hey, those are perfectly valid reasons to not like particular DE, which is why lots of people choose other great desktop options like KDE Plasma, XFCE, Cinnamon, or one of the countless other desktop environments out there. Strange thing is, though, that some of these people can't seem to shut the fuck up about how much they hate GNOME.
Now, I don't think that anything is or should be immune from criticism (in fact, I think criticism can be a tool to make things better), but the level of hate this desktop environment gets seems rather disproportionate for something you can, quite easily, choose not to use and never interact with in your life. GNOME isn't a corporate monopoly like Windows, it's not an inescapable pop song, and it isn't a "hot new thing" like LLM-based "AI"s getting shoved in your face at every turn. It's entirely avoidable! So why do a dedicated group of internet shitheads have so much smoke for it?
In my mind, the answer, like I was saying earlier, comes at the intersection of pointless tribalism and a culture that cares more about posting desktop screenshots to /r/unixporn than using one's computer for recreation or (heaven forbid!) actual fucking work. From what I've seen, most of the shitflinging these people do falls into one or both of the following categories:
- "GNOME is literally the worst thing ever because it [doesn't have a feature I want | isn't close enough to Windows 7 for my taste | is too woke | etc], unlike my favorite desktop environment, KDE Plasma!" (no shade to KDE or the devs, it's a great DE with an annoying fanbase)
- "I think the GNOME devs are comparable to one hundred Ted Bundys because it makes it harder for me to spend countless hours customizing the look and feel of my desktop, which is of course the main, if not only reason, to own a computer."
So what do we do about these people? Do we write out long, well-thought-out blog posts to try to sway their opinions? If we engage with them in enough intellectual debate, will they change and grow as people, see the light, and stop being so annoying and insufferable?
LOL NO :^)
I don't think people often change their minds because someone talked them into having a different worldview. In fact, I think that almost never happens. I don't exactly know how to combat these attitudes in a realistic way. Hell, if you ask me, I think we should lure all these people into an enclosed space and kill them with hammers. But I'm told that's illegal, so I guess that option is off the table for now. This post isn't really supposed to have some kind of new insight or solution; really I'm just writing here to vent and maybe someone, someday, can see my venting and think to themselves, "yeah that guy kind of has a point". That's enough for me.
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