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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The latest release of the de facto default desktop of most Linux distros brings some new features – but the GNOME 4x transition isn't done yet.
GNOME 47 was released last week, codenamed "Denver" after the venue for this year's GUADEC event. This release returns some touches of customization that had gone away, brings some long-wanted functional improvements, and a few new components.
Both Ubuntu 24.10 and Fedora 41 are in beta testing, and both should arrive in the middle of October with GNOME 47 as their default desktop environments. You can't fully judge GNOME 47 from Ubuntu "Oracular Oriole," though. Canonical tweaks the GNOME desktop environment a little with some pre-installed extensions to make it a little more familiar to long-term Ubuntu users. For instance, Ubuntu's default GNOME desktop has desktop icons, notification icons in the top panel, a permanent dock along the left screen edge, and a tool to assist with tiling windows. Fedora eschews these changes and ships a largely unmodified version, so it's much closer to the stock appearance.
GNOME 47 lets you set your own highlight color, so you're free to pick clashing combinations if you like – click to enlarge
The new feature that receives top billing in the version 47 release notes may thus seem a little puzzling to Ubuntu users: customizable accent colors. This is the color tint that's used to call out or highlight parts of the desktop, such as the current tab or the default button. Ubuntu users already had this, and if you're using GNOME 43 to 46 on a different distro, you can get this via an extension. Now everyone gets this option.
This is noteworthy because since GNOME 40, the environment doesn't permit users to customize their themes. As we described when we looked at GNOME 42, there is one official theme, "Adwaita," and both developers and users are meant to leave it alone, which has proved to be controversial. The Reg FOSS desk tends to leave theming to the professionals, and GNOME has some of the best in the business. GNOME designer Jakub Steiner's level of attention to detail can be discerned from his blog post about the wallpapers in GNOME 47.
[...] The new Text Editor app, which replaces the venerable Gedit, gets better printing and spellcheck. The new GNOME Console terminal emulator has more settings, such as scrollback size. GNOME Maps now has route planning, thanks to the external Transitous service. GNOME Calendar now has drag-and-drop import of ICS files for events, and better network calendar support. GNOME is still one of the best-of-breed FOSS environments for supporting network interoperability with cloud services, and this version gets better support for IMAP config, WebDAV, Microsoft 365, and more efficient Kerberos authentication. The Remote Desktop Connection app can now handle persistent sessions, meaning that it can resume a disconnected login session.
Although we suspect most people probably use Firefox or Chrome, GNOME's Epiphany web browser has a bunch of new features. Now it can do automatic form filling, has better bookmarks, improvements in the handling of text boxes and the address field, as well as passwords, image contrast, setting wallpapers, and more. Sadly, though, support for Mozilla's Firefox Sync, missing for a few releases, hasn't returned yet.
Many more changes are under the hood and less visible – unless it means improved support for kit that you use, such as VR headsets, which get better Wayland support. There's improved handling for graphics tablets, including customizing button actions and pressure sensitivity. Graphics acceleration has also improved, especially on Nvidia GPUs, and there's better handling of machines with hybrid graphics. Interop with X11 apps is better, with drag-and-drop, improved fractional scaling – but if you're one of the people who wants to banish X.org forever, GNOME can now be compiled entirely without X11 support.
Especially now with the return of limited custom color selections, and Files' expanding functionality, we sometimes get the feeling that after GNOME 3 got started by removing a large range of functionality, over the years since the team has been gradually adding it back, piecemeal. The growing functionality of some of its accessory apps also makes us wonder if the project might not save itself some work by cooperating more with existing external projects. However, public disagreements with both Pop!_OS developers System76 and also comments from the Linux Mint team would seem to suggest that's not the GNOME way.
Whatever the reasons, it is the flagship desktop of most Linux distributions today. It's the only choice on both SUSE and Red Hat's enterprise flavors, as well as being the default in Debian, Ubuntu, and many others. As such, long may it grow and flourish.
(Score: 2) by ls671 on Thursday October 03, @09:13AM (4 children)
It's been a while since I heard about gnome. I am using kde on my slackware desktop and xfce on the few headless debian servers with a GUI which are accessed with VNC over ssh with compression enabled (-C option) where I usually install konsole since I like it. I tried X2GO at some point but it doesn't seem to work too well yet and all it does is basically wrap the connection in ssh anyway.
Oh! the ubuntu computer I am typing this on in my bedroom seems to be using gnome since I have a "gnome-shell" process running!
Anyway I recall at some point, quite a while ago, people complaining about the directions gnome had taken.
Feel free to educate me with regards to where current desktop solutions are at nowadays!
Everything I write is lies, including this sentence.
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Thursday October 03, @10:12AM
Originally I switched to gnome from kde because I wanted to try wayland and at that point only gnome had any sort of support for it, among fully featured DEs at least. I like that gnome doesn't get in the way and I don't have to waste too much time making it do what I want. I use some extensions though, like sensors, clipboard manager and gsconnect. Not even sure I'd be able to configure kde like that. From my memory my efforts to configure panels in kde mostly didn't do what I wanted and were getting broken by updates. I still use so many kde apps so my DE can be called KNome :P
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday October 03, @02:57PM (2 children)
I have been in GNOME since 2013, but started transitioning into XFCE in mid 2024. Preferred KDE before that, but 4k resolution screens were getting popular in 2013 and Unity had a better handle on that issue at the time, and I have never had a strong reason to get back into KDE since they finally addressed font size and other resolution scaling issues adequately.
I started to use XFCE in 2016 but ended up in GNOME for "reasons" and have been stuck with it since as the desktop under our product. We're finally doing an OS update and GNOME is getting drop kicked out by XFCE because: modularity. We need control of our desktop, so much so that running a bare window manager has been proposed, and I tried that back in 2016, but settled on XFCE instead because on the bare window manager I was reinventing too many wheels that XFCE already has nicely polished. So, XFCE gives the developers and testers creature comforts when they boost productivity, and then we can simply turn that stuff off when it's time to put the system in user facing mode.
GNOME is configurable, too configurable at a fine grained high level of detail. There aren't enough free standing optional modules that you can just not launch when not needed or explicitly not wanted. All that detail becomes a maintenance problem, and also a completeness problem, even after years of use and explicit testing, we are still discovering key combinations that expose the desktop and other behaviors we don't want.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by boltronics on Friday October 04, @03:01AM (1 child)
I was using GNOME since pre 1.0, and loved it for many years. Moving to 2.x was annoying at first, but I came to love it even more. Then there was 3.x. That's where the GNOME project lost a lot of their existing user base — myself included. Needing to use extensions and hacks just for basic functionality, and so many features missing. IIRC, sloppy mouse focus didn't work properly and could only be enabled by messing with settings in gconf-editor — things that prior versions had done well for years. I ended up switching to Xfce.
Then I got myself a 4K monitor a few years ago and wanted to run it side-by-side with a monitor of a different size and lower resolution. Hence, I needed per-monitor DPI adjustment so that applications would look to be the same size on either panel, which meant Wayland. Only GNOME and KDE Plasma had Wayland support, so I experimented with them both.
On GNOME, I calibrated both monitors so that the applications on either looked to be the same size. I then tried dragging an application from one screen to the other. On GNOME, there was no smooth transition — the application would simply "hop" from one monitor to the next. I then tried KDE, and found that I could drag an application window from one screen to the other seamlessly. I could even have a window half on one screen and half on the other, with the window looking the same height on both screens despite the very different screen DPIs.
I have no idea if GNOME ever improved in this regard, but I have been using KDE Plasma ever since, for both my main desktop and laptop. I even switched to KMail and Konsole as a result (from Thunderbird — and Evolution before that, and Terminator for the xterm) so I think it would be very hard for me to give GNOME another serious look at this point.
However, I still have Xfce running on a few really old computers I have at home, such as an Core i5-2300 with 4Gb of RAM, and a Gigabyte BRIX.
While I think of it, there is one killer feature Xfce has that KDE does not! It did make the initial jump to KDE slightly frustrating. In Xfce under Settings -> Window Manager -> Keyboard it's possible to set a shortcut for "Fill window". It's like maximise, but only increases the window size to the maximum amount of space that is not already occupied by other windows already on the screen. I wish KDE would get something similar one day, but I've learned to live without it. KDE's custom screen partitions sometimes help to a degree, but they aren't as good IMO.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 04, @01:02PM
A lot has to do with timing, KDE moved slower into 4K support and probably because of that had a better architecture to do the things you describe.
XFCE is still bad about click and drag to resize windows, the control edge areas are too small, but if you train to their system, alt+right click and drag is much easier for window resizing and you don't do it accidentally....
Being able to take definitive control of things by shutting them off entirely, not just configuring parameters, is XFCE's big advantage for my use. Power manager, screen saver, auto logout? Yeah, just off. Same for "desktop" icons and right click menu, I will set wallpaper myself with feh, thank you very much.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by crb3 on Thursday October 03, @09:54AM
They're setting up for another rugpull... because that's the Gnome way.
(Score: 3, Touché) by MonkeypoxBugChaser on Thursday October 03, @12:59PM (6 children)
I run mate, xfce and kde on most systems. Worst came to worse, I'd run Cinnamon.
They're only default if you can't download an ISO with some other DE. Those enterprise flavors are meant to be connected remotely and do work.
Gnome is truly the DE for masochists.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Freeman on Thursday October 03, @01:19PM
Xfce has been my DE of choice for quite some time. It's lightweight and doesn't get in my way.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Thursday October 03, @01:39PM (2 children)
KDE seems a bit noisy to me, and "too full of magic". I prefer Mate. Perhaps I'd use xfce as a second choice, but a few years ago some of the features I wanted weren't working, so I picked something else. I haven't looked at Cinnamon for several years, but the last time I did it was in 3rd or 4th place. Gnome2 was my choice when KDE3 was replaced by KDE4...but Gnome3 seems worse than any of the one's I've mentioned above.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 04, @02:46AM
KDE here. It's closest to what I want (I really want the XP desktop back) without being Trinity, which I really prefer but it doesn't have the stability.
Gnome makes Win10 seem friendly (and I say that after watching Win10 autofuck itself with a 6 hour update, then had to go back and fix all my settings, and it is now in never-update-again mode. This is where I will whisper that when Winaero Tweaker disables updates, it does it so thoroughly that Windows goes "Updates? Whuzzat??") So to those who went "Where the %@#$ is my desktop??" when Gnome3 arrived, know that we understand your pain.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday October 04, @01:31PM
I always found KDE to be "the other gnome".
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday October 03, @04:39PM (1 child)
MATE user here. It is so easy to configure just the way I want it and I have written numerous 'extensions' to Nautilus. I had no success trying to tailor KDE to my wishes; it seems to me to just be bling that gets in the way of my work.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 04, @02:52AM
I disable nearly all the KDE bling (there are a couple things I use, like dim inactive window, or whatever it calls it). It is indeed annoying that it's not disabled by default, and lacks a "disable all, dammit" button.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday October 03, @08:50PM
I switched to AfterStep followed by WindowMaker, never looked back. The whole point of using FOSS was I am empowered. I get to do what I want. GNOME was the future once but they blew it. The world moved on.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by corey on Friday October 04, @11:40AM
I just read the release notes. It seems like the changes are a bit useless. Custom accent colours? Why is that a thing now? And I’d have thought all the widgets that use a colour don’t have it hard coded but as a final variable. Then they just need to code up a picker.
The other things are also mostly tiny changes that don’t make much difference. One is that screen recording uses less CPU. Hmm ok. Another, it looks better on small screens. There’s another thing for 1% off users. Ok the save as dialog is better. That’s something. But then they say scaling is better for fractional values. But it’s still experimental and you need to run a special command to make it work. Ugh. I, like heaps of others I know, have a 4K screen and 100% scaling looks tiny and 200% looks huge. FIX THAT GNOME PEOPLE! We’re the 80% needing that fixed, who cares about colours or small screens. Fix HiDPI!
Oh the other thing they announced was improvements in the GNOME Web browser. Web browser??! Why are they still doing that, wasting time? Who uses this browser? Even Firefox only has something like 3% of the browsing market. I thought they killed off that browser that was bundled with GNOME years ago.
Having whinged about all that, I use it a bit. I used to be a massive KDE fan but since got sick of the days of customisation I invested my life into, and now just want it to get out of my way. But still look modern and functional (don’t like XFCE much).