Switching to the Gnome Desktop
Going from hating something to wanting it everywhere
I come across as pretty polarised sometimes, but those who have known me long enough know that it just takes the right kind of push for me to go from absolutely hating something to loving it. Obviously I have made an effort to avoid this as much as possible, nobody wants to come across as a mercurial git, but quite recently another instance of this flip flop occurred, and in the form of the Gnome Desktop.
When I first saw the concept desktop shell for Gnome 3 I was a little shocked, on this side of the world everyone was still on a Blackberry or some such and this Tablety , touch screen , post PC world sounded both insane and threatening to my existence. The gnome interface looked like it was designed to be some sort of hybrid between a desktop PC and some sort of touch screen interface. I thought this was madness, we have so much space on the desktop, so much precision with a mouse, they were taking away my power!
Unity offended me in much the same way with it’s ridiculously large fonts that could be seen from space but as time passed I got used to it as more of an OSX/macOS clone. It turned out that all I wanted out of a desktop anyway was hitting the Super(Windows) key and typing the name of the application I wanted to open.
That and of course switching between applications, as someone who has never been an alt+tabber , I really wanted a dock , or bar, or... something to indicate what I had open. But then , something happened, one of the two stars that would have to align for my appreciation of Gnome to develop.
I started to realise that I let my computer distract me a lot , I would have multiple windows open , a YouTube video playing , an instant messenger buzzing, three terminals running curl, wget or some package manager for who knows what reason besides curiosity, and a game of 2048. Yes , this is my home machine . I am not doing what is defined as work in these periods of time, but I still want to get things done, that’s what makes me happy, what drives me, and all these distractions are a problem and must be stopped.
It was in the middle of me trimming other fat though (playing with programming languages I will never use or learn anything new from) that Ubuntu made an announcement: It was dropping Unity for Gnome. My natural and obvious reaction was to panic , format my drive and install the KDE version of Manjaro (clearly I base all of my decisions off of formal logic).
There was a problem with KDE though, even the modern Plasma 5 started to feel bulky, The window decorations seemed to resemble classical ornate picture frames in comparison to Unity , macOS or even Windows. KDE’s design ethic also seemed to be “make this look like it drives space shuttles”, making most of it’s apps competitive with Visual Studio in the “Has tons of menu options that I have no clue about and never use” category.
So after talking to a stranger on the internet, who told me to just try Gnome and install plugins to add a dock and other things that I was missing, I installed Gnome… but I didn’t install the plugins. You see , when I installed Gnome , I gazed upon a fresh clean desktop. I had long vanquished desktop shortcuts from my desktops when I am not using it as a literal desktop to store things temporarily, but this was different. It was cleaner , no dock , just a thin bar at the top telling me that number that determines whether I should go to bed or not, and wide open freedom.
It was at this point I decided that I should try using Gnome the way it seemed to be intended, as a type of “Zen Mode” desktop.
And now, default Gnome is working great for me. I usually have one maximised window open at a time.It turns out I didn’t have to be a control freak and know what was running all the time while basically living inside IntelliJ. If I really need to know , it’s only one key away. If you treat Gnome as a distraction free desktop , you will not be disappointed.
This revelation has gone so far that in fact, at work on my macOS desktop, I emulate Gnome by hiding the dock, and have moved to using maximised windows and alt+tabbing a lot more than I used to.
I am seeing a lot of articles popping up telling you how to mod your Gnome to function more like Unity in the wake of Cannonical’s announcement. I would seriously encourage having a more open mind and attempting to embrace Gnome for what it feels like it’s designed for before making it something that its not. For me , it’s now my go to desktop, and I have no plans for changing it any time soon. Hopefully this will also put a notch in my belt and help me not reject or dismiss new things the first time I see them. It’s important to evaluate things on what they are designed for , not how we think we want to use them.
