The simple 2-bit explanation is KDE is following Windows trends, Gnome is following Mac trends. Even the screenshot widgets are both following the closed-source versions (recent Gnome screenshot widget is exactly the new MacOS screenshot widget)
I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches" distro, but ships with a DE that will annoy nerds much more than KDE does. My Linux experience got so much better under KDE. I respect what Gnome does a lot but I feel at home in KDE land.
IMHO the difference is that KDE took the classic Windows desktop as starting point and has developed it into something that's now actually better than the Win10/11 desktop. GNOME OTH might be trying to imitate macOS but if that's actually the case they are doing a very poor job (I spend most of my time on a Mac, but have recently switched from GNOME to KDE on my Linux laptop because after updating to Ubuntu 24 I was finally fed up with GNOME's UX only ever getting worse, never improving).
PS: switching from GNOME to a KDE desktop session was absolutely trivial and quick on Ubuntu btw.
> IMHO the difference is that KDE took the classic Windows desktop as starting point and has developed it into something that's now actually better than the Win10/11 desktop.
In some areas KDE has also taken inspiration from macOS, and imo significantly improved over the original. The best example in my view is the Present Windows desktop effect, which is fundamentally a take on Exposé/Mission Control but massively outdoes those equivalents in usability by adding fuzzy filtering as you type to select windows. A less appealing version of that (Contexts) is something I have to pay money to a proprietary app developer for on macOS.
Ignoring all the other bad stuff with Windows 11, one thing that made me switch to Linux was the ugly "modern" design. iirc, someone on HN said that Windows designers don't even use Windows, they use Mac.
But then I switched to Linux and a lot of apps, specially gnome and gnome-inspired apps, have such terrible design as well. I'm going to spare you the details because I could rant about it for hours.
IMHO The pinacle of the Windows desktop was Windows 2000. Windows XP was ok except for the default bubble gum theme. We don't talk about Windows Vista and Windows 8. Windows 7 was sort-of ok. Windows 10 is was trying to salvage some of the Windows 8 mess with little success. Can't comment on Windows 11 because I'll stick with Windows 10 as long as possible ;)
I agree with this more when you include how the then current versions of MS Office felt to use.
Ribbons might have a place at the absolute entry level of usability, but they'll never replace a well designed menu system that includes keyboard shortcut documentation in the UI within a super information dense presentation.
I hate the way menu bar is detached from the window/app that it applies to in macOS, but over time I've learned to grudgingly appreciate one thing about this design: it forces the apps to have a menu bar, because if you don't, it is such a visual sore point. So even when designers go nuts with UX layout, which seems to be so common these days, they still have to provide access to various things in the menu bar in a way that is mostly consistent across apps, and in any case is easier to find things in (esp. thanks to menu bar search as standard feature).
Who are you targeting as the main user of this software? Most users do not depend on keyboard shortcuts but rather repeatable actions they can use the mouse for. The ribbon only annoys power users which is a number much much smaller than 50% of all users. Plus keyboard shortcuts still exist with the ribbon system.
As someone who has spent a lot of time with “regular users”, no body is complaining about the ribbon…
> Plus keyboard shortcuts still exist with the ribbon system.
So this objection is completely manufactured?
> The ribbon only annoys power users which is a number much much smaller than 50% of all users.
It's 0% of the users who are new to the software, and 90% of the users who have used the software for some time. The UI shouldn't be optimized for people who are only going to use the software a few times unless the software is only meant to be used a few times.
But in the case of office software, what you want is affordances that can be eliminated at the user's own pace while they get to know the software over years or decades. Things like indicating the keyboard shortcut next to the menu entry, which is standard for most UI toolkits. Or things like allowing the "ribbon" to be disabled, which I would be really surprised if you could come up with a reasonable opposition to.
It also annoys infrequent users, because you need to remember into which ribbon they stuffed what you want to do and what icon it uses. With a classical menu bar, the organization tends to be more intuitive (in my experience, at least) and you can skim the different menu items to find what you need.
That seems to depend on the specific version of Office, if the screenshots I looked at are to be believed. Office 2016, for example, doesn't seem to have it.
Edit: Maybe this depends on settings rather than versions? Upon further investigation, I've found some screenshots of Word/PowerPoint 2016 that have a search bar and some that don't.
This almost makes me want to try a Mac. Everyone is copying them, they must be pretty good, right?
I just miss it when my apps had main menus, and dialog windows instead of transitions, and it didn't feel like every window was a browser even when they weren't electron apps... and I miss the window borders, and the colored icons, and when themes weren't just light or dark and...
You'll be disappointed. Even Apple isn't adhering to its own Human Interface Guidelines anymore. It might be the least bad option of the current desktop environments, but that doesn't mean much.
As sibling comment says, you'll be disappointed - and worse, unlike on Windows or Linux there will be no way to change things you don't like. With Apple, it's their way or the highway. For example, they just don't do themes at all, and have slowly deprecated or removed even the basic customization features they used to do well (like changing the icon for a folder).
I recently started using a Mac at work and Gnome aping MacOS is the only thing that makes sense.
The applications selector, the settings drop-downs... spatial Nautilus... it didn't just start with Gnome 3. These are all poorly-implemented, half-baked versions of MacOS features. It has been going on for years.
I mean, the thin scroll bars for $deity's sake! On MacOS this makes sense because the trackpad and trackpad/mouse work, and work very well. On Gnome, it makes no sense at all since you can't hit them with the mouse pointer.
As a decade old macOS user, I agree. I don’t want to use macOS after Gnome. I like the new one. It’s 45 now, but I think the major update was either 44 or 43.
Yep, GNOME’s closest proprietary analogue is iPadOS, not macOS. GNOME omits all sorts of little power user features in comparison and takes the whole minimalism thing much further than macOS ever did (often too far IMHO).
This applies to Pantheon too, even if it’s prettier. There unfortunately isn’t a Mac-like DE.
Unity was till 2017, it states. Hmm, what does Ubuntu use now? It’s not the Gnome I use on Fedora. I don’t like (and use) Ubuntu, so I was under impression that it uses Unity to this day.
Ubuntu uses Gnome as the default install, however it has official "flavours" that you can choose from, such as KDE (the Kubuntu flavour), Unity, and others.
They stopped using Unity years ago, but it came back recently as a flavour. You can throw it into a VM and see how it is if you're exploring.
>Gnome's future looks even more Phone/Tablet oriented [link]
Well, that looks very opinionated to me. And I have an impression that opinion is from someone quite far from being competent on UI matters. I see it — the background kill switch — as a great simplification and I use it all the time. I absolutely hate the mess of background apps in tray, be it macOS or Windows. Here, it’s way simpler.
> I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches" distro
Is it though? I mean, it is advertised by magazines and shills as such, but it really is not in practice, never has been. Back in the days, Mandriva was the "no headaches" distro, since then many distros have caught up - my go-to for many years that I also successfully got non-nerds to use has been OpenSUSE.
The original name was Mandrake, precisely because it would magically autoconfigure all your hardware and software - well before Ubuntu existed.
The issue Mandrake/Mandriva always had, was that they would go a bit overboard with the approach, ending up with a system that could feel a bit sluggish - because it had all sorts of stuff preinstalled "just in case". It was also a bit of a separate kingdom - used RPM but wasn't really compatible with the wider array of RedHat packages.
The Ubuntu innovation was that they hit a better middle ground: they were fundamentally Debian-compatible, and their autoconfiguration worked well (particularly with 3d cards, at the start) but also gave you a fairly fast desktop.
In the early days of my Linux use I was on Mandrake 7.2 and loved it. All the "just in case" random packages were very entertaining and educational to me, although they were probably a distraction from whatever I was meant to be doing!
Still, the experience seems to have served me well in the end. I do miss that feeling of discovering all the weird themes and window managers they packaged by default, I don't get the same vibes of "any UI is possible" these days (even though the UX is probably much better by conventional criteria).
As the sibling comment says, was relatively popular here in Europe. It was my first GNU/Linux disto. I had problems installing Debian in a laptop with a nasty Wifi PCMCIA card, Mandrake was able to make it work.
Me too! Count me in! Mandriva was my first ever Linux distro! It was so long ago that I forgot it happened. I came to think that was Ubuntu, but it came after Mandriva and after Ubuntu I was on Debian, of course. Now it’s Arch on my laptop and Fedora on my desktops.
OpenSuse is fantastic. It’s very easy to set up and nice to use out of the box. It’s also fairly close to the bleeding edge and at the same time very stable. I am quite happy with it.
IMHO the best update strategy I've seen is the FreeBSD/NetBSD quarterly update, with "base" part of the system not updating. OpenSUSE is too frequent to my taste.
The one I usually install to normal users who do not know computers well is KDE Neon. But yeah with recent very positive experiences with openSUSE Tumbleweed, I am also thinking about using oST instead.
I think you have this backwards. KDE has been ahead of windows since the Windows Vista era. KDE4 and Plasma (KDE5) are extremely good and have been borrowed from liberally by the commercial desktops for quite some time.
> The simple 2-bit explanation is KDE is following Windows trends, Gnome is following Mac trends.
I am a heavy Mac user at home (for about 20 years), and a heavy Linux (and to a lesser extent Windows) user at work, and I don’t see that at all. Gnome is infuriating even for a Mac user. I don’t like KDE either, so I use XFCE, but I am absolutely not at home in Gnome.
I feel that this perception that Gnome is Mac-like is because the Gnome devs have strong opinions and don’t tend to compromise. But as a piece of software and desktop environment, Gnome is not more “Mac-inspired” than KDE.
> The simple 2-bit explanation is KDE is following Windows trends, Gnome is following Mac trends.
I find it more that Gnome is following Android/iOS trends. They're trying to be the mobile DE, but Linux (aside from Android) on the mobile phone was DOA.
Saying gnome is following MacOS just says you haven't used gnome since ages, give gnome 45 a spin and tell me how it's following macOS, it's better than macOS will ever be.
I was on Gnome on my laptop until January 2024 (was running KDE on the desktop). I have gotten a Mac laptop for reasons and... I stand by my judgement.
I think you could say Gnome is better than MacOS's DE, or that it's worse (to be clear, I don't think it's worse really), but my point was more that the design philosophies are close along so many axes
If GNOME would be following Mac trends, we would get more Vala and less JavaScript, and proper developer tools instead of writing XML based layouts by hand.
I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches" distro, but ships with a DE that will annoy nerds much more than KDE does. My Linux experience got so much better under KDE. I respect what Gnome does a lot but I feel at home in KDE land.