Gnome 40 - The anti-desktop desktop

In a few weeks, Fedora 34 will be released, and alongside it - you will get to use Gnome 40, the next version of this namesake desktop environments. But wait. Gnome 40 has been officially released only a few short days ago, and you can already try it. Ahead of the distro testing season, I thought it would be a neat idea to grab the software and check what awaits the Tux crowds en masse come mid-April. I downloaded the Fedora 34 beta and booted the system.

Going into a review without any expectations or great hope is a good thing for me. My emotional balance will most likely not be upset too much today. After all, for me, Gnome 3 has never delivered. It’s always been sub-optimal, introducing complication and confusion into the classic desktop formula through a strange paradigm of would-be visual minimalism and touch-like inefficiency. More mouse clicks = not fun. I don’t expect miracles. But who knows, I might actually be surprised. Remember, beta version, things could change. Now, let’s proceed. Commence…

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I’m definitely a bit biased against gnome so keep that in mind, but that’s because I have really really not enjoyed using it when I do. I even keep trying to use it on occasion as I keep it installed on my computer and give it another try on occasion to see how it evolves. But in short, I really really dislike gnome, all the way up to version 3 is what I’ve tried, we’ll see how 4 goes but based on this article I’m not going to be a fan of it either.

KDE on the other hand, I’m an absolute fan of. Not only is it incredibly lightweight (even lighter than most “lightweight” DE’s), but it’s “Activities” (not to be confused with gnome activities, which is basically just the running/runnable programs) are basically the multi-desktop view well known on X but to a significantly enhanced degree, and it’s amazing to add to your workflow. In addition, the sheer customizability of KDE and it’s ability to change to adapt to anything from huge Desktop views to phone interfaces is unmatched in my opinion thus far.

A fun thing to note, KDE by default is…fairly windows styled, but you can make it look like a mac, like gnome3, like gnome2, like gnome4, like unity, like basically anything else you could near imagine (short of VR interfaces, though that’s being worked on as well by others). It’s configurability is unparalleled by any other DE.

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I wonder which Linux distro/set-up is most Mac-like? If you have any links or vids I’d definitely be interested in taking a look :smiley:

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By default? No clue. But KDE can definitely become the most mac-like. I know I’ve seen the occasional youtube video and online article on how to do so, but can always set it up manually. The latte dock I think it was, was the main jumping off point? Then of course moving menu bars to the top of the screen, etc… etc…

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I have used dozens of Linux distributions and there are no Mac-like defaults at least in the most popular ones. That’s said most up-to-date distributions either share their own dark theme as default or provide Breeze theme. As it was said already KDE/Plasma is highly configurable and you can change everything you want. There are full themes ready to install for Windows and Mac look, so it’s not really that hard to setup it. I guess the biggest thing here may be only keyboard shortcuts which of course you can customize as well.

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