People have noticed I started using GNOME as the default interface for Linspire and Xandros and have asked why. Didnt I use to hate GNOME? Yes I did for a long time. This doesnt take away from the other two. I love XFCE and will always be an XFCE fan as well. Plasma is good too. If you are a Windows interface lover you will love Plasma. In fact Windows 11 took a lot of design pointers from KDE. The Windows engineers can deny it but you can see it. There is a lot of KDE influence in Windows 11. But GNOME. Why did I hate it and why did I change my mind?
When I first started using GNOME 3, I made the same mistake that a lot of people did. I used a ton of extensions, 12 to be exact, to try and make the experience better and instead I made it worse. Whenever I would get sent a new copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux I would always go grab XFCE right after install. Then Red Hat sent me a boxed copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. I was so busy working on my other distributions I just did what I normally do. Install it on a test machine but instead of working with it though I just left it alone because honestly I didnt have the time to deal with it at the time. One weekend as I was setting it up for deployment and I started using the standard, vanilla GNOME interface. The more I used it I started to notice the fluidity of the desktop and then I started to get it. I started to see why the GNOME team made the decisions that they made. Now this is not a gush fest over GNOME there are still a couple of things that drive me crazy and to fix some of those I use extensions but instead of 12 I only use 3. An extension to get rid of that stupid spring board animation in the app grid view, one for user themes and coverflow alt-tab. Now I havent even looked at GNOME 41 yet. I probably wont for another year. This will allow time for bugs and quirks to get ironed out.
But if you had the same experience I did and felt like you needed every extension on the planet to make GNOME more usable go back and disable all the extensions and take it back to vanilla GNOME. Use it for awhile. It will take some getting used to. You may even have some frustrations for a minute but give vanilla GNOME a chance and I can almost guarantee that you will see the beauty is in the simplicity and design. I never thought I would ever say this but I have to say I am a fan. I'm now a GNOME guy.
