I actually like Gnome’s paradigm. But I also used CDE-style desktops for quite a long time, so I’m not really locked to the Windows ways. I would say Gnome is CDE inspired, but with the weird activities fuckery.
Ultimately, Gnome is just too lacking in customization. No panel, no notification area, window switching behavior… I have to install extensions for basic functionality. Which is fine at first glance, but then I have to be careful with updates when a new version is released, until the extensions update. Then I have to chase new extensions for the ones that are really lagging or cease development. Which happens a lot, because most people seem to get sick of dealing with that shit and stop using Gnome at some point.
Honestly, if Gnome would let me show the panel when docked and banish it to activities when undocked, I could probably live with all the rest. Also, have they fixed reversal of swipe gestures when you reverse scroll direction? That’s just absurdly bad UX, which is actually out of character. We might disagree with a lot of UX decisions from the Gnome project, but they’re usually refined and precise. The swipe gesture issues are just plain broken, or were, it’s been a couple years since I’ve used it.
KDE is just too much, and there’s quirky stuff I’m really not fond of. I’m using it now, have been for about 6 months now, which is by far the longest I have going back to trying it occasionally starting back in the late 90’s.
I’m excited for Cosmic, I used that for a good stretch, and it might be time to give it another try soon. I’m also excited for my old friend XFCE, and some other mid-weight DEs, finally finding their way to Wayland.
Yeah, I have almost no apps on my phone now. Breezy Weather, Firefox Focus, Comaps, Stratum for MFA, Signal, and a few other things. I rarely use any of it, except I check Breezy Weather once a day (better than anything I’ve found on the web). Signal seems to finally be removing the phone requirement, and I could move MFA to my password manager. I rarely turn on mobile data, and I get 6-8 days battery on my Pixel 9a running Graphene.
But, it’s really nice to have if I get lost when I’m in town. I can go from ruining my day, which being autistic, tends to snowball into a week or so, to pulling out my phone and getting everything back on track.
That said, I used to constantly have my face in a reddit app, have YNAB and all my banking apps, and rely on it for just about everything. I don’t need all that. I take my receipts home, I bank from my laptop, I bought a DAP for my music, Pocketbook for reading, etc.
That said, I’d like to move music back to it once I get a phone with an SD card that will run an OS I’m happy with. I’m optimistic for the Motorola phone with Graphene support. And I’d like to use it to control MPD or Navidrome at home, start getting some Home Assistant stuff running with it for control, and spin up an open source alternative to YNAB that I can run an app for.
It took me years to get to this point where I feel like I can start using it for actually useful stuff, and not be tempted to have it take over my life. Of course, now RAM and disk are too expensive for me to build the little hyperconverged cluster I want to run those services.