Today I had a bit of an epiphany.
I’m mostly a KDE and Cinnamon kind of person. I use Windows 11 a lot as well. Most of my Linux systems use KDE or Cinnamon. These days I mostly use KDE, because outside of Mint Cinnamon, Cinnamon just seems to miss out on a few configuration options - it’s a bit odd.
Until about midday today, if someone had asked me I would have said that GNOME was simply clunky. To run an application, you have to get to the activities screen, and start it that way. If you want to switch applications, you have to go back to the activities screen, and select the application you want instead. There is no minimise button, so you can’t just uncover another application. With KDE, it’s much easier - you pin what you want to the taskbar, and then you can start and switch applications there. I think this is why stock Ubuntu comes with a taskbar on the left hand side of the screen. The problem was that Rocky OS comes with GNOME and no taskbar.
About midday, I watched a YouTube video about how to use GNOME properly - it turns out, it’s a bit more like Hyprland. I can do something with that. You have an endless sequence of workspaces, like Hyprland, and instead of piling everything into one workspace, like KDE, you put one or two applications on each workspace. You can move the applications from one workspace to another, like Hyprland. Unlike Hyprland, it doesn’t try to tile dialog boxes, which is one reason why Hyprland and myself just don’t get on together.
Now I think that GNOME is my favourite desktop. It’s quite a change of viewpoint in less than a day, which is why I am writing this. It leads me to think that the GNOME people ought to sort out their communications about how GNOME works. I suspect that many people are trying to use GNOME like KDE, and finding it harder work than it should be. The YouTube videos are out there, it’s simply a question of connecting GNOME users and the videos together.
Have a nice day.