Intro

If you're familiar with my blog then you're probably aware that I prefer working on offline technology and minimalism, so if you're reading the title of this post you're probably asking yourself "Why on earth would you want to use Gnome??". I've been a long time user of pretty bare window managers such as i3 and Sway on my Arch and Guix systems respectively, however that I've since been lured back into the world of Graphical Desktop Environments and GUIs with the recent release of Gnome 42.

GTK4

So one of the main selling points for me on Gnome was the move from GTK3 over to GTK4 with it's beatiful and well thought out UI. Not only that but I'm getting significantly better performance on my laptop than I was using i3, and I'm talking an average of 30-50% CPU during work to around 15-20%. GTK4 apps are also more responsive and more lightweight since a lot of these newer tools are utilizing Rust.

Workflow

I'm able to migrate all of my keyboard shortcuts that I utilized from i3 and not have my workflow suffer. The only thing I miss is tiling windows, however it seems I can still have that if I so choose with something like Material Shell (not related to me). Since I do most of my work in emacs/eshell I'm not really worried as much for having window splitting when that supported natively in emacs, however it is useful in cases where I am comparing or writing notes for something that is on multiple windows.

Often I've advocated for KDE but lately I've had some issues with QT apps looking how I'd like as well as a lot of consistancy issues in the UI. While I really enjoy the customization within KDE it doesn't really add that much value when most of what I'm working with is full screen doesn't really bring me value. I support fully what KDE is doing and will continue to use it on another VM to see all the updates but overall I think Gnome is what I'll be using for a while.

Final Notes

I'm mainly excited for the performance boost that Gnome 42+ is bringing and can't wait to see what they have in store for the future. I've already looked at an early version of 43 and thing they're on the right track with normalizing GTK4 so quickly across all programs. Hopefully now that I'm getting the hang of gnome I can work on porting some GTK3 applications to GTK4, maybe even work on some new ones.

Resources


*να είσαι καλός*