GNOME is going to be replaced
Don’t donate to the foundation, donate to the extension maintainers
I’ve always admired how GNOME has advanced in the last years. There is a reason why Ubuntu and ZorinOS decided to fork it for their own desktop experience, and why Pop!_OS used it on their first versions. But as you may see, nobody uses GNOME as-is, they always put something on top.
That’s because GNOME is unusable.
We’re past the age of having a single window using the whole screen, or asking the user to change windows using keyboard combinations. People who are using Linux are no tech-savvy dudes anymore who can move their way through the console like any Monday morning. Linus is receiving average gamers, students, home-office workers; normal people are coming to use the tux (thank Windows for that).
And normal people cannot use GNOME out of the box.
Extensions are going to bite GNOME back
There is a big reason why most of the people, at least from my perspective, use GNOME with extensions, and that’s because the default desktop experience is asinine. It’s cumbersome for anything but real work, and it confuses any first time user about how to use their own computer.
In other words, the end-user is punished for using GNOME when the extension developer moves on.
It inexplicable how GNOME pushes you to be mono-task, hyper-focusing your experience only on what you have in front of you. The drawer of applications is hidden by default, there is no support for task icons, and some other configuration require secondary apps (like Tweaks) instead of being backed in. Newbies use the mouse more than the keyboard, and asking them to “press Super” to make the desktop work is the same as Microsoft asking people to press the “Copilot” button on the keyboard.
GNOME suffers from overshooting. It’s what I like to call “aiming to the Moon, landing on Mars”, or the “Jonathan Ive effect”. Pursuing a philosophy or mantra to the extreme, losing sight of what’s really important in detriment of the core experience.
While the GNOME team is already planning some useful features, it sounds totally tone deaf when they negate the features that implement the most downloaded extensions —they have the metrics there, it baffles me why they ignore what developers have solved. Even if the future looks great, the reality is that today the desktop experience still depends on the fragmented, often fragile community that is developing extensions for pure passion and love.
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In other words, the end-user is punished for using GNOME when the extension developer moves on: a bigger job elsewhere, tired of maintenance, moving to other desktop or operative system, lack of funding, etc. Most of these extension solves a problem the developer has.
As it has happened, and will continue happening, with extensions: you will still see projects without updates, breaking on the next desktop version. What happens when the Dash-to-Dock extension stop working, two or more extensions become incompatible with one another, or the AppIndicator maintainers leave? What does the normal user does?
That type of duality is what makes me think twice about recommending to donate to GNOME Foundation.
There is no golden manual or magic switch to “change your desktop experience” in Linux, and most distributions don’t recommend it given their packages are hard-plumbed into the desktop manager.
The average user will resort to just install another distro without GNOME and call it a day when things break — Valve didn’t choose KDE for SteamOS with a dice, System76 didn’t found Cosmic on an old drawer. Multiply this for the GNOME user base and you end up with people leaving slowly but steadily because everything is breaking, which is more frustrating than being invaded by ads on Windows.
GNOME cannot be saved on looks alone. The libadwaita library, a set of common widgets for GNOME applications, makes everything cool, well designed, and forces apps to use the same graphical language that makes everything feel pleasantly integrated. It angers me because libadwaita is a great idea on a desktop platform that is not great.
Trying to be two things at the same time
To me, GNOME is split in two.
One part wants the software to be a complete desktop experience. The problem is that it’s failing to do so. The experience prioritizes the “one app desktop” to the extreme, actively negating real productivity features that should be backed in.
On the other part, it wants to become a baseline for an usable desktop, but fails because it depends on the volatile extension repository that breaks on every GNOME release, rather than offering a stable framework to work with.
That type of duality is what makes me think twice about recommending to donate to GNOME Foundation to actually fund the thing millions of people use. If they want that money, they have to prove they’re worth your dollars in this economy, and that means pushing what the people want, not what looks prettier.
Let me put it in another way: I understand that financing is what can make a foundation do real change on the products and services it offers, and GNOME is no exception to the rule. The problem appears when they negate their own metrics — the extensions market. It sends the message that the people in charge don’t give a sh*t beyond their paychecks and contacts, and are not aligned with the community of both GNOME users and GNOME extension developers.
Until the GNOME Foundation doesn’t pick one of the two, they risk being left behind by the next complete desktop experience or framework: KDE, Hyprland, Cinnamon, or whatever new girl on the block appears to steal the attention.
I’m just waiting for Cosmic to become more stable than a desktop environment with rough edges to make the switch of for a free-extensions-that-may-break experience, because Cosmic is transforming in what GNOME should have been all along: a complete, stable and graphically pleasing desktop experience.
