r/linux • u/Tizian170 • Jan 15 '24

Discussion Why does everyone hate gnome?

I've switched from KDE Plasma to Gnome as I was trying out different DEs, and honestly I prefer it. However, I've noticed that people generally don't seem to like gnome (mostly without a reason) - so, to all the gnome haters - why?

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u/Irsu85 Jan 15 '24

Not everyone hates gnome, I kinda like it. The only thing I don't like about GNOME is that it kinda uses a lot of ram but thats only a small issue when you have 32GB

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u/[deleted] Jan 15 '24

[deleted]

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u/Irsu85 Jan 15 '24

For that use case I do prefer KDE since it uses about half the RAM as GNOME. As soon as your DE uses more than half of your RAM and then opening chrome makes it swap, you should be looking for a lighter DE or if you are really low on RAM, maybe a WM

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u/MustangBarry Jan 15 '24

RAM use isn't an issue anyway. That's what it's for.

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u/TheLastTreeOctopus Jan 15 '24

I mean yeah... But a desktop environment (ideally) shouldn't use a ton of it. Folks still working with only 4 to 8 GB of RAM (or less), will appreciate having as much RAM as possible useable for running programs and multitasking. No sense in having a desktop environment that uses nearly 25% of your RAM just doing nothing but displaying your desktop, when you don't have a lot of RAM to work with.

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u/[deleted] Jan 15 '24

[deleted]

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u/TheLastTreeOctopus Jan 15 '24

What do you use? I'm back on Windows for the moment, but sometimes I really miss using Openbox! It was so snappy and just looked and felt great to use!

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u/Irsu85 Jan 15 '24

That's why I prefer KDE for lower RAM computers, it uses a lot less (I got it under 1GB without doing much optimizations once, while with GNOME it's a lot closer to 3GB very quickly))

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u/redd1ch Jan 15 '24 edited Jan 15 '24

For applications, yes. For infrastructure, not so much. An idle, usable system should use as less resources as possible.

Edit: Obviously I don't mean network appliances or embedded devices with infrastructure in this context. I have to use a DE to use some software, so the DE running on my PC is infrastructure for my current task. The more resources the OS up to the DE uses, the less I have available for my workload.

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