> GNOME 2 was perfect

I'm one of those rare people that like Gnome 3 way better than Gnome 2 or any other "windows 95" or "traditional-style" desktop. Other than command-line apps, I run like 5 main pieces of software regularly (IDE, browser, etc.) and probably 20 pieces of gui software total over the lifetime of my PC. I want something that:

1. Makes it easy to launch my main 5 apps (under 1 second)

2. Makes it fairly easy to run the 15 apps I run less often (couple secs max)

3. Looks pretty out of the box w/o customization so I can just get stuff done

The only environments I've used that tick all my boxes (subjectively of course) are Gnome 3 and macOS.

I think Gnome 3 especially does this extremely well. I flick to my upper right hot corner to expose my dock with my 5 apps - instant launch. If I want one of the other 15 I'm happy to type it in the resulting app search box. Done. I never understood why I would want to click and navigate for like 10 seconds (much less have to remember WHERE it is and WHY it is under a certain 'category') to launch one program from a Windows 95 style start menu. To each their own I guess.

EDIT: I should add a #4: Minimal customization. Gone are my days tweaking me DE exactly how I want it. While I do _some_ customization - it is very little (1 or 2 extensions)

I don't think it's rare to prefer GNOME 3 over GNOME 2; in fact, I would wager that that is the majority opinion.

By the way, I find it even faster to launch apps by pressing the Super (Windows) key and typing the app name. For example, you can press [Super] [t] [e] [Enter] to launch a GNOME Terminal instance. Just my 2c :)

I really shouldn't focus on speed. I start my apps and then let them run for a month or more (or whenever I reboot to for kernel patches), so it is more about annoyance than speed (and I've always found "start menus" annoying), so I've never bothered to figure out the keyboard shortcuts :-)

I use XFCE, a lightweight Win95 style DE. My XFCE start menu ("whisker menu") is bound to Start+Space, which lets me find apps by name. For apps I use frequently, they are bound to Start+[Key], eg, Start+F for the file manager, Start+S for Sublime Text (also used to open new windows in each app).

I do miss the Expose from macOS though, I don't think XFCE has that. (Edit: apparently this can be done with a third party tool.)

On manjaro (xfce edition), just press start and then type part of the application name.

I just figured it out a few hours ago. :-)

I bound it to Start originally, but then all my Start+[Key] bindings would open the start menu (and leave it open). This was a few years ago though, maybe the current behavior is different.

Add this to Application Autostart in xfce4-session-settings.

xcape -e 'Super_L=Control_L|Shift_L|Alt_L|Super_L|Escape'

Then bind xfce4-popup-whiskermenu to Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Super+Escape in the keyboard shortcuts. You can use another key combination, but that's what I use to avoid any plausible conflict.

The whole XFCE, LXDE, LXQT always leaves me confused but probably just because of the name :D

On Manjaro I've always used XFCE and it's a very nice DE for sure.

Yeah I think Gnome 3 nowadays is very good. Though I recently switched over to KDE and I think it’s also pretty great from a “gadget” perspective. The options offered in a right click in the file browser are a good distillation of the design differences between KDE and Gnome (as well as the screenshot widget…)

Definitely would have no issue recommending Gnome to a normal computer user. I like having the busier interface nowadays though.

Windows or desktops? For windows, why not just alt+tab? Gnome really prefers having multiple desktops with close-to-fullscreen windows on each. And super+mouse wheel is fantastic on desktop machines, but the best experience to me is on a laptop with 3-finger swipes (because it is fast and doesn’t make me wait an animation a la osx. Which is funny because their swipe gestures are spot on on the iphone)

I found it more Intuitive to control my computer with mouse instead of keyboard shortcuts, as most regular user do.

I rarely do. I have 3 monitors and usually just place one window per monitor.

When I do switch, it is easy, flip to hot corner, pick window, done.

As you said, it takes two actions to switch windows in GNOME, but only one action in Windows (clicking an icon on taskbar).

I absolutely loved KDE 3 back then.

Konqueror was awesome. File Manager and Web Browser in one! For some ideological reasons they decided to introduce Dolphin as a file manager in KDE 4 which had much less features.

I ended up switching to Xfce though these days I also use Cinnamon (also Gnome 2 inspired) because it is the Linux Mint default choice. Though I hate that they have recently tried to make Cinnamon look more "fresh" and keep changing it so I probably will end up going back to Xfce if it still the same.

From what I (vaguely) remember, the reasons behind moves like Dolphin were that they felt the integrated Konqueror was a mistake. It certainly made for hard maintenance, the integration system often broke after small changes; and I can imagine security was an issue. Microsoft had made a similar choice in Windows 98/2000/XP, and went through a similar backtracking after XPsp2.

Also, they were trying to move the system to Qt4, which was a big task. Breaking things up probably seemed logical. Add a bit of classic FOSS bugfix-is-boring-let's-rewrite, and voilà...

Of course, in MS’s case the backtracking happened primarily because after years of court battle and endless millions of dollars they were told they’re very much not allowed to deeply integrate the browser to the OS. There never was any technical or usability merit in marrying the two Explorers, it was 100% Microsoft’s attempt to own the web.

I went through almost the same story.

At some point I was disappointed by KRunner of KDE 4 disappearing with my partially written formulas, then found Qalculate.

Then I saw someone at work using i3, and I was amazed and hooked. I changed some keybindings to be more familiar (like alt+f4 close and alt+f2 run). But recently I have been having some dual monitor troubles with it. Maybe I'll try Trinity for a few weeks. And maybe some tiling WM other than i3.

I should really spend a weekend seeing whether I can get the Trinity desktop environment running with i3 as a window manager. I'm currently using a Gnome-flashback/i3 hybrid that's surprisingly nice.

> GNOME 2 was perfect. … MATE … It’s not perfect …

Is MATE worse than GNOME 2 used to be?

I just switched to MATE and I have run into all sorts of odd bugs.

1. If I position an external monitor above the primary, I can’t put any windows in the overlapping portion along the x axis.

2. If I disconnect and reconnect the external monitor, maximized windows return to their original monitor but half-maximized windows don’t.

3. If I disconnect and reconnect the external monitor, the background becomes tiled instead of zoomed with Marco + compositing and it blacks out and the desktop flickers with Compiz.

4. With Compiz, I can constrain the window switcher across all windows to the current workspace but I cannot constrain the window switcher within app group to the current workspace.

5. With Marco + compositing, due to a regression, taking a screenshot of a single window includes the boundary around it that contains the window’s shadow.

There was something else too but I forget. Quite dispiriting but I have given up on finding the perfect desktop.

It has rotted a bit unfortunately, due to shifts in lower level libs.

Gnome 2 was peak for me too.

I use XFCE these days. It's close enough to what GNOME 2 was.

Came here to say this. I don't use heavy desktop environments personally (some machines of mine run dwm or even), but I set up a machine for my daughter recently and did so with MATE. It's a pretty good desktop setup out of the box. Boring and mostly gets out of the way. She's mostly using chromium.