Goodbye, GNOME
I have been using GNOME on Linux since I first installed Ubuntu 08.04 back in 2008. Over the years I tried KDE, some other desktop environments, and even spent some time on i3 and a couple of other tiling window managers, but I always came back to GNOME.
I actually quite like Gnome Shell; it suits my workflow. Although I understand the support for MATE and projects to keep GNOME as it always had been, I embraced the new concept when it came out.
And in the last couple of years, POP shell from System76 has been perfect for me.
But I am writing this from within Arch Linux running Awesome WM on xorg, and I plan to remove GNOME shell from all my machines.
Why?
The simple answer, or rather the straw that broke the camel’s back, is the buggy implementation of Pipewire that ruins my work zoom calls.
But there are two convergent reasons:
- I want to get back to a more CLI driven desktop, with TUI over GUI, and GNOME offers the opposite.
- GNOME’s politics.
In my estimation, the GNOME Foundation is now incapable of maintaining the GNOME project, and I expect it to get worse over time. And I do not hold that my software choices are morally neutral: I started using Linux and supporting software freedom (be it Free Software or Open Source) 17 years ago for ethical, moral, philosophical reasons, as a protest against Microsoft and Apple.
Does that mean my life is de-Googled? No, but I don’t have to be to make an informed choice.
So, goodbye GNOME. You were my first desktop, but you have changed and not for the better.
To invert the age-old put-down:
It’s not me, it’s you.