>Never understood why all the distros pivoted to Gnome shell
AFAIK two reasons.
For one, KDE 4 was considered horrible, making everyone switched to Gnome, and due to inertia, they stuck with in instead of going to KDE 5. And some users can be incredibly petty, stubborn and opinionated, just because they tried KDE 4 one time, hated it, and then keep bad mouthing it years later even though they haven't tried KDE 5 and their opinions are out of date, they'll still keep bragging how they tried KDE once and it was shit so nobody should bother with it according to them. Even on HN. All this bad publicity didn't help since other users took it as gospel.
And two, the release cadence of Gnome versions was on a fixed calendar basis, meaning distros like Ubuntu and Fedora could plan their own releases to line up with that and always ship their newest distros with the newest Gnome, while KDE wasn't and would update the KDE Gear framework, QT and KDE release at totally different times unallied to any fixed dates, making sync planning for distro releases to ship with it very difficult. The KDE release cycle is more fitting for rolling releases. I heard they're planning to change this in the future and switch to a fixed cycle as well.
No, these things go back much further than the KDE 4 or Gnome 3 product cycles.
The distro/commercial ecosystem preference for Gnome dates back to earlier times, and comes down mostly to geography and licensing.
Wrt/ licensing, the underlying GTK GUI toolkit had LGPL some years before Qt moved to also having an LGPL option under Nokia ownership. That meant if you were a commercial entity wanting to invest (as, e.g. Sun and Adobe did with GTK at various points), GTK looked like the better bet.
Geography: When the Gnome community initially forked out of the KDE community, the fault line was partially regional, with the core of the KDE community remaining in Europe and the initial Gnome developers being American KDE devs. As a result, for many years (and to this day), if you go to a Linux event in the US, you're more likely to run into a Gnome/GTK person, and therefore things are more likely to happen.
The software industries in the US and Europe also tick quite differently. The US for a long time offered more career paths for young kids in FOSS to graduate into product companies involved with what they were doing before (e.g. Red Hat). KDE/Qt developers have generally graduated into consultancy companies that spend their time on proprietary products instead (with exceptions).
These things have a lot of inertia and long-term effects.
It's interesting to see a bit of a reversal of this trend now, with the latest breed of meaningful new Linux deployments that get to make fresh choices (e.g. Asahi for Apple Silicon or the Steam Deck) generally shipping KDE Plasma instead of Gnome.
> I heard they're planning to change this in the future and switch to a fixed cycle as well.
KDE has had time-based releases and has also been doing LTS releases for about a decade now, ever since the 5.x series.
But your comment still contains some truth; you're probably thinking of the monthly release cadence the KDE Frameworks libs have had vs. the slower Plasma cycle. This has indeed caused some discomfort at distros over the years, and KDE is now making changes to make this easier.
KDE4 was great. KDE 4.0 was terrible, but everyone ignored the developer advice to wait for 4.3 (which is when KDE 4 became great again) and the concluded all of KDE4 was bad even though it was just the first release.
>As much as I'm a KDE fan, saying "developer advice" was to wait for 4.3 is very unhelpful (not to call it something else)
At least they were honest and upfront about it that it's shit and it's gonna be fixed later. Gnome's response in such a case would have usually been "it's not a bug, you're just holding it wrong"[1].
I can't get my head around why Gnome doesn't have an option in settings to prevent laptop going to sleep when lid is closed. In KDE you can configure that and much more regarding laptop behavior when charging vs on battery.
Why there is no option on Gnome to ungroup windows in dock/launcher without installing third-party extensions. On KDE it's one click. Not everybody likes to click 2-3 times to open desired window.
Gnome's default image viewer can't even crop or resize photos.
There is a ton things like this that make KDE far more usable out of the box than Gnome.
The only thing that is better on Gnome is HiDPI handling. KDE works kind of OK with wayland on HiDPI screens but some apps have issues with very slow scrolling, e.g. SublimeText and LibreOffice apps
> The only thing that is better on Gnome is HiDPI handling. KDE works kind of OK with wayland on HiDPI screens but some apps have issues with very slow scrolling, e.g. SublimeText and LibreOffice apps
so that's what's been going on?
is there a bug report i can monitor? is a fix coming?
Gnome at least made sense for Red Hat/Fedora since they are the biggest sponsors of Gnome. I think another part of it was that the migration from KDE 3 to 4 was pretty rough, which also helped drive a lot of distros away from KDE and over to it. Ubuntu also had Unity and when they decided to give that up Gnome was more similar to Unity than KDE was, making it the obvious replacement. And don't forget the old licensing controversies over Qt, which were long settled by then but a lot of people still regarded Qt with suspicion.
>And don't forget the old licensing controversies over Qt, which were long settled by then but a lot of people still regarded Qt with suspicion.
I think a lot of users today weren't even born when the QT controversy was happening yet they keep bringing it up like it's an active showstopper. I think this piece of lore keeps getting repeated so often everywhere, that people forget where it came from and assume it must be a current issue if people still keep bringing it up.
Agreed, it hasn't been a real issue in what, decades? I've been using Linux for a really long time but even for me I think Qt had switched to GPL a couple years before I first used KDE (exact memory fuzzy). But I definitely recall people bringing it up and using it as a reason to avoid KDE even in the KDE4/Gnome 3 early days.
In 2014, the Debian project cited accessibility [1] as a main reason to offer Gnome as the default desktop. Since that was over 9 years ago, a lot could have changed. However, observing that Gnome is generally the most well funded Linux desktop, and is sponsored by/the default for Red Hat Enterprise Linux [2] that has large incentives to meet government accessibility regulations, there's a good chance it is still ahead.
[2]: It is also the default on other enterprise Linux vendors, such as Ubuntu (albeit customized) and even major KDE supporter SUSE uses Gnome Classic mode as the default for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop
There generally has been a major regression for both GNOME and KDE with regards to accessability with the switch to Wayland IIRC. Mostly due to the strict separation of apps and not being able to snoop eachothers windows by default.
Tho there have been major works sponsored/supported by GNOME/STF to improve the entire accessibility stack used in the Linux userspace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9psDfEFf9c
KDE was LGPL and flirting with the idea of making money. GNOME was FOSS purist and GPL, making it a safer bet at the time.
Then again, maybe Qt is so much better today than GTK because Trolltech is a company that makes money. (It's not even close; projects are fleeing GTK for Qt, and it's the reason why every GTK app is a toy compared to a Qt alternative, like Nautilus vs. Dolphin.)
It was the other way around. It was GTK/Gnome with the LGPL licensing, while Qt's open source edition was initially GPL-only, before LGPL was added later on.
LGPL means you can write closed source software against the open source toolkit, and yes I think it's fair to say this was a big driver for commercial adoption of GTK in the late 90s to early 00s as it seemed like the better ticket for "serious" closed source software on the Linux software.
The irony is of course that today, far more "serious" software (e.g. your Autodesks, Mathematicas, Abletons, etc.) with Linux releases has been developed with Qt and little or perhaps none with GTK since that earlier wave (where maybe the most complex app was Acrobat PDF Reader).
> far more "serious" software (e.g. your Autodesks, Mathematicas, Abletons, etc.) with Linux releases has been developed with Qt and little or perhaps none with GTK since that earlier wave (where maybe the most complex app was Acrobat PDF Reader).
You have to use Qt if you want anything but trivial desktop software. D: If you've used modern GTK and Qt, it's obvious why.
