I still like the look and feel of GNOME a lot so I spent a little time putting it together that way. I want a simple desktop with small elements to maximize real estate for windows. I also use the small taskbar on my work computer for the same reason. But with my work computer, I do show window titles because I usually have at least 5 workbooks open at once so it's nice to see which is which when I need to switch between them.
I love KDE's application launcher. It feels very Windows XP with the way it sorts things. It just makes complete sense.
Century Gothic may not be the most readable font in the world, but I think it has an old school charm to it.
And that's fine. I said I really liked gnome. The only extensions I had were weather in the top bar and dash to dock. I just wanted it to do a few extra things, and I wanted to play around with widgets. Gnome was also a bit too rigid for my taste. Plasma makes tweaking small things a joy.
For me, ootb Plasma felt too much like Windows. I use Windows all day at work so I want my home machines to look and feel completely unlike Windows.
So... How can you possibly justify that start button?
For the lolz, of course. Like, who is still using the XP start button in '25?
I'm 32 so I was a kid in the 2000s. XP represents a golden age of the Internet to me. A time when every YouTube channel looked different and any random MySpace profile you ended up on was probably playing MCR. Before you had to sell practically every scrap of info about yourself to use nearly any service, and Google wasn't visibly evil. Ads were mostly "Your friend's IQ was 44. Can you beat that??" because all the world's authoritarians were too old to care about the web. You could pretty reliably know you were talking to a person in a chat room, and you didn't have to do some kind of mental calculus to determine whether it was a bot trying to rob your grandma of all her money in Google Play cards. Pretty well no kid in the 2000s is safe these days. I'm sure most of us said the racial slur or the mental slur or had sexual relations with everyone's mother after getting shot in Halo. I'm safe. We never had Xbox Live lol But I played a lot of split screen Halo in the living room. Good, innocent times.
Rose tinted glasses and all that, but idk, I feel like we'll never achieve that again. Everyone was throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck. And the tech was kind of in a Goldilocks zone. Just powerful enough to be cool and exciting, but not so powerful that it gets scary.
Except for those damn PS2s being used for nuclear bomb guidance.
You should have tried Dash to Panel instead of Dash to Dock, based on your preferences. That plus Wintile is what keeps me on Gnome vs Plasmathese days.
🤦
Gnome devs shouldn't have put the onus of adding settings onto addon developers...
Never going to forgive those fools for having something like "gnome tweak tools" be recommended to so many users without them adding an official implementation.
Hah, yea, good point.
Right!? I was half expecting a maintainer somewhere to start adding some extra recommends or something when it really started to get grim. Happy Plasma user now 🚀