this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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People just want things to never change. How many of those users do you think actually bothered to look into why GNOME won't implement SSDs?
I don't understand what change has to do with it. The problem is, lots of people have used it, tried it, criticized it, and been ignored. It has nothing to do with change.
Change is fine, as long as the new version is better than the old one. Look at how KDE evolved. Sure, there were a lot of people that didn't like the 3 -> 4 transition (not me personally, I loved KDE4), but very few people lament what KDE has become today and it certainly is very different from what it was during the 3.x days.
Personally, yes, I and a lot of other users have read why GNOME does not implement SSDs, and frankly their reasoning is not very convincing, but I don't think it matters that much. The fact is, users don't care why it's not implemented - if they don't like it, they're just going to criticize the project and that's just why GNOME is so widely hated.
Trust me, I don't want to hate GNOME - I wish I could just make my life easy and use it as a sane default. But if it's not good, then I can't do that - and by "good", I mean how I define a good desktop, not whatever creative definition they dreamed up.
The CSDs vs SSDs has very little to do with users, it's about pushing application developers to create their own decorations and get rid of the awful title bar. In the end GNOME caved and created libdecor and now I still have half my applications with an extra bar that has literally 1 button.
Interesting, I was not aware of libdecor. Sorry to hear that it degraded your experience - it really sucks when things like that happen. For what it's worth, I have seen some interesting themes which could be a reasonable solution to that problem - basically, they made the titlebar very thin or completely missing, except in the area where the window buttons were located, which were enlarged. Not sure which window manager they were made for though - I think it was either xfwm or openbox.
But in any case, this is the problem with CSD - it doesn't really have a complete, holistic vision. It's great that they're trying to be innovative, but then they very quickly run into problems like the one described by the Factorio developer above. So now they're in a very awkward position that simply cannot meet everyone's needs.
And yet, we never had this problem before they went on their quixotic CSD journey - that's why many people think it was a really bad idea.
I think the conflict comes from the philosophical opposition to the application being in control of such a thing. Title bars are for window management and application termination, which are beyond the purview of the application itself. GNOME decided that they wanted it to be something different and include application controls as well all on their own.
i think gnome is actually pretty good... for a desktop with limited duties. like launching a browser and email--perhaps a word processor, and not much else. think a chromebook alternative that could actually do more if you wanted. a lot of things are 'hidden' to the user by default, what a user does need to be able to access (wifi, etc) is relatively easy to find, nice big icons that you can put front-and-center while relegating system-related things to a folder. i've set up a number of systems like that.
for my own uses though, gnome does need a half-dozen extensions for me to consider it 'usable'.. but i would still prefer a 'traditional' desktop experience such as cinnamon
I completely agree. For basic things, it is very good. But for productivity, it leaves a lot to be desired, because they (the developers) simply cannot accept that different people work in different ways and they refuse to accommodate that.. I prefer environments that can be adapted to my workflows - I don't want an environment that forces me to adapt to it. And it doesn't help that extensions tend to break on upgrades.