83% of GNOME Users Installed Extensions, Survey Shows (omglinux.com) 86
Last summer GNOME invited people to voluntarily run the tool gnome-info-collect on their systems to send back (non-sensitive/non-identifiable) data about their system configurations. 2,560 people ran the tool, and they're now releasing the data.
Here's the distribution of distros for all 2,560 respondents:
Fedora: 1,376 (54.69%)
Arch: 469 (18.64%)
Ubuntu: 267 (10.61%)
Manjaro: 140 (5.56%)
EndeavourOS: 66 (2.62%)
Debian: 44 (1.75%)
openSUSE: 38 (1.51%)
Pop! 38 (1.51%)
Other: 78 (3.10%)
And the breakdown of hardware manufacturers (top four):
Lenovo: 516 (23.54%)
Dell: 329 (15.01%)
ASUS: 261 (11.91%)
HP: 223 (10.17%)
The site OMG! Linux pointed out that 90% of systems had Flatpak installed — (though it's enabled by default on Fedora, which was 54.69% of all the respondents). Some other interesting stats they noticed: - Most common default browser: Firefox (73.14%), Chrome (11.64%), Brave (4.76%). [Microsoft Edge was the default browser on 37 systems (1.51%) ]
- 83% of users have at least one (non-default) GNOME extension installed
- 'App Indicator' is the most popular extension (by 43% of those using extensions)
- GSConnect, User Themes, and Dash to Panel/Dock also widely used
- Most popular desktop apps: GIMP (58.48%), VLC (53.71%), Steam (53.40%)
[...] The popularity of GNOME extensions will surprise no-one. It is a solid indicator that the existing GNOME extension system is good at doing what it's there to: let users augment and extend their system in the ways they want.
GNOME's report adds that "it's exciting to see the popularity of new GNOME apps like Flatseal, To Do, Bottles, and Fragments."
One other interesting stat from their report: 55% of the participants were using Online Accounts, with Google the most common one added, followed by Nextcloud and Microsoft. But "Some of the account types had very little usage at all, with Foursquare, Facebook, Media Server, Flickr and Last.fm all being active on less than 1% of systems."
Here's the distribution of distros for all 2,560 respondents:
Fedora: 1,376 (54.69%)
Arch: 469 (18.64%)
Ubuntu: 267 (10.61%)
Manjaro: 140 (5.56%)
EndeavourOS: 66 (2.62%)
Debian: 44 (1.75%)
openSUSE: 38 (1.51%)
Pop! 38 (1.51%)
Other: 78 (3.10%)
And the breakdown of hardware manufacturers (top four):
Lenovo: 516 (23.54%)
Dell: 329 (15.01%)
ASUS: 261 (11.91%)
HP: 223 (10.17%)
The site OMG! Linux pointed out that 90% of systems had Flatpak installed — (though it's enabled by default on Fedora, which was 54.69% of all the respondents). Some other interesting stats they noticed: - Most common default browser: Firefox (73.14%), Chrome (11.64%), Brave (4.76%). [Microsoft Edge was the default browser on 37 systems (1.51%) ]
- 83% of users have at least one (non-default) GNOME extension installed
- 'App Indicator' is the most popular extension (by 43% of those using extensions)
- GSConnect, User Themes, and Dash to Panel/Dock also widely used
- Most popular desktop apps: GIMP (58.48%), VLC (53.71%), Steam (53.40%)
[...] The popularity of GNOME extensions will surprise no-one. It is a solid indicator that the existing GNOME extension system is good at doing what it's there to: let users augment and extend their system in the ways they want.
GNOME's report adds that "it's exciting to see the popularity of new GNOME apps like Flatseal, To Do, Bottles, and Fragments."
One other interesting stat from their report: 55% of the participants were using Online Accounts, with Google the most common one added, followed by Nextcloud and Microsoft. But "Some of the account types had very little usage at all, with Foursquare, Facebook, Media Server, Flickr and Last.fm all being active on less than 1% of systems."
This article is just sad (Score:2)
The fact that Slashdot has a headline article about the fact that some users installed a plugin on Gnome says so much about the sad state of Linux-on-the-desktop. If this is news then really, it is not worth it.
83% of GNOME Users (Score:3, Funny)
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Right?
I kid, but actually many people I know use it, but those people are in some senses dedicated to the "default" whatever that may be, so it means Ubuntu's skin on ubuntu. Basically the anti-customisers. As in they use the default, then complain about it, but won't change it. Then you have people like me who are cheerful customisers and port their dot files from system to system over the course of decades. We on the whole also dislike GNOME.
I don't think I've encountered a single person who runs it by ch
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I also had the displeasure of working on a homegrown OO implementation in C, but in their defence, the core of the program was written in 1995, when C++ compilers were still not reliably compliant. Even they eventually went all the way to C++17, and merely wrapped around the C stuff.
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OO in C is horrible.
I'm not going to argue but it does seem odd that the original OO languages (Simula and Smalltalk) were written in what we would think of as very primitive languages (Simula-I and BASIC, I believe). C is much more capable yet OO based on C (and I include C++) have been abject failures in capturing the important parts of OO programming, not least of which is automatic memory management.
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And C++ OO is of the Simula lineage rather than the Smalltalk lineage.
The Smalltalk guys keep wanting to make their OO the one true definition of OO, but Simula simply had something different in mind.
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C++ has automatic memory management.
Sure. Now. It took about 30 years or something like that and it's still not the default AFAIK.
And C++ OO is of the Simula lineage rather than the Smalltalk lineage.
Indeed.
The Smalltalk guys keep wanting to make their OO the one true definition of OO, but Simula simply had something different in mind.
True, but I'd far rather program in Smalltalk than Simula.
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As well, C++ abandoned a lot of OO and went with generics for its standard library.
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True, but I'd far rather program in Smalltalk than Simula.
Yeah, but no one wants to use either because they're so slow.
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Memory management is a high level feature, it doesn't really fit into the low level language. To do it right you need system support and generally a relatively larger system, and that gets in the way of portability as well as availability on small systems (ie, systems without virtual memory, user space access to page tables, etc). C++ *tries* to be a high level language but it's such a mish-mash of features while also trying to be low level when needed, so memory management doesn't really fit its design.
E
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Re:83% of GNOME Users (Score:4, Interesting)
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Still not sure how I feel about QtQuick/QML. I used KDE for a while recently but I found from a user's point of view the split between Qt and QtQuick was a bit jarring. Most parts of KDE are still done in traditional Qt (which looks and feels great on a desktop), and parts are now done in QtQuick. They don't look and feel like they go together at all. And I don't love how QtQuick apps tend to feel very tablety on a desktop, and the UI loses a lot of density, not to mention common theming. Maybe eventua
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Yes true. Cura uses QtQuick and it looks like a modern, normal desktop app that's not too out of place for the most part. Still a few weird bits, though, like the spacing of traditional elements in menus and dialogs is off, so still feels a tiny bit off.
As for KDE, I'm not sure what the KDE devs are aiming for.
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A huge reason to use QtQuick is that bindings in other languages are much easier because the C++ surface is so much smaller. Really it's only one class you have to wrap now (QObject), and everything QML interfaces with is defined through the properties API of the QObject. Using Dotherside you can create bindings in any language now. Something that wasn't easy to do with Qt--PySide is amazing that it actually works so well without leaking that badly.
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No it won't help you. It's meant for creating bindings to QML from other languages (compiled or interpreted) via a small C API that wraps the C++ objects needed to work with QML. For example this is used to create a binding for Rust, and for the NIM language.
With Python you need to continue using PySide.
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Linux could never be a better Windows than Windows and it can never be a better OSX than OSX.
Well, it totally used to be. I used to use Gnome 2, Compiz, Emerald, and avant-window-navigator to get all the OSX UI features except better. Then all of those things were abandoned, and only Gnome 2 got a meaningful fork. Now I use KDE, which has many of the features I used Compiz for, but not all. It also has some embarrassing failures which have persisted for years, like no mipmapped window previews on X11, and really stupid default drag behavior in Dolphin which is apparently the fault of some library t
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"our way or GTFO"
Fret not, as Qt and KDE have a long track record of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory as well.
Qt came along at an extremely favorable time, and had all but guaranteed success. Trolltech chose a license that was incompatible with the Free software of the time, thereby spawning the catastrophe that is GNOME. They then broke API compatibility not once, but twice. Qt 4's breakage was severe, and is where I dumped it in favor of Java. Despite Java's flaws, it has maintained 100% backwards compatibility.
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Despite Java's flaws, it has maintained 100% backwards compatibility. Everything I have ever written from the mid-1990's onward still recompiles and works today, with no source code modifications at all.
I use ImageJ on and off. It looks like it comes from the 90s... which it did. 1997, to be precise. It uses the old, much derided, much hated Java GUI library. It won't win any prizes for looks. But it's still a popular package today 35 years later because it fucking works.
Who gives a shit if the GUI isn't fl
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API and ABI breakages are expected for major version increases. If you can get the old Qt versions, your code will still recompile against them.
The Java ones maintain backwards compatibility because they don't go through major version increases. You might as well be complaining that JavaFX didn't maintain
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GNOME2 was so good because it was a clone that was better than the Real McCoy.
GNOME3 is someone's third year abstract art project.
That being said, GNOME2 (or flashback) became hard enough to get a working distribution of that I did eventually move to GNOME3, and with enough fucking extensions, it can be made to work well enough.
I wish the developers would look at the fact that 83% of GNOME3 desktops have functionality installed that drastically alters the behavior of the desktop as evide
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I always meant to give it another shot after it matured, just never really got around to it. Thanks for the reminder, I think i'll take a look.
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MS Edge (Score:1)
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Ubuntu, 10% (Score:1)
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Re:Ubuntu, 10% (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know why you would have to leave JACK behind, but I will suggest that if you are using Ubuntu, you replace pulseaudio with pipewire. Since I have done, my audio has actually worked correctly and reliably. You have to keep pulseaudio installed for the client library, and you will probably also want pavucontrol etc., but you do not need to run the pulseaudio daemon any more. If you have eradicated that garbage from your system already, then disregard this comment.
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So, all in all, this is just another meaningless rigged statistic that tells you nothing.
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Yes. Other things that make one think its probably a biased sample:
-- Debian is so low
-- No sign of MX or Mint
If you compare this list with the Distrowatch hit ranking, its very different. The top ten there are:
Rank Distribution HPD*
1 MX Linux 2760
2 EndeavourOS 2278
3 Mint 2044
4 Manjaro 1391
5 Pop!_OS 1166
6 Fedora 1135
7 Ubuntu 1109
8 Debian 101
9 Lite 807
10 is Garuda.....
Debian is quite low on this too. Mint seems about as expect
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Mint does not have distribution with GNOME as the default .. Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce are the only options ...
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Ubuntu is kind of the default... Actually it's literally the default in WSL, so must be getting a lot of installs that way.
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That bias is even acknowledged in the report, no big evil conspiracy behind it, just RTFA: https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2... [gnome.org]
Re: Ubuntu, 10% (Score:3)
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Even if you uninstall snapd, you are left with a lot of software simply not available, as Ubuntu went snap-only for a lot of content.
So you have to go without or add a bunch of ppas or switch distros.
I switched distros personally. I was even of a mindset that maybe snap wouldn't be *that* bad and then I see so many things take longer to launch and various browser features no longer available because snap wouldn't allow it (webauthn and keepassxc integration breaking were the last straws for me).
LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Quote (caps mine): "The popularity of GNOME extensions ... is a solid indicator that the ... extension system is good at doing what it's there to: let users augment and extend their system IN THE WAYS THEY WANT."
LOL, nope. The extension system is good to make the GNOME desktop usable and you have that percentage of end-users that installed extensions to work with it.
The only ones that did not install extension would probably be the programmers that would use mostly and IDE or console.
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Jepp that sums it pretty. much up, the extensions is basically there to make gnome usable. I wonder which extensions are popular, I guess the ones turning on a real desktop are very high on the list!
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Yeah, it's silly that GNOME's on-screen keyboard is lacking core keys like Control and Fx, it makes it impossible to use on a tablet without a 3rd party GNOME add-on (which, luckily, exists)
Re:LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, the Gnome Extension setup is pretty crappy.
You want a behavior that was in Gnome 2, and Plasma, but left out of Gnome 3... Oh there's an extension. Oh but it only supported 3.34 through 3.38, and then got abandoned and won't work with new versions because the developer got sick and tired of being broken every single damn release because Gnome doesn't provide stable APIs for extensions.
Or hey, by chance the extension ostensibly supports the version of Gnome in my distribution.... Oh but it breaks the UI in weird ways to try to get it to do something the GNOME developers expressly don't want to work..
The Extensions capability is a band aid that is begrudgingly tolerated and actively broken by the core developer team constantly. People that are attached to the 'default' desktop status that Gnome 2 earned trying to make the best of the 'default' desktop with their new vision. If the exact same implementation that was Gnome 3 had been released without the ability to just unilaterally declare itself the 'new Gnome', it never would have gotten traction.
Re: LOL (Score:2)
"That's the user's fault. As everyone knows, there never was an extension API. People were creating hacks by using internal and undocumented APIs that are never intended to be used or to be stable. But promise, we're working on a real API, you can expect to see it soon in gnome 7, and it will allow to change the right click action only, and it will break in gnome 7.1".
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If GNOME included all the functionality of the extensions out of the box, you'd all be bitching about BLOAT
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If GNOME included all the functionality of the extensions out of the box, you'd all be bitching about BLOAT
False. If GNOME included all the functionality of the extensions out of the box, people here would still be using GNOME, because it wouldn't be such unconfigurable garbage nor would it be missing features of crucial importance to mouse users.
GNOME has made the decision to move to an all-touch interface, and major distributions have made the decision to embrace it. Both are bad decisions which have led to mass replacement of GNOME with alternatives. It's ironic because KDE had problems in the switch from 3 t
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If GNOME included all the functionality of the extensions out of the box, you'd all be bitching about BLOAT
False. If GNOME included all the functionality of the extensions out of the box, people here would still be using GNOME...
Yes, they would use it and bitch about bloat. Why should anyone try to cater a crowd that is never happy with anything?
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Quote: "And this comment shows you people on Slashdot are never happy with anything."
LOL. My comment shows people should be critical, despite people like you who doesn't like criticism.
Quote: "If GNOME included all the functionality of the extensions out of the box, you'd all be bitching about BLOAT"
GNOME 2.0 included 90% of the functionality of the extensions out of the box was was not bloated at all. It was a WORKING DE, not like the 3.0 re-write.
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Agreed. I had to install Gnome extensions on Fedora just to get a stupid minimize/maximize button in a window.
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They have found that people willing to run the tool, are the same people who run GNOME and run it with extensions ..
Extensions? (Score:3, Insightful)
I use Fedora but with MATE (I know, I should change distros, but I am too lazy for that) so I have a candid question: what is an extension and why would I want one? Back when GNOME was good (2.x) everything you needed was included in the base install. If something is that important that is needed by 83% of users, why is not part of the base install but an extension?
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This is a good question. The "App Indicator" they talk about is basically the tray icon. Yes, by default, you launch say Dropbox and the Dropbox icon is not shown anywhere. You have to activate (it's preinstalled) it.
The whole extension thing is broke to begin with. After a few days of uptime it takes one full core of my CPU to "do things" that I cannot begin to imagine. Since all extensions are run in the same process, you don't know which one is misbehaving, and the whole thing slows down to a crawl.
I sin
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Plus if things went awry you could actually kill the gnome-panel and it would respawn with all the applets and indicators you had set up. All without killing your session either. What a concept! Definitely in some areas things have gone backwards in Gnome.
Switch to Ubuntu Mate and you'll find yourself back in the old days that just worked. Been there happily for years an years.
Re: Extensions? (Score:2)
Except that mate now builds against gtk 3, so it suffers from some of the stupid decisions that gtk/gnome devs shoved in there.
The deal breaker for me that made me abandon mate to try kde was the removal of the ability to switch tabs by scrolling on them, because the dev "encountered some mice with low resistance on the scroll wheel and that can be surprising for new users".
I was happy on mate until I dist upgraded one day and lost that functionality.
Re:Extensions? (Score:5, Insightful)
Extensions are because Gnome developers have declared various things 'bad' and will not implement them, and "Extensions" is a bone they throw to let people attempt to tweak the UI to get things if they really want.
For one, GNOME devs have decided tray icons are bad practice, so they just don't implement support for them. That 83% extension endeavors to put it back.
It's painful because they don't provide a stable API so extension developers are on a constant treadmill trying to keep it working. They are hamstrung in various ways limiting how much they can do. Also it's easy for an extension to make the UI glitch out.
Other crazy examples:
-Gnome decided the *only* way virtual desktops should be done is in a column, that doing it in a row or let alone a grid is bad. Then with Gnome 40 they decided that doing it in a column is dumb, so it must *only* be done in a row. So extensions to *try* to make that more traditional and flexible.
-Gnome decided that you must *not* be able to see active applications in any sort of taskbar or doc. So instead of a setting, you have to search the extensions site.
-Generally a *lot* of regressions from when compiz popularized some features of compositing, and now extensions try to provide some of those features. Except they can't because Gnome doesn't allow *that* much extensibility.
-Similarly, the black bar must always be at the top, that exact size and that exact shape (they had decided that the shape *must* curve into the display real estate, then decided it must *not* curve into the display.
Basically, they have a unilateral vision that is unpopular, even among their users, and they feel better foisting the problem off so they can pretend their pure vision is widely deployed.
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Generally a *lot* of regressions from when compiz popularized some features of compositing, and now extensions try to provide some of those features. Except they can't because Gnome doesn't allow *that* much extensibility.
Even KDE leaves me wishing I could just have Compiz back. And it's still there, but it's super explodey now, not that it was ever very stable. I really feel like I don't need a whole unified DE, I'm happier with pieces and parts and if apps look slightly different my brain will work it out.
Sadly, I get the impression Compiz is not exactly easy to comprehend internally, and that would be out of my reach anyway at this point. KDE it is
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Ubuntu ships with an extension by default to give a decent taskbar. Ironically, it's a fork that has less settings than the original.
So yeah, most GNOME users use extensions... the system most people run it on comes with at least one.
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Since MATE is Gnome 2 done right ... You are running the answer to Gnome went downhill ...
Using gnome different from what the developers wan (Score:2)
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So... 83% of gnome users got pissed every time gnome got updated?
Correct. It's fucking obnoxious.
what percentage installed KDE? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because if I could have set GNOME on fire when I left, I would have.
I told one of my friends who was complaining about Linux being flaky (the same guy who Time Machine shit the bed on, who you all said didn't exist, he's got other systems too) and on my advice he moved to KDE and said it was a big improvement over GNOME.
If GNOME were worth a shit, you wouldn't need extensions.
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I jest, because I don't truly think KDE can be said to objectively suck, but I'd take GNOME3+the dozen or so extensions required to make it not fucking stupid over KDE any day.
I do give KDE a shot (via Kubuntu, usually) every year or so. I keep waiting for the year it starts up without something crashing, or having 2 sound icons, or detecting my hard drive as a removable, or some other stupid shit.
It's so much jank, st
Is there an extension... (Score:2, Funny)
Ha ha, I jest.
Howabout one that makes it exactly like GNOME 2.x?
Still joking. Win XP?
Seriously, folks, what is the point of software, if not to lock users into a walled garden?
Solid color background? Not possible. (Score:4, Insightful)
I tried GNOME recently and discovered it's not possible to set the desktop background to a solid color. I suppose one could make a 1x1 pixel image and set that as the background? Simplicity is nice, but this is a case where removing features makes using the system harder.
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They definitely want to be a better OSX than OSX. They seem to think this means "you're holding it wrong" should be the default answer. You need to love what they are giving you because they are the ones giving it. When they gave you the opposite last year they were geniuses, when they did an about face it's because they are geniuses. That is the Apple way, and GNOME appear to have adopted it.
If you don't build it, someone else has to. (Score:3)
I'd much rather have a GNOME that was natively configurable without the need for extensions. For example, the default On Screen Display settings are absolute junk. Turn up the volume, and wait forever for the OSD to stop obscuring the center of your display. By default, you cannot change how, when, or where that OSD pops-up. The "Better OSD" does a great job of providing configuration options to move that OSD to a better place (the corner), resize it (down) and make it disappear faster too. But WTF should someone else have to write and maintain something that could and should have easily been written into core Gnome itself?
Extension ecosystems are fragile. On several occasions I have had an upgrade to Gnome break compatibility with an extension, leaving me to wait for the extension maintainer to update. A couple of times I've even had to go searching for a different extension as the original had been abandoned. It's complexity that just isn't needed for the functionality that many extensions provide.
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The "Better OSD" does a great job of providing configuration options to move that OSD to a better place (the corner), resize it (down) and make it disappear faster too. But WTF should someone else have to write and maintain something that could and should have easily been written into core Gnome itself?
The GNOME team is apparently operating under the assumption that users want less configurability. I assume they are big OSX and iOS fans. This may have been almost a reasonable assumption when KDE 4 came out and it looked like a widget factory exploded, but the reality is that the settings app was just poorly laid out. It's still not great in 5, but at least now it's usable and you can find things in it, and most of the defaults are reasonable.
The problem with this idea is the same as the idea that a word p
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Yes they are definitely big iOS and macOS fans, and probably Android material whatever fans as well. Of course it's not just them. Lots of others are jumping on this bandwagon like Mozilla's UX crew. Firefox doesn't even use my native scrollbars anymore, but uses iOS-style tiny thin, hard to hit with the mouse, line things down the side of the page.
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Firefox doesn't even use my native scrollbars anymore, but uses iOS-style tiny thin, hard to hit with the mouse, line things down the side of the page.
Want to get really pissed off at that? They don't do that on Windows, the scroll bars are normal width. But then in the bug that's been open for years they say they can't fix it on Linux because of CSS. Die, Mozilla, Die.
Re: If you don't build it, someone else has to. (Score:2)
So true.
Giving them 5000 additional functions and continuously changing the ui, with forced "upgrades" has kept everyone from ever understanding it.
I'd bet that 5 templates would satisfy 90% of the use
Gnome Extension updates/installs require re-login (Score:2)
Gnome has gone backwards in this respect. You used to be able to restart the gnome-session with X11 but with wayland, You can't do that. You have to log out and log back in for newly installed/updated extensions. You can live-patch a kernel but you have to log out and log back into the your GUI session to add a gnome extension?
More info...
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME... [gnome.org]
GNOME Haters (Score:2)
Absolutely fascinate me. It's kind of like Apple haters, there's probably at least a dozen posts here already that says GNOME devs just really want to be Apple like that's some big clever insult, yeah that really got 'em. You win an internet.
But really, why?
I'm reminded of what Neil deGrasse Tyson said about golf and atheism:
"It's odd that the word atheist even exists. I don't play golf, is there a word for non-golf players? Do non-golf players gather and strategize? . . . I can't gather around and talk abo
Re: GNOME Haters (Score:2)
Simple, because us non gnome users are actually former gnome users.
We used gnome 2, we liked it, and one day it was stolen from us, and we're pissed about it because to this day, we've not been able to find a better replacement.
Imagine your favorite tool, that you use everyday, let's say a nice hammer, sturdy head, ergonomic handle, nice lanyard, great custom paint job, and then someone comes, takes your hammer away and gives you a shitty one instead, with a thorny iron grip and a soft rounded aluminum head
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I don't think that's it. I've used GNOME all the way back to GNOME 1.x.
I didn't like GNOME 3 for a long time myself, but nothing was stolen, that's a terrible analogy. GNOME 2 continued to exist, all the source code is out there, that's just not real.
The analogy would be more like if someone gave you free hammers for years, at great expense to themselves. They then stopped, started giving away a different design you didn't like. And instead of saying "well I don't like this as much, but thanks for all the f
Re: GNOME Haters (Score:2)
Good for you if you like now.
And yes, it was stolen. In theory, you're right, the source code is still there, you can still use it.
In reality, no. It was removed from the repositories, if you want to use it, you have to build it yourself, that's not easy, we're talking about an entire DE, not a simple utility.
And even if you decide to fork and maintain gnome2, good luck getting it in the repos.
One guy managed to do it. He had to make a full distro and get it popular before other distros decided to include h
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You may not want to invest all of your time, but you're not wanting to doesn't make it theft.
You're pretty literally suggesting that everyone who worked on something, and offered it up for free, are obligated to do so forever, in the way you want, or they are committing some injustice. They not only stole nothing, they did as much the opposite as possible. When the dozens if not hundreds of people who worked on GNOME 2 stopped, they did literally nothing to keep another dozen if not hundreds of equally capa
Must be a slow news day today. (Score:1)