The last time I used GNOME (a few years ago I think it was Version 3) I was surprised at how ugly it had gotten and how much of an “improvement” this was praised as.

Turns out the only thing that really has changed is that it’s now basically impossible to make it less ugly.

So many years have gone by, and still the trackpad feels as weird/glitchy as I remember, the sounds are annoying and on full blast by default, everything is HUGE with large paddings everywhere and animated in a way that makes it feel slippery like oil on linoleum; The first instinct I have is to change settings because everything feels awful, and there are three applications to configure the preferences, one of which is basically regedit.exe, why? No idea.

I wasted two hours in trying to get it to look at least a bit better, I only managed to change the title bar of the terminal application, everything else seems to use this new fixed design that is 99% padding (== wasted space) and only available in two weird colors, did I mention that you can’t even change the size of the dock (or maybe I didn’t look deep enough into the cursed config editor thing).

The resolution scaling is completely useless as well; because of the design not being configurable, I tried using the scaling to make it bearable, but I would need something like 132% to make it perfect and of course I can only choose between 125% (too small to read) or 150% (boomer mode), with a dropdown.

At least there are visible improvements. Lots of time seem to have been sunk in reimplementing all the things Apple keeps cramming into macOS for some weird reason (which made me check out going back to Linux in the first place, oh well) but without the (nowadays really lacking) love and care (aka. QA) that MADE macOS feel special.

Sad to see the primary/first option listed in the Debian installer being this bad.

It’s not (yet) the time of the Linux Desktop (imo).