Plasma is rock solid. Yes, you can break it. And that is called freedom.
If you don’t install 30 third party widgets and themes, you’ll be FINE, while still being able to make it yours.
That is why I always choose KDE Plasma (we’ll see when Cosmic comes).
I love it but I definitely wouldn’t call it rock solid. I have occasional small bugs here and there and especially with the Plasma 6 switch I’ve had the whole desktop going down (and taking all programs with it). That has been fixed though.
I was not satisfied with Plasma because I would have different window styles etc. With Plasma 6 I removed all themes and all the shit and customized it with builtin features only. It looks so nice and clean and just works like a charm.
It is way to overwhelming for me personally. I need something that isn’t distracting.
If Xfce gets good Wayland support maybe I’ll try it for fun at some point.
Distracting how?
Everything is an option or extension. I just want a basic system.
Then just install it and use it. No need for tweaks.
But them all the setting a buried under tons of options I’ll never use. On gnome the settings menu is nice and clean.
There is a search bar…?
Encountering sleep/black screen bug is not freedom. The average linux user is shifting, its not longer being used only by teens/tech savvy. People want to get things done.
I don’t think you understood my comment. Sorry.
Hear hear!
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Plasma needs stability
Yeah, let’s not mention Gnome breaking every peace of itself every update, along with abandoning APIs and hating QT apps. How can I use a DE, if I can almost certainly be sure that half of my extensions won’t work after another update? Or that all of my QT apps will look weird (if they’ll work at all)?
And I don’t hate Gnome. It’s cool and stuff, but you can’t call it stable, 'cause KDE/XFCE/LXDE/[insert DE name here] will be far more stable than Gnome.What’s sad is the gnome team is so adamant about removing functionality to make their jobs easier.
This means you need extensions to make gnome usable, but it ends up feeling hacked together because it is.
I’ll never forgive the gnome team for their defense of putting the dock on the side with no option to change it or not including something like gnome tweak tools by default.
It’s really obvious gnome died with gnome3. That’s when all the forks happened, and for good reason. The gnome3 team just listens to the wrong people.
I’m glad we have alternatives to that pile of crap.
Gnome is amazing.
I’m glad you like it.
Yeah, it’s amazing. Best DE for sure. I’m sorry that it hurts your feelings or whatever, that’s unfortunate.
Yeah, let’s not mention Gnome breaking every peace of itself every update
This is not my experience.
That’s mine!
If you rely on extensions when you use GNOME, that’s on you. Vanilla gnome is perfectly fine by itself if you understand the workflow. I only really want, not need, one extension and that’s pano the clipboard manager. Anything else is just extra.
Vanilla gnome is perfectly fine by itself if you understand the workflow.
Well, maybe it is the DE that should be able to adapt to my workflow and not the other way around
@TeryVeneno @JustMarkov, Gnome really works good and it’s stable, but the Apps Ecosystem isn’t really the best. You have “limited” apps in the sense of: apps don’t have so much features as the Kirigami apps for KDE. Sometimes we like an integrated terminal in apps or split screen option (like in Dolphin) and Gnome doesn’t feature it from out of the box. Then you have to use extensions, which are really, really unstable 🙄 (that’s just my point of view)
That’s really interesting cause in my experience it’s been the opposite, I feel way too limited and also overwhelmed using kde apps, the plethora of gnome apps on flathub dedicated to doing one thing really well are just wonderful. And sometimes more complicated ones show up too like Design or Denaro or Planify.
@TeryVeneno, Yes Gnome it’s more user friendly and has more macOS features. It’s easier to catch up and use it (I used it for 4 years, before switching to Cinnamon, then Deepin and now KDE for another 4 years). On KDE I just like the features that Gnome doesn’t provide, like: hot corners, easier switching desktops, integrated terminal in almost any app 😅, KDE admin apps (like KSysLog), SSH profile in Konsole,… It’s better for daily usage. But Gnome has far better UI/UX (I have to admit) 😁
Aside from the integrated terminal in almost any app, I think gnome has all those other features you mentioned. I do have to say KDE is definitely more customizable though. Also not sure I would say gnome has any MacOS features, the two are very different in my experience. But gnome is definitely lagging on implementation of Somme Wayland things. UI/UX is king though for me so here we are lol.
*me waiting for EventCalendar and Krunner-Symbols being updated for Plasma 6*
Luckily with Plasma it’s not as common for extensions to break.
ITT: people make up fake desktop war drama between gnome, KDE, and window managers
Listen, its FOSS. Gnome and KDE can have different design philosophys, if they didn’t why even be different. You can mix and match what you want and need from both quit a bit. The devs do!
All software has bugs, if your not paying devs or summited merge requests all you can do is ask nicely and fill helpful bug reports.
I love them both, just differently.
exactly!
ITT: people make up fake desktop war drama between gnome, KDE, and window managers
Happens every time. Someone has a criticism of Plasma and the Reddit/Lemmy comment sections devolve into “well Gnome = bad”
This is a submission about KDE and most of the comments are just a circlejerk about hating Gnome. It’s pathetic.
I don’t understand people who are so emotionally triggered by a DE they don’t even use.
Kinda rich dissing KDE for its “unstability” and putting GNOME as its paradigm, the very DE well known to break every major version.
Sometimes this kind of posts/“content” make me feel like I must be the only person in the world who hasn’t had major issues with KDE and it’s been absolutely flawless lately, specially since 5 - but I then realize people without issues don’t complain. It’s the people who have issues with something that make the noise and make it a very big deal (and I’d argue most cases are of the PEBCAK type).
If the need is for something simple and stable I’d shoot for something like Xfce - but putting GNOME as the example of “stability” is nothing but laughable.
GNOME doesn’t break, extensions do.
They’re literally ignoring specs… and also most of the features of gnome are the extensions, so I’d count that.
If most of the features you use are gnome extensions you shouldn’t be using gnome. There are plenty of other desktops that would meet your needs better.
Most? I don’t think that someone who installs Dash to Panel would say most of their features are extensions, just some essential ones. I feel like you could go as far as “If any essential features you use are gnome extensions you shouldn’t be using gnome.”
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Okay, I agree with that. CSD/SSD is a great example
Its not as bad as some people make it
Ahaha is that why they’re removing everything from the DE and forcing people to use extensions for things like desktop icons? So they can say “it’s not us, it’s the extensions”?
Why do you want to use desktop icons?
I personally don’t, but it’s a standard Mac/Windows users are very familiar with, and the ability to add them doesn’t impact you if you don’t want to.
In other words: it’s a net-positive.
Also some people just like them
Gnome has been rock solid for me and I’ve only had a handful of issues in over 5 years on Fedora.
Gnome focuses on reliability while KDE focuses on innovation
Well I had this one time I had issues with commands being sent to the shell. Super - arrow keys changed ttys instead of desktops and in the middle of updates I hit Ctrl c to kill a terminal app and it killed gnome desktop which killed the update process which bricked my system. Also XWayland apps are just buggy in ways I’ve never seen anywhere else.
It was real frustrating to set up with those bugs. My mother uses gnome but I refuse to install extensions because they break literally every single version of gnome. I probably should have put kde on her desktop tbh.
Reliability? Gnome maybe stable… per version! New resease? New breaking change! Screws all your extension and themes, and removes certain features because its “a decade old” or something.
I’ll keep saying it again and again: Gnome only “breaks” your extensions if you install them from a different source than your Gnome version (I.e. from the website). Install them from your distro’s repo and you have no issues.
Same as all other software: let your package manager handle it.
From my personal experience having used primarily Gnome and KDE, KDE plasma always seems to have weird quirks and bugs upon first install that require fiddling and Google searching or waiting for them to be patched.
make me feel like I must be the only person in the world who hasn’t had major issues with KDE and it’s been absolutely flawless lately, specially since 5
There’s dozens of us! (kidding, it’s clear in recent years it’s way more than that, and I’m happy to see it.)
If folks are happy with how GNOME does things… I’m happy for them.
Gnome is extremely stable. Very very very stable. And Gnome isn’t well known to break every version, I don’t know where you’ve got that from.
They do expect extension developers to test and mark their extensions as compatible with new Gnome versions, but that’s the opposite of unstable, that’s enforcing stability, although I do see how it could annoy people who like to immediately move to beta Gnome releases and their extension developers haven’t got around to testing/verifying yet.
Personally I’m more in favour of that than the alternatives:
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locking down what extensions can do in order to guarantee they work across all versions with zero need for tweaks/testing
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assuming each extension will work with a new version, risking breaking stuff if, say, the new Gnome version makes changes to the notification system UI an extension makes alterations to
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I’ve been using KDE on Fedora for work for a few years now. Several system upgrades staeting from Fedora 36. Recently upgraded to plasma 6 and fedora 40. It is rock solid and very reliable.
And i do use alot of widgets, 3rd party apps, flatpaks, etc.
Plasma has been pretty stable for the last several years I’ve been using it, especially X11. Wayland is buggier, but not terribly so, and it gets better all the time.
I’ve switched over to Wayland with Plasma now because it is stable enough for me now, I’m on Nobara.
I don’t really use Gnome, so I can’t speak to that experience.
If I were to vouch for a DE that is rock stable, it would be Cinnamon. I’ve never had any problems with Cinnamon. It’s not super pretty, and it’s a bit clunky, but if I want a DE that just works and gets out of my way, Cinnamon is my first choice.
It’s what I use for my business laptop, LMDE with Cinnamon, rock solid.
I should also add that I’ve always used fully AMD hardware, CPU and GPUs, and never brand new. Always a year or two old, so the Linux kernel has time to address bleeding edge bugs and such.
I think we have to step back once in a while to get a wider perspective.
Both GNOME and Plasma are not just simply desktops. Oh no. They are entire stacks, complete with SDKs, for the user and desktop applications to use. They are orchestrated collections of libraries, services and apps, that together combine to make huge projects.
All of this requires contributions, all of this requires developer time. And in this economy? Open source is taking a kick to the pants.
You also got feature creep and tech debt galore, as well as needing to replace various bits and pieces when things become outdated, deprecated and unmaintainable.
Let’s put it plainly though: there’s a reason GNOME is reorganising, and why it’s all about the money, dum-dum-didi-dum-dum. I think that it would be great if GNOME managed to restructure to facilitate more developer time, because the lofty goals they have set means having to put some elbow grease in it. The same goes for KDE.
Yes, it’s the funding issue again. It’s all about prioritization. With the economy being what it is, money doesn’t stretch that far anymore either.
With all this in mind, I think we should all show some appreciation for the good work of the folks who make GNOME and Plasma. We are given two great options, with each their approaches, that show us what true competition looks like, and they are really giving it their all - despite what some people may be saying.
We should do better to remind ourselves this
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If you want stability you can choose Xfce. You’ll don’t need extensions because of easy configurability.
It was stable for awhile, but I’m having issues with freezing now.
Sure it has a couple of bugs but it has been super solid. I’m on KDE Neon which is the least stable Plasma distro and I barely notice bugs. Once a month Plasma crashes but it does a full recovery with windows in the exact same places.
Gnome is currently the least stable major desktop. By far. It’s an absolute disaster crippled by tons of little bugs that creep in when you least expect them. Even if you don’t add anything to it and use Gnome as vanilla as you can get it, it’s still going to be problematic.
Plasma has some small bugs here and there – and there was a point a few years ago when Plasma seemed like they didn’t care about bugs and instead just threw out a ton of shiny new pointless features every release instead – but recently it is incredibly solid in general and more usable than anything else in Linux, by far. One of the only things I find “buggy” about Plasma is when someone tries to over-rice the desktop with tons of widgets and other things everywhere.
I really don’t know how you could call Gnome buggy, Gnome is super stable.
You can just compliment Plasma without shitting on Gnome you know.
Gnome is super stable in which alternative universe? I swear, I’m sitting here conversing with the internet from a universe where everything is completely the opposite from how things are here.
Wow, activitypub got multiverse federation working?
In the universe in which we exist. Gnome is very, very, very stable.
That’s not a design goal of Plasma. They add features instead of fixing the existing ones. Its a little better now but KDE is just not what I want a computer to be.
At least they don’t remove perfectly good ones 🤷♂️
Man… I’m doing to switch to Linux full time soon. I really love the Windows 10 desktop interface. (Don’t judge me) It’s flat. It’s fast. It’s intuitive. It’s got good ergonomics.
KDE allows me to reproduce that to a certain point using third party extensions. However, KDE plasma has way, way too many configurable options. And I’ve had my whole interface break just by changing the themes to the ones provided by default. There’s too much stuff to configure. It breaks easily too and trying to come back often means nuking your whole home directory and start over. And when you go use someone else’s PC, you’re almost certain they’ve modified their desktop to a point you can’t even recognize anything.
Gnome is simple to a fault. What you see is what you get. The user is limited to what they can configure but your environment stays the same and you get the same experience from one PC to another. You know what to expect. And it just fucking works.
This is what Linux needs. One single user experience for all. It needs a champion to sell it to normal less tech savvy people. As much I love KDE and QT, Gnome is the way to go.
Well there’s a simple thing you are overlooking. You could just not theme Kde with third party themes and extentions and stuff like kvantum themes. It wouldn’t break, just like gnome. Still if you do decide to change stuff its going to be fine most of the time. The beauty of Kde is that there is the option to change stuff, but you aren’t required to.
KDEs default layout is really beautiful and well put together, just like gnome is.
Oh and don’t forget to take backups of your /home. Thats good practice for every desktop environment.
Oh and don’t forget to take backups of your /home. Thats good practice for every desktop environment.
The config files of the major desktop environments have become a mess though. Plasma absolutely shits files all over
~/.configand/.local/sharewhere they sit mingled together with the config files of all your other applications and most of it is thoroughly undocumented. I’ve been in the situation where I wanted to restore a previous state of my Plasma desktop from my backups or just start with a clean default desktop and there is just no straightforward way to do that, short of nuking all your configurations.Doing a quick find query in my current home directory, there are 57 directories and 79 config files that have either plasma or kde in the name, and that doesn’t even include all the
/.config/*files belonging to plasma or kde components that don’t have it in their name explicitly (e.g.dolphinrc,katerc,kwinrc,powerdevilrc,bluedevilglobalrc, …)It was much simpler in the old days when you just had something like a
~/.fvwmrcfile that was easy to backup and restore, even early kde used to store everything together in a~/.kdedirectory.Yes!!! Thank you!
KDE doesn’t even need me to use plugins to break though. Just messing with the themes that are delivered with KDE by default is enough to break it.
That really shouldn’t be happening, make sure to file a bug report if it’s the core themes!
Hasn’t happened to me in the years i have used KDE.
Which theme and what did you do? I’ve never seen breeze break.
The last time I broke Plasma with themes, was because they weren’t compatible anymore. They could do better with the store, though, there is a lot of stuff which doesn’t work anymore.
There’s also XFCE and LXQt, if you want simple, easy-to-use environments.
My elderly, non-techy mum has been using XFCE over a decade across three different distros (Mint, Xubuntu, Zorin) and her experience has been consistent all these years, with no major issues or complaints. If my mum can use Linux just fine - so can anyone else (who don’t have any specific/complex hw/sw requirements that is). I don’t see how much further intuitive it needs to get.
KDE, Gnome, XFCE, LXQt etc all have their own place and audience. There’s no need to have one experience for all - in fact, that would be a huge detriment, because you can never satisfy everyone with a one-size-fits-all approach. Take a look at Windows itself as an example - the abomination that was the Start Menu in Windows 8 (and the lack of the start button) angered so many, to the point that Microsoft had to backtrack some of those design decisions. Then there was the convoluted mess of Metro and Win32 design elements in Win 10, and finally the divisive new taskbar in Win11… you’re never going to make everyone happy. And this is where Linux shines - all the different DEs and WMs offer a UX that suits a different audience or requirements. And we should continue to foster and encourage the development of these environments. Linux doesn’t need to be like Windows.
What I’m saying is, Linux needs a champion. It needs a default DE to be the face of Linux everywhere if we want to advertise it and make it to mainstream. Too many different options will confuse people.
If you want your environment to be consistent between desktops, keep it mostly stock. The default KDE themeing and setup is pretty damn similar to Windows 10, and I’ve kept it stock ever since I started using it ~1 ½ years ago.
Sure. But the problem with KDE is just how much stuff you can configure. It’s too much and it’s prone to breaking things.
Instead of clicking the “disagree button” (downvote) please take the time to reply with your opinion. Downvoting is for things that don’t deserve discussion. This post doesn’t deserve to be hidden.
Now, my take:
I love GNOME’s UX/UI because it’s amazingly intuitive for me, but it’s underlying tech is inferior to KDE, for gaming purposes. That’s why I use KDE, but I miss GNOME every day.
Yes! That’s how I feel as well.
To me, Gnome 2 was the best user experience ever in Linux. I’ve used Mate for a long while after Gnome 3 came out because I found it unusable initially.
As a dev, QT was a dream to work with. And it works so well across multiple platforms.
I wish there was a combination of the two.
You most certainly can customise it, the previous version of Nobara had GNOME looking like windows. Not only can, but need to. Try starting out from default GNOME, and then compare it to what comes with distros. It’s essentially unusable if you don’t spend a lot of time and effort to customize it in order to have the basic functionality you’d expect coming from Windows.
This is what Linux needs. One single user experience for all. It needs a champion to sell it to normal less tech savvy people. As much I love KDE and QT, Gnome is the way to go.
GNOME is bad, and even if it wasn’t, you most certainly don’t need a one true DE. If you want that, you can go right back to win or mac.
Try starting out from default GNOME, and then compare it to what comes with distros. It’s essentially unusable if you don’t spend a lot of time and effort to customize it in order to have the basic functionality you’d expect coming from Windows.
Oh man. I have to agree with you there. I’ve been using Ubuntu for so long I forgot how bad Gnome 3 is ootb. Ubuntu really brought some good quality of life improvement to the DE with their own modifications.
But I still stand by my argument that we need one desktop to be the star of Linux if et want more people to adopt it and for it to become mainstream. Giving most people too many options can confuse them.
Honestly, if you want one simple DE for everyone it should probably be XFCE. Dead simple to use, feels vaguely familiar to Windows users, not overly complicated.
KDE is heavily customizable, Gnome is very opinionated, and tiling WMs don’t adhere to orthodox UI patterns. Those are all suboptimal if you want something usable by the absolute widest range of users.
Someone recommended Linux Mint’s Cinnamon also.
There’s also Pantheon from Elementary OS that I really really liked. But it’s missing a few features in my opinion.
Mind you, the real winner is of course Android. It has a consistent, easy to learn interface and a wide range of applications that integrate nicely.
And we don’t need to speculate; it has already won and is the true face of Linux for the masses. Plenty of young people don’t even own traditional computers anymore and do everything on their smartphone or tablets.
And that’s why this entire discussion is really just a form of fan wank; we don’t need to find a unified UI for Linux because it has already been found and has a massive market share. You may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like.
Everything else can be as complicated, janky, or exotic as it wants because it doesn’t matter.
We’re talking about desktop environments.
It’s actually really funny you say that since starting out with default gnome is actually what got me to stick with Linux. I tried out Ubuntu style gnome and tried stuff like dash to panel and dash to dock but found it either unstable or hated it. Vanilla gnome is what got me to be at peace lol. I thought I didn’t like it at first but then it just suddenly clicked once I got over that. Calling it bad is just rude.
The comment reads a bit like corporate-speak and or an advertisement.
Folks also don’t need to be protected from themselves, because people perfectly capable of governing themselves once they figured out how plugins work.
One could read from this that plugins should be moderated better, maybe with automatic checks.
Try Linux Mint Cinnamon
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KDE is for Kids. GNOME is for Grownups.
I cannot even begin to describe what a dumb take this is. I really hope i’s satire
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*he says as GNOME is literally THE desktop to go against EVERY OTHER DESKTOP on Wayland issues and to keep on delaying major fixes further for bullshit reasons. Delaying or not adding features users want, for ideological reasons is the exact reason that Wayland is still not ready even though development started in 2008.
Gnome does break extensions from time to time. They extension developers just fix it.
Gnome is not a good fit for everyone. KDE is good for people who want high levels of customization and Xfce4 is good for people who want a simple configurable desktop.
There is also gnome soft forks like Cinnamon that try to create a Win 7 feel. My point is Gnome is good for me and others but it doesn’t work for everyone. To say it is the only option is wrong.
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“KDE is for kids”
No, KDE is for people who want a desktop which is “Simple by default, powerful when needed”. Or people who simply prefer it.
I also like how you compare DE performance and decide KDE is worse than Gnome? Like what? Are you stuck on KDE4?
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5.3 and 5.6 are both ancient :/
I’ve been running KDE for years.
On a:
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Thinkpad T400 (2009, 2.3GHz dual core)
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Toshiba Satellite (2009, 1.2(?)GHz single core)
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HP Pavilion (unknown year, model, clock speed)
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Framework 13 (2020, 4.9GHz hexa core)
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AMD A10-7700K desktop (3.4GHz quad core)
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AMD Ryzen 3 2200G (3.6GHZ quad core)
With the compositor enabled.
These all ran it smoothly. The only slow part was the loading on some of these machines.
And KDE is absolutely usable by default, it resembles a Windows desktop.
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KDE Plasma 5.6 is from 2016, genius. It is very old.
5.27 is the current version Debian is on.
And I’ve run KDE Plasma on a lot of hardware, a lot of it very old, and it’s been fine, if with slightly slow loading times (I daily drove that single-core potato I mentioned for about a year on Plasma).
I’m very sorry it felt sluggish for you but that’s likely down to your specific hardware configuration, drivers, GPU vendor + display server combo, etc. Plasma is not that bad for most people. You just got unlucky.
EDIT: Actually, if you actually somehow installed 5.6 on modern Debian with modern Qt frameworks etc, that could be why it was so slow. Could have been a fucked install.
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An integrated GPU isn’t great, but it should run alright still. I think I disabled the dedicated GPU on the Thinkpad I was running and it still ran smoothly.
I don’t know what your circumstances were with your specific laptop, but to paint KDE as, well, shit, just because it ran badly when you tried it is not cool. Especially in the face of other people who have had fine performance on the slowest of potatoes.
Maybe your CPU’s iGPU is a poor bin, maybe you ran up against a bug in something which fucked performance, maybe your HDD was failing or just slow (if it was mechanical), who knows? Point is your one laptop is not representative of all laptops.
Display server = Xorg/Wayland, not the monitor…
Is there any particular reason you felt the need to resort to insults? I like KDE for a reason, because it does what I want and it runs well. I’m not blindly devoted to it like it’s some kind of religion. Hell, I actually prefer GTK as a library over Qt due to it’s C-based nature and I used to daily drive Cinnamon, then MATE.
KDE release nomenclature is also easy. Higher number = newer.
I… know the Plasma 6 release is new? Why is that relevant? We’re both talking about Plasma 5, and Plasma 6 is basically just mega-improved Plasma 5 anyways.
You know what, if you want, tomorrow I’ll get you a video of Plasma running on my single core 1GHz potato laptop if you like.
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I think its really about wanting to just get things done instead of fixing/encountering bugs like sleep/back screen. KDE should review their priorities. But I guess its coming, you cant add new features at infinitum.
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Pano clipboard broke
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Gnome 43 is old at this point. That’s why nothing breaks.
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The only time extensions break is when the release is very new or when an extension is not maintained
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If anyone is circle jerking it is you. KDE and gnome fit two different use cases.
(This comment is was made to be ironic)
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