What are your favourite GNOME applications?

wildhorse

Which GNOME applications do you use? Why are they important to you?

List only those which really depend on GNOME. Applications with optional support for GNOME shall not count. Plain GTK applications shall not count either, at least for now.
The GNOME window manager shall be excluded from the list as well.

Evolution looks like the only interesting GNOME application to me. I have not integrated it into may daily work flow, though, and I doubt that I ever will.

Please, feel free to list your favourite GNOME applications even if they have been mentioned before.

Update:

One week later, 7 000 views, and not a single reply.
Maybe there are no favourite GNOME applications?

ChrisJumper · Advocate Joined: 12 Mar 2005 Posts: 2407 Location: Germany

Hi wildhorse,

i think the forum is captured by a.i. bots and search spiders mostly this is why mostly of the 7000 are no humans. And on the low folks of gentoo admins there are not many using this Desktop environment. The Users are not here in the forum and most forum users have just other applications running or use more then one Linux on there systems.

I like gnome because it is slim and easy to uses. In the early 2000 it had the raputation that it is only for clicking users without much knowledge. But its more like the Apple one with art and not overload with features or buttons to have everything.

I like to use the comment line and its tools to handle my computer or my linux phone but like the art of a flat design. If i have to do something with my computer for work i tent to write scripts for it once and only add new features there.

Viewing files i like evince instead of ocular - cause its faster. Eog for pictures instead of Firefox. I dislike Epiphany. On Mobile i love the podcast app or the rss reader. GDM and Gnome is perfect for me.

Yes evolution is my fav. Email and Calendar App for 28 years now.

Bye Chrisjumper

Zucca · Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2025 8:38 pm Post subject:

Moved from Desktop Environments to Gentoo Chat.
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pietinger · Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2025 9:05 pm Post subject:

wildhorse · Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2025 10:40 am Post subject:

As far as I am concerned, this thread is still all about the desktop environment.

Interesting point about Google.

Let me add two reasons:

First, Gentoo is the best Linux distribution, because it is totally open and gives the users all the choices they want. Thus Gentoo users quickly become competent and do not need to waste their time with questions about the desktop environment. At least, that is the way it should be, because the desktop environment hardly counts when it comes to getting the daily job done. It's the applications that matter.

There seems to be only one GNOME application that is being used by a small group of people, namely evolution. Recent reports in the Gentoo desktop environments forum indicate that evolution still suffers from GNOME related issues. The questions asked and the answers show that Gentoo users are indeed quite competent.

I looked into the source code of evolution and found that it would take only a weekend, maybe less, to replace all that is GNOME with existing proven and tested code.

GNOME did come with several personal information management (PIM) applications. But they all have disappeared over the past years. That is terrible from the user perspective.

The authors of GNOME keep claiming that they are replacing "legacy" software.
https://www.google.com/search?q=legacy+site:gnome.org
But the GNOME code is no better than what it is replacing. GNOME is written in C (same goes for gtk), like the code it is replacing. The difference is, that the old code has become proven and tested over many years.
GNOME isn't even memory safe. Can you imagine?
https://www.google.com/search?q=gnome+memory+leak

Which brings us to the second reason: nobody really cares about GNOME applications.
For the few GNOME applications of any relevance, non-GNOME alternatives existed in the past and they still do.

The only things GNOME adds are eye candy on the screen, lots of new problems, and utter destruction to Linux desktop applications. Personally, I see GNOME as bloatware.

I started to look into this matter after the announcement made by the makers of GNOME, that they are going to utterly destroy (or whatever) X11 with gtk and wayland. By cutting X11 step by step, the GNOME makers are taking away the choice for the application users.

There is, of course, the matter of gtk. GNOME and gtk are closely related.

I took a close look at some of the applications linked with gtk by analysing their use of the underlying X protocol. It's sheer horror. It's like running one of those terrible VNC solutions on your work station (or desktop computer), locally with no network in between. They constantly transport huge blocks of memory between each application and the display server instead of giving short instructions to the display server (see the X protocol how it should be done). Moving huge memory blocks between the applications and the display server is suppose to be modern in gtk terms.

There are applications with gtk support which run perfectly fine without gtk. The most prominent one is libreoffice. By turning off the USE flags gtk3, gtk4, kde, and qt6, libreoffice turns into a plain X11 application. You can verify that by checking the executable images and linked shared libraries. With gtk enabled I found libreoffice to be sluggish on fast amd64 computers (locally, not network). Libreoffice turned into a snappy application once gtk was removed. To my surprise, libreoffice without gtk runs fine on my arm (32 bit) SBCs as well. Even after connecting libreoffice on an arm computer with an X server on an amd64 PC over a LAN (no ssh, ssh is ill-suited for that purpose), libreoffice was still usable. Time to do another analysis of the underlying transfer via X protocol.

My arm systems are mostly performing network services. They all have been freed of gtk by now (and qt as well as wxwidgets). One interesting obstacle was virtual/secret-service, the "freedesktop.org Secret Service API provider". It depends on either gtk or qt. You have to pick the lesser of two evils. Eventually, I fixed that for my machines. When you look into the source code of gnome-base/gnome-keyring and app-admin/keepassxc, the only alternatives provided with virtual/secret-service, you will encounter a large portion of the code dedicated to a GUI. The authors definitely set their priorities. For example, you will find that it was very important for them to make the fonts look nice. What could possibly go wrong? There is no way to detach the GUI from the actual service and there are no alternatives like X11, curses or plain tty etc. The question is, why do we have an elementary security related library in Gentoo and most Linux systems with such an ill-advised design and dependency? Something to think about.

A preliminary review of all the packages installed on my amd64 computers with gtk dependencies shows a list of some 900 gtk function references in the application source code. Most of these functions are very primitive. The number gets reduced by selecting the most important applications. I think I am going to have some fun.

Another revolutionary widget set is wxwidgets, that is suppose to enable developers to write software for "Windows, macOS, Linux and other platforms". In reality, only "Windows, macOS and Linux/GTK" are left and Linux is being reduced to gtk. There used to be a code base for X11 and one for Motif/X11. But both have been abandoned by the authors of wxwidgets a long time ago. I have already switched some applications from wxwidgets/gtk to wxwidgets/x11 or wxwidgets/motif (two options). The most prominent application left is kicad. A lot of comments from kicad users indicate that they are really angry about the decisions made for them by the gtk project.

Last, but not least, let me point out that Windows and MacOS support X11 applications. Other operating systems have provided support for X11 since decades and I am still using some of them.

Now I would like to see some comments in the Gentoo Desktop Environments forum.

PS: Here and there I forgot to add a ;-)

to my statements.

Banana · Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2025 5:21 pm Post subject:

That are a lot of claims with out adding anything usefull to the topic. Please be more specific.

As for the question "What are your favourite GNOME applications?"
What are those really? Can you specify and give some examples?
Does an application classify as a gnome application because the desktop enviroment does support it, or are you talking about the special desktop enviroment applications which help to manager gnome?
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20624

wildhorse · Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 1:08 pm Post subject:

Apparently the enthusiasm for GNOME applications is quite limited. ChrisJumper mentioned a few more. For every one of them, there is a non-GNOME alternative available. This is something to keep in mind when we read announcements from the GNOME developers about how they are going to conquer the Linux desktop.
A few use cases for the GNOME window manager (and display manager) which supposedly cannot be addressed with X11 alternatives would interesting.

I intended to post the same question about gtk applications. However, I do not think that Gentoo Chat is the right forum to address this topic.

For now, I am adding full support for plain X11 and Motif to wxwidgets (DnD etc.). Kicad depends on wxwidgets. Wxwidgets depends on gtk (for now). I care about kicad.
In a second step, I may add full X11 support to kicad (replacing wxwidgets).

I am following with great pleasure the discussion at https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8864934.html#8864934. I would have missed it if I hadn't ended up involuntarily in Gentoo Chat.

Zucca · Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 3:58 pm Post subject:

szatox · Advocate Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 3679

GNOME is a highly opinionated DE, and it goes directly against what basically all other DEs are doing, so it's definitely not for everyone. Of course the enthusiasm is going to be limited: pretty much nobody who is not a gnome user will be thrilled about applications that don't work outside of gnome. I don't now how many gnome users are there, but I'm sure many of them use it as a tool too, so they won't be too emotionally attached either.

But you're not really helping the discussion either. It's hard to tell what you're going for. Asking a confusingly vague question about gnome without any context, and then ranting about it, taking shortage of responses as a proof your rant is on point.
Like, what do you even want from us?
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wildhorse · Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 5:28 pm Post subject:

Naib · Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 7:02 pm Post subject:

the one that you can use to change the default gdm session from gnome to something else
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