Fun fact, roughly half of gnome-shell codebase is written in JavaScript.
I know that extensions are mostly written in js, but why codebase? Any legacy reason I wonder?
From what I can gather
- JS is system agnostic, doesn’t require compilation or multiple dependency binaries, as opposed to say Python.
- JS is widely understood, could get more contributors.
- JS is a good enough scripting language made with UI stuff in mind.
I also see people lamenting that lua wasn’t chosen, so there’s that.
İf it works good enough for my laptop phone and pc then it’s good enough for everyone else
Besides, it wouldn’t have made much of a massive difference if it was lua or js, but even lua has it’s issues leading to people preferring other versions of lua
JS is system agnostic, doesn’t require compilation or multiple dependency binaries, as opposed to say Python.
Can you expand on that? How does JS have less requirements than Python?
While it’s true that both python and js are interpreted languages, making them highly portable, JS at that time was a very lightweight language with a robust runtime offered by mozjs, that was built to be easy to embed into other systems, while python was designed for being the framework in which you build apps directly, hence requiring deeper dependencies.
Sources:
https://blog.fishsoup.net/2008/10/22/implementing-the-next-gnome-shell/#comment-1691
https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2008/09/09/embeddable-languages-an-implementation/
https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/120edc0/comment/jdgwyoq/
Is that bad?
It’s fun
And that’s a fact
A rock fact
Oh that’s why cinnamon (fork of Gnome 3) uses a ton of JavaScript.
Great for my 128Gb RAM laptop
Is it up to the level of quality and features of KDE yet?
I consider KDE to be the lower quality option so that’s subjective.
Why is that? (genuine question, thanks!)
Again, it’s subjective. The last time I used KDE it felt hacked together and inconsistent, and I got exactly the opposite impression of GTK and GNOME. I thought KDE4 was good but KDE5 looking like a knockoff Windows complete with context menu hell just isn’t for me. It’s much more developed now, but in my own testing I find a lot more inconsistency from KDE and Qt stylings in general, and I prefer to not have to touch my machine once it’s setup and I really find GNOME’s workflow to be best for me.
I feel the same. I like the minimal design oft GNOME and KDE plasma looks kind of too much like windows, which feels traumatic to me :D But I will try plasma again soon with mint. I hope it will be more pleasant than I remember
Unlike gnome, kde can be configured to look and act completely different so you should be fine
Some people don’t want to have to spend hours customizing their entire DE to make it usable for them when GNOME works just fine out of the box.
KDE works out of the box but can be customised, unlike gnome, which if it’s not how you want to use it does not work out of the box and there’s nothing you can do about it
KDE is not less consistent, it’s just more configurable. Sorry, actually configurable. Gnome basically says “Do it our way or not at all… okay maybe you can change some colours if you must”, which is much more of a Windows (and especially MacOS) attitude than KDE. The default layout of kde is bit more windows like (but less rubbish) but far more configurable. As to hacked together… have you seen gnome’s file dialogues???
This is the endless argument, though. I like the way GNOME works by default, so the configurability is irrelevant. Some people want configurability, which is fair, but after 9 years I just don’t care anymore.
it’s just more configurable
That’s an understatement 😄 The amount of configuration KDE offers is mindbogglingly to me. Again, UX and degree of configuration are very subjective matters.
Roughly the quality of KDE 4.1
You can probably compare Gnome with Pantheon DE.
