At the same time, GNOME is probably the most criticized desktop environment. Everywhere I go, I see people complaining about GNOME.

So why do I still recommend GNOME?

“Industry Standard”

Like it or not, GNOME has become the reference desktop for Linux. Most major distributions still ship GNOME as their default desktop environment. Even though KDE Plasma has improved tremendously over the years, many flagship distributions, such as Fedora, continue to choose GNOME.

A small but interesting example is Fedora itself. The GNOME edition is simply called Fedora Workstation, while the KDE edition is named Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop. That naming alone reflects GNOME’s position as Fedora’s primary desktop experience, while KDE is offered as an alternative.

Design

Personally, I think GNOME has the best-looking interface of any Linux desktop.

I don’t care whether it has blur effects or transparent panels. What matters to me is that everything feels intentional. The typography, spacing, icons, animations, and applications all follow the same design language.

Then there’s KDE Plasma. I know many people love Breeze, but to me it looks like Android 5, if not worse. I don’t need blur, transparency, or tons of visual effects. Even if Plasma has all of those, I still don’t find it visually appealing.

Philosophy and workflow

This is probably the most controversial reason.

GNOME deliberately moves away from the traditional desktop workflow. It removes many traditional desktop elements such as dock/taskbar, minimize/maximize buttons, desktop icons, system tray, … Instead, it revolves around the Overview and Workspaces.

I understand why many people dislike this approach. It feels unfamiliar at first, and it takes time to adapt. But once it clicks, it becomes surprisingly efficient and difficult to leave behind.

Another thing I appreciate most about GNOME is that it rarely ships features before they’re ready.

Instead of trying to include every possible feature, GNOME focuses on shipping fewer features that are well-designed, well-tested, and properly integrated with the rest of the desktop.

Of course, this philosophy also has its downsides.

GNOME removes a lot of settings that I think a desktop environment should expose, or at least settings that I personally want to have. Things like managing startup applications, changing the system font or switching the GTK theme aren’t available in the default Settings app, even though I think they should be.

I understand that the GNOME developers want to keep the interface simple, but I do think they’ve gone a little too far in a few areas.

Performance and Stability

People often say GNOME is heavy, but that hasn’t been my experience.

Memory usage between GNOME and KDE Plasma is fairly similar today (Fedora 44). On my hardware (i5-7300U), however, GNOME consistently uses less CPU and GPU resources. Its interface is relatively simple, without blur or visual effects, and the desktop itself consists of fewer independent components. GNOME’s core applications also launch noticeably faster on my machine than their KDE counterparts.

I’ve been using GNOME since Bionic Beaver 18.04, and during all those years I’ve encountered very few serious bugs, usually only after modifying the system myself.

My experience with KDE Plasma has been quite different. I frequently ran into bugs or even desktop crashes. I also tried COSMIC, and while it was generally excellent, one system update broke cosmic-greeter, preventing me from logging in normally.

Why not window manager?

I’ve spent a long time using different window managers over the years, so this isn’t coming from someone who’s never tried them. I understand why people love them, and I understand the appeal of building a desktop that’s perfectly tailored to your own workflow. But these days, I’m simply too lazy to maintain that kind of setup.

A custom window manager takes a lot of time. You have to choose the compositor, notification daemon, launcher, lock screen, clipboard manager, screenshot tools, and countless other components. Then you have to configure everything, make it all work together, and occasionally fix things when updates break your setup.

I don’t want to spend days building and maintaining my desktop anymore. I just want something polished that works well out of the box, so I can spend my time doing the things I actually care about.

But…

Of course, GNOME isn’t perfect.

There are still a few things that annoy me, but most of them are things I’d consider nitpicks. For example, you still can’t disable touchpad acceleration, adjusting touchpad scrolling speed, disable scaling for XWayland applications, or allow screen tearing (at the time of writing).

Do I wish these features existed? Absolutely.

But at the end of the day, I care far more about the overall experience than a handful of missing options. I’d rather use a desktop that’s stable, polished, and consistent than one that gives me every feature I could ask for but feels less reliable as a whole.

I didn’t expect many responses because this is just a personal website with a small audience. However, the results were more interesting than I expected.

The numbers are small, but for a personal website without active promotion, I consider this a positive result.

Interestingly, the visitors didn’t come from search engines this time. They came from personal connections and social platforms.

This small survey gave me more motivation to continue writing. Even though the number of visitors is still small, knowing that there are real people reading my work makes the effort feel meaningful.

I will continue writing about the things I care about, improving the website along the way, and sharing my experiences and thoughts through this blog.

A small audience is still an audience, and I’m glad that this little corner of the internet has reached someone.

So I decided to try something many people in the privacy community were talking about at the time:

De-Google

Five years later, the result looks very different from what I originally expected.

Phase 1: Idealism

Like many people, my first attempt at de-Googling was straightforward. Replace Google services with “privacy-friendly alternatives”.

• Gmail: Proton/Tutanota
• Chrome: Firefox/Brave
• Google search: DuckDuckGo/Startpage
• Remove Google services from my devices and my life

At the time it felt like the obvious answer. If Google and big tech was the problem, then removing and replacing them should solve it. And for a while I believed it did.

But over time I started noticing something uncomfortable.

Phase 2: Realization

Many of the alternatives I switched to slowly started drifting in directions that felt… familiar. Not identical to big tech companies, but similar enough that the pattern became hard to ignore.

Browsers

At first the logic seemed simple.

If Chrome was tracking users, then switching to more privacy-focused browsers like Firefox or Brave should solve the problem.

Over time, however, these browsers started accumulating more and more unrelated features, telemetry, and questionable product decisions.

Some examples and controversies:

• Firefox telemetry and data collection
• Firefox sponsored content on the new tab page
• Firefox is becoming an AI browser
• Firefox’s New Term of Use and Privacy Policy
• Brave’s built-in advertising system
• The Brave affiliate link controversy

Private Mail

The same thing happened with privacy-focused email services like Proton and Tutanota. Many of them expanded into full SaaS ecosystems:

• storage
• password managers
• calendars
• VPNs
• subscription tiers

What started as simple privacy-focused tools gradually turned into platform products. And more importantly, the trust model never really changed. You still had to trust a centralized provider, just a different one.

Another thing I realized over time was how email encryption actually works in practice.

Most “private email” systems primarily encrypt messages inside their own ecosystem. Once messages leave that ecosystem, they behave like normal email again.

This is very different from protocol-level encryption systems like GPG, where encryption is independent of the provider. That distinction matters more than marketing pages suggest.

At this point these services are even worse than Google in many regards.

Some examples and controversies:

• Proton Mail logging a climate activist’s IP address after a Swiss court order (2021)
• Proton Mail payment metadata being used to identify a “Stop Cop City” protester via Swiss authorities and the FBI (2026)
• Proton’s expansion into a full SaaS ecosystem (VPN, Drive, Pass, Calendar)

Search engines

Search engines were supposed to be one of the easiest parts of de-Googling. Several services positioned themselves as privacy-focused alternatives.

DuckDuckGo is one of the most commonly recommended privacy search engines.

In 2022 it was revealed that the DuckDuckGo browser allowed certain Microsoft tracking scripts to run due to a search syndication agreement with Microsoft.

Another structural limitation is that DuckDuckGo does not operate a fully independent search index. A significant portion of its results are sourced from Microsoft Bing.

Startpage faced a different controversy.

In 2019 it was revealed that the company had been acquired by Privacy One Group, which is owned by the advertising technology company System1.

This raised concerns because a service marketed as a privacy-focused search engine was now owned by a company whose core business revolves around advertising technology.

Over time it became clear that many “privacy search engines” fall into one of two categories:

• Metasearch engines relying on Google or Bing indexes
• Privacy layers built on top of existing search infrastructure

In other words, the underlying search ecosystem is still largely controlled by the same large companies.

Phase 3: Infrastructure

At some point I stopped looking for better replacements. Switching from one company to another never really changed the underlying problem. It just moved the trust somewhere else.

So my approach slowly shifted. Instead of looking for “privacy-friendly services”, I started paying more attention to the infrastructure I depended on.

Over time my setup became much simpler:

• A small community-run mail server instead of large email providers
• GPG for end-to-end email encryption
• Linux as my primary operating system
• Open protocols instead of platform ecosystems
• Self-hosted or community infrastructure where it makes sense

None of this is perfect. It takes more effort and requires a bit more technical knowledge. But the trust model is different.

Instead of relying on a single company to do everything correctly, the system is made of smaller pieces that can be replaced or moved if necessary.

At that point I realized something.

The goal was never really de-Googling. The real goal was depending less on large platforms in general.