I agree with the other commenter. ElementaryOS would have been a better choice. Not only is the design and UX very consistent but they have their own app store which favors apps written for their distro that follow their guidelines. Personally I like the Gnome HIG better though, but they are similar. It sounds like you gave up on gnome a little too fast. It is by far the most polished experience IMO. do Ubuntu and you get a stable easy to use gnome with a permanent dock. Personally I dislike docks so I turn it off. download gnome-tweaks to change back to the default gtk theme and it looks great.
regarding keyboard shortcuts that is easily configurable in gnome. If you want to go macOS like there is probably a way to configure super+(cxv) for clipboard actions. It might be simpler to just use something like autokey to get working though.
You could try out tootle for a native Mastodon client. Geary is a really nice mail client (with a redesign to make it adaptive for mobile that also just makes it look way better overall). Gnome calendar is great too. I like notesup for notes but unfortunately it was made for elementaryOS and currently looks a little broken on other desktops. Looks like dropbox has a native plugin for the gnome file manager too github.com/dropbox/nautilus-dropbox
Treat different desktops/distros like different operating systems. It just happens to be true that you can mix and match but of course you are not going to have consistency if you do that.
That's an interesting approach that I've never really heard before, to stay within the lane of a single distro's apps. But doesn't that severely limit you? The world of quality modern linux desktop software is pretty limited as it is, so if you only use the software written for a relatively new (comparatively) distro, doesn't that really lock you in?
I think for gnome and kde desktops it's pretty doable. They both have nice ecosystems of applications. If you value consistency you can get it for 99% of apps. The few special cases would be for complicated software like image/art software like Gimp/Krita and maybe media clients and text editors depending on how picky you are.
I think Elementary would be the only one I know of where you could kind of get "locked in" since in my experience trying run apps written for that distro on other platforms they tend to look bad if the author didn't test them off elementary. That said they are just Gtk apps, They just use a different style sheet and have their own library of widgets for certain things. Pantheon - the desktop environment used by elementary is available in other distros now too.
Cool! I think I'll spin up an Elementary instance this weekend and try to stick to only what they supply in their app store and see how the experience differs. Thanks for your detailed insight!
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I agree with the other commenter. ElementaryOS would have been a better choice. Not only is the design and UX very consistent but they have their own app store which favors apps written for their distro that follow their guidelines. Personally I like the Gnome HIG better though, but they are similar. It sounds like you gave up on gnome a little too fast. It is by far the most polished experience IMO. do Ubuntu and you get a stable easy to use gnome with a permanent dock. Personally I dislike docks so I turn it off. download gnome-tweaks to change back to the default gtk theme and it looks great.
regarding keyboard shortcuts that is easily configurable in gnome. If you want to go macOS like there is probably a way to configure super+(cxv) for clipboard actions. It might be simpler to just use something like autokey to get working though.
You could try out tootle for a native Mastodon client. Geary is a really nice mail client (with a redesign to make it adaptive for mobile that also just makes it look way better overall). Gnome calendar is great too. I like notesup for notes but unfortunately it was made for elementaryOS and currently looks a little broken on other desktops. Looks like dropbox has a native plugin for the gnome file manager too github.com/dropbox/nautilus-dropbox
Treat different desktops/distros like different operating systems. It just happens to be true that you can mix and match but of course you are not going to have consistency if you do that.
That's an interesting approach that I've never really heard before, to stay within the lane of a single distro's apps. But doesn't that severely limit you? The world of quality modern linux desktop software is pretty limited as it is, so if you only use the software written for a relatively new (comparatively) distro, doesn't that really lock you in?
I think for gnome and kde desktops it's pretty doable. They both have nice ecosystems of applications. If you value consistency you can get it for 99% of apps. The few special cases would be for complicated software like image/art software like Gimp/Krita and maybe media clients and text editors depending on how picky you are.
I think Elementary would be the only one I know of where you could kind of get "locked in" since in my experience trying run apps written for that distro on other platforms they tend to look bad if the author didn't test them off elementary. That said they are just Gtk apps, They just use a different style sheet and have their own library of widgets for certain things. Pantheon - the desktop environment used by elementary is available in other distros now too.
Cool! I think I'll spin up an Elementary instance this weekend and try to stick to only what they supply in their app store and see how the experience differs. Thanks for your detailed insight!