It is no secret that there is a lot of hate for the GNOME desktop in the Linux world. The GNOME hate wave didn’t start between day and night. Instead, it was a set of incremental changes that changed the desktop either for the better or the worse. General census is that often, it was for the latter.

Between 2008 and 2011, GNOME announced its plans to adopt a new design philosophy that was going to shape its 3.x release. GNOME 2.32 was the last supported version from the 2.x branch, and GNOME 3 was initially released in 2011.

A lot of software developers and stakeholders didn’t agree with the direction in which GNOME was going, and they simply forked the project for their own good.

“Forking” is the process of taking the source code for a software project, and then developing it in a different place and under different hands from the original project. Forking often happens because of disagreements regarding development decisions.

This is a list of Linux desktop environments that appeared following GNOME’s 3.x release because of design decision disagreements, or the ones which were forked from a working GNOME codebase:

Unity: Canonical’s CEO Mark Shuttleworth was one of the biggest critics of GNOME’s new design philosophy and wrote many long blog posts about it. His disagreements with the GNOME team ultimately led to the creation of the Unity desktop which was solely developed by Canonical. Unity desktop lived from 2011 to 2017 until Mark hinted that Canonical did not have further resources to waste on the desktop and announced his plans to drop Unity’s development for GNOME. Ubuntu 17.10 was the first release that shipped with GNOME 3 as its default user desktop.
MATE: MATE is a classical desktop that aims to continue the legacy of the GNOME 2.32 release according to the same design principles and desktop layout. The project is still alive and maintained, and the latest release was released in 2024. Many distributions appeared that ship MATE by default like Ubuntu MATE and others.
Cinnamon: Linux Mint developers were among the stakeholders who didn’t like the direction in which GNOME was going. A few releases of Linux Mint shipped with GNOME 3 with some custom GNOME extensions developed by the Linux Mint team, but after they saw that these extensions were going to break every few releases of GNOME Shell due to API incompatibility (which GNOME didn’t care for back then), they announced the development of their own GNOME-forked Cinnamon desktop that forked all the GNOME codebase and libraries into their own hands. Later on, the Linux Mint team also announced X-Apps; which are a set of GNOME apps that are forked to keep their traditional look and layout and make sure they appear well on every GTK-based desktop. Both Cinnamon and X-Apps are still maintained as of today, and the LM team is looking to double-down on forking more GNOME apps.
Budgie: Budgie is not exactly a fork of GNOME, nor has it ever contained GNOME 2.32 code. However, the Budgie desktop uses a lot of libraries and components from the GNOME 3 desktop in its workings. The desktop appeared in 2014 to be a default for the Solus distribution, and is still being maintained as of this day. Budgie developers had plans to switch to Qt and drop GTK toolkit altogether, but they dropped these plans. Budgie lead developed talked before about their disagreements with both the GTK and GNOME teams.
COSMIC: Was a GNOME-forked desktop made by System76 for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution that they ship by default with their desktop PCs and laptops. The COSMIC desktop was basically GNOME 3 but with different modifications to add better window tiling support, different layouts and other things. However, System76 announced its plans to drop GNOME 3 altogether in their distribution and develop a Rust-based desktop from scratch that does not depend on any GNOME codebase whatsoever. System76’s disagreements with the libadwaita introduction by GNOME were the major factors that caused this decision. The new COSMIC desktop is still under development and didn’t see an alpha release yet.

So there you have it. These are the Linux desktops that appeared either in full or in part due to disagreements with GNOME and their design philosophy. Apparently, a lot of work hours, debates, time and effort were wasted by everyone involved in these projects.

One can only imagine what the Linux desktop landscape would have looked like had GNOME not gone into the total fiasco mode that it chose, and what would have happened if some of these efforts were combined to create a better Linux ecosystem experience for all.

Meanwhile, GNOME Foundation is looking for a new executive director after the shaman they hired, who didn’t use GNOME in her life before, didn’t last for 8 months in the position.