Happy anniversary GNOME: What's your favorite version?

For the 22nd anniversary of GNOME, we asked our writers about their favorite release. Now we want to hear from you. Take our poll.
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Today is the 22nd anniversary of the first GNOME release. To celebrate, we want to hear from you. What's your favorite GNOME version? And what does your favorite version say about you? Are you change-averse or are you a pioneer of new releases? Take our poll!

We asked our writers to weigh in on the topic and we received some impassioned responses. Even though GNOME 3 was released about 8 years ago, GNOME 2 continues to be the preferred version among our writers. Many of our writers proclaimed that MATE is the best version. Others argued that MATE is indeed not a GNOME version while some suggested that it may as well be considered GNOME 2. 

"GNOME 2 or MATE Desktop." —Ivan Bazulic 

"My favorite is always the latest version. Each release has new goodies I can't wait to try out. These are the ones from 3.32 which was released with Fedora 30 - my favorite is the new icons, I love the vibrantly-colored redesign!" —Máirín Duffy 

"I'm a fan of GNOME 2, since I have been using Linux Mint + Mate desktop for a good number of years on my home computers." —Eli Marcus 

"My favorite GNOME was 2, simply because it had the option to set the window borders to the theme "microgui" which I really like." —Germán Pulido

"GNOME 2.x, I can't get used to GNOME 3 unfortunately, I think the GNOME 2 user experience was a lot better." —Mario Torre

"My visually impaired colleagues like MATE, that means basically GNOME 2 too, because it works reliably for them and they don't feel like second class citizens with it." —Milan Zamazal 

"My favorite GNOME version is 2.32, it was simple, fast, and very usable. Still better than most modern iterations. Disclaimer: I develop and maintain the MATE Desktop, which is a fork of GNOME 2 from those days." —Victor Kareh

What do you think? Take our poll and leave us a comment to state your case. 

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Lauren is the managing editor for Opensource.com. When she's not organizing the editorial calendar or digging into the data, she can be found going on adventures with her family and German shepherd rescue dog, Quailford. She is passionate about spreading awareness of how open source technology and principles can be applied to areas outside the tech industry such as education and government.

2 Comments

If I'm using GNOME, then I want to use GNOME 3.

But really I'm happy in KDE.

Another KDE (Plasma 5) user here, weirdly on a GNOME article :)

The only GNOME version I really liked was 0.98 (or something like that), because I could swap the window manager to whichever suited me best, but then I discovered KDE 1.1 and switched.

From time to time I used to try different desktops and window managers but I always kept coming back to KDE land.

But if I was a GNOME user I'd probably be using the latest version 3.x as I like getting continual improvements and refinements :)

Happy bday GNOME!

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