When comparing GNOME vs Elementary OS, the Slant community recommends GNOME for most people. In the question“What are the best UNIX-like desktop environments with high DPI support for retina displays?” GNOME is ranked 9th while Elementary OS is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose GNOME is:
GNOME has a well-rounded set of features meaning that any user will be able to get around it and not miss anything from other desktops.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Very polished
GNOME has a well-rounded set of features meaning that any user will be able to get around it and not miss anything from other desktops.
Pro Lots of apps
Dozens of great apps are made specifically for GNOME.
Pro GTK >=2 is written for GNOME
GTK is now a GNOME project so the desktop will be compatible with the latest versions.
Pro Extensions
They provide the user with a plethora of customizations and tweaks.
Pro Dynamic workspaces
Setting provides for effortless workspace management.
Pro Activities overview
Grid-style app menu.
Pro UI design consistency
Excellent uniformity between all the stock application and an overall extremely clean design with simple animations.
Pro Lightweight & fast
Runs well on limited-resources hardware, including netbooks or chromebooks.
Pro Built on Ubuntu
Built on Ubuntu LTS with all its qualities and support.
Pro If you like MacOSX the UI/UX is similar
Pro Extremely user-friendly
This distribution promises you a very tailored user experience and it does deliver on that promise. The developers provide you with a custom desktop environment and a set of neat programs. And the whole desktop looks simply gorgeous.
Pro Active Google+ community
There is a place where Elementary users can ask their questions and usually get answers pretty quickly. Not only by the other users, but the devs are pretty active themselves, often engaging in the discussions on the hows, whys, and plans of the OS.
Pro Simplicity, limited configurability
Sane defaults with less confusion for new users.
Pro Consistent development practices
All Elementary apps are written in Vala and hosted on Launchpad, and there are standard APIs such as contractor for applications to interact with one another. This is different from most distros, in which apps are written in a variety of languages. This design decision makes it easy to get started developing for Elementary and to understand how the various pieces fit together.
Pro A dedicated StackExchange site
Elementary OS has a dedicated StackExchange site where users can easily find answers to common questions.
Pro With new tweak tools customisation is not a problem
Now the OS is amazingly customisable
Cons
Con Hides many settings
GNOME sometimes reduces the whole interface to the absolute minimum, a few examples:
- GNOME hides many advanced options/settings in its interfaces
- Toolbars can't be edited without external tools
- Menubars have been removed in favor of a hamburger menu
- Newer GTK versions remove icons inside popupmenus and menu mnemonics
Con Standardized
The desktop layout is not as modifiable as some other options, and certain settings require additional software (such as Gnome Tweak Tool) to reasonably modify.
Con No tray support by default
An extension has to be installed to get tray support.
Con Designed for tablets before desktops
Said a million times already by the other cons but the design is for tablets, even though the primary usecase is on laptops.
Con UI doesn't let you change anything
Every installation of elementaryOS looks exactly like the same.
Con Old base and applications
The slow release schedule makes the applications outdated. It drags behind Ubuntu LTS (on which it's based) which itself drags behind Ubuntu which is often still quite far behind Arch for example.
Con Outdated or bad default applications
Con Poor Linux community reputation
The devs of elementary OS feel anyone not paying for their Ubuntu respin are not worthy of using it. Which upset a good bit of people. Obviously the core dev team have issues with their community outreach and PR.
Con Quite buggy
Con Very slow development cycle
Elementary does not offer any release date for their stable releases going more with an "it's done when it's done" attitude. Making depending on newer apps a difficulty as well as a poor choice for those that need consistent release schedules for their OS.
Con Not very configurable
Con The desktop doesn't let you to put icons by default
Con Limited and outdated packages
Packages can be very outdated, and many can't be installed from official repos.
Con Doesn't support 32-bit hardwares anymore
One can install pantheon DE from new ubuntu's repo but Elementry OS is not making new ISO's nor is it supporting them. It makes confuzzled to new users.
Con Upper panel requires extra spaces
The upper panel in Elementary OS requires more space. This can be a problem for computers with small monitors.
Con Emacs doesn't work
Emacs crashes due to a partial gnome library update.
Con Heavy animations
It has some animations that don‘t run well on older hardware.
Con Window control button placement may be unintuitive to some
elementary OS has window controls on the left side of the window. It may be less intuitive to users coming from other operating systems that put window controls on the right.
Con No proprietary driver installer
Elementary OS removed the driver installer of Ubuntu.
Con Problems with basic functions
Problems often arise with functions like keyboard layout and touchpad.
Con Boring UI
It can be very boring.