 Hi, I'm Denshi and today I'm talking about the GNOME desktop environment and me being a KDE user and my perspective on it. I decided to use GNOME for the last week and these are my thoughts. So first of all if you don't know what GNOME is, it's a desktop environment for you know Linux and I think BSD as well operating systems and this is just the activities page in GNOME so the main application launcher and quite possibly the most recognizable thing from the GNOME you know these little rows and rows of apps that you find in GNOME 3. To some considerations before beginning, GNOME is marketed to all users. This might seem like a no brainer but some you know window managers for example like DWM are very clearly pointed towards certain groups of users in its case groups of users who wish to recompile their you know window manager every time they want to make a change which you know that's a existing market that's a group of people who want to do that that's really really cool that's all good but GNOME is marketed at all users which is you know sort of an indication of where it's coming for or you know where it's coming from in terms of its design decisions it wants to be useful for professionals and for people who don't know how to use computers so that's something to take into consideration and it's a very non-traditional UI so if you go back it looks non-traditional it might look like a Mac with this application launcher and that is similar to a Mac's launcher so macOS's launcher and the dock as well but that's not a dock that only shows up when you press the super key or go to the activities page when you're just using GNOME normally the only UI elements on the screen are your windows and the top bar so all of this stuff all of these apps all this you know the wallpaper is darkened but you know it would just be the wallpaper all of that stuff's gone it's a very quote-unquote minimalist you know desktop environment and it's very non-traditional in the sense that there's no dock or like panel or that kind of stuff for launching programs you have to press the super key then search for the program you want or you click on show applications and this mac looking menu shows up so it has a very non-traditional UI it's controversial for being minimalist I wouldn't call GNOME controversial just that you know people don't like it for various reasons and one of those is for its attempts in minimalism now GNOME has always been plagued by problems in terms of performance but I'm talking more about the interface itself and as you can see the interface here looks pretty minimalist and clean but what people have been complaining is that features are being removed from GNOME and I'll talk about some of those later one that really infuriated me I'll talk about that that have been removed for no apparent reason just simply because the people who make GNOME thought they were quote-unquote bloat or something like that anyway it also uses GTK and Wayland and oh god Wayland so GTK is the GIMP toolkit I think it's called the GNOME toolkit now I don't know it's something toolkit I think it's GIMP toolkit and all GTK is is essentially the well you know the API for developing the UI of the programs that are meant to run GNOME and I'll talk about what I like about GTK later but let's first of all touch on Wayland oh boy that's on Wayland this is the first time I'm using Wayland and I used it for like two seconds then I switched to XOR and Wayland is great I think it's really really excellent because it can run a lot of programs really well it uses less memory less resources it is just generally excellent in terms of performance and on lower end machines you will see the difference you will genuinely see a big difference when it comes to running on Wayland it's it you can really notice this performance improvement I gotta say and I did notice it as well because just running with Wayland I used considerably less memory and less CPU than I would when I was running XOR which is sort of a weird thing what we're gonna talk about GNOME's resource usage later but the thing is obviously with Wayland you can't use dedicated GPUs you can't do this you can't do that I can't run certain extra gaps I don't even think DXVK works and all that kind of stuff you can't do that on Wayland so I just ended up switching little config in GDM to XOR and we'll talk about GDM but first of all what I liked GTK one of the greatest things about GNOME is that it has a very uniform design this is because of GTK and I really really love GTK especially when it's you know integrated directly into the operating system in terms of the interface everything in GNOME looks very uniform and I really really like that so this is an example of like a test of GTK interface and as you can see every UI element in the world is being used here and it looks really really good even with all this mess on the screen it looks really good I don't think I can say the same for Qt or QT which is what KDE uses so I really like GTK and I like the theming in GTK it has you know had some issues with distributions theming their stuff and there was that that whole thing but I don't think it's as big of a problem now I just stick to the regular dark theme that's included a Dwight of Dark but I really like GTK so I do enjoy GTK another thing I liked is the GNOME apps so once again the uniformity of them things like you know weather maps GNOME's like image preview GNOME's PDF viewer I like these because unlike KDE they were named appropriately they had you know no nonsense names and most importantly they worked really really well they were fast they were you know generally they had a lot of features the PDF reader had pretty much all the features you'd expect for like annotations and all that kind of stuff and it's they're just generally really good programs and over here you'll notice that I have the square at the bottom right corner and that's with you know GNOME has Google and you know cloud drive integration in it in its file manager so a GNOME app the you know Nautilus file manager has integration with that stuff by default I don't use Google Drive I don't use NextCloud I use Mega which has a program for Dolphin as well which is the KDE so the K desktop environment file manager but you know if you do use Google Drive I guess that could be useful for you and GNOME's pretty much the only one that I've seen that has that kind of feature where you can access your Google Drive from your you know folders so anyway what I liked as well this is the last thing I'm going to talk about that I liked activities I know people don't find it confusing the concept of at first I found it confusing as well I press the super key and it brings me through this menu and it's got these windows all over the screen oh my god I don't know what to do now how do I switch workplaces what's the hot key for this and it all ended up being very intuitive once you think about it with using the mouse and then you know learn the actual hot keys and I think the activities thing is really smart the fact that you press the super key and all your windows spread apart and you can see what you're doing because I tend to do that thing where I overlap a lot of windows like a complete idiot without you know going to new workspaces and this is a solution to that problem sure I should probably fix the root problem but hey I really liked activities and its implementation and I think it's something that other desktop environments need to look into because I think it's really genius what I disliked load now GNOME is known for being a resource hawk and in the past it was also plagued with instability issues but it genuinely is bloated it uses more memory and more cpu and pretty much more everything this is an actual screenshot this is just to illustrate my point but basically it is generally more bloated now I'm going to be honest if you have any kind of modern like computer like anything released in the last three years that has a decent cpu and you know a good amount of RAM you're not really going to notice this you're not going to notice the difference between GNOME and KDE and likely you're not going to notice any actual slowdown but you know it's good to have more memory and more cpu available and obviously compared to something like I was running open box the other day it uses far less memory because it's just a window manager what I disliked minimalism quote unquote now I mentioned this before GNOME is controversial for being quote unquote minimalist now by minimalist I mean it gets rid of a lot of features so for example desktop icons aren't a thing in GNOME and that's once again an example of it not being a very traditional desktop environment and the thing is you can add these back and I'll touch upon that later but it's really annoying to see developers take things out which people actually like thinking it's going to you know reduce bloat or something when people need that feature they might think it's you know bloat but it's not bloat hits a feature anyway if I wanted to fix this issue of desktop icons I'd have to get something called GNOME tweaks where I can then go to a website where I can get extensions and click a little thing and then there's a browser plugin so I can directly add extensions on that stuff KDE has a similar thing but basically my point is I find it really really annoying that I need to install a separate program GNOME tweaks and a bunch of other stuff like get specific extensions just so I can get desktop icons back on my environment like it's it's completely ridiculous that that's what I got to do it's just sort of completely annoying I think and the developers of GNOME should at least understand the concept that you know maybe newcomers will want desktop icons if they've been using Windows or Mac they have desktop icons on Windows or Mac and your first instinct as a new user is oh my god I gotta get that feature back right now so I'm gonna go and install GNOME tweaks and blow it up my system oh my god this plugin is unstable or something I install the plugin and it doesn't work because if it's a plugin that people want and it's you know a plugin and very clearly they have a reason for it not to be in the actual program and an example of that is that many plugins have issues running on GNOME I don't know if it's just my own isolated cases but even something as basic as installing the this desktop icons function would break a lot maybe just arch I don't know but um yeah and they will use it and then that will break and a new user will be very upset simply because this feature wasn't there in the first place so that's just something I don't like the minimalism and the fact that you need to go and get GNOME tweaks so you can add things and even just change the theme you need to GNOME tweaks for that it's not in the default system settings as it is with KDE I think GNOME is great but it's just not for me so I've been you know ranting a bit about GNOME in the last three slides uh but you know I have loads of positive stuff to say about it I like GTK I like the GNOME ecosystem and the activities and that kind of stuff and you know Whelan's okay and in general I think it's a desktop environment which I could you know feasibly migrate to eventually for me my biggest gripe is the lack of desktop icons and also I didn't mention this in this video yet but the lack of coloring folders which yet again needs another plugin for you need to add plugins and plugins and plugins just to get this basic functionality which is already in KDE and sure you may call KDE over complicated it's got all these UI things and right clicking on everything opens up menus and menus but at least it doesn't try to remove things or hide things like GNOME and KDE you see a million settings because there are a million settings in GNOME sure it's more uniform and beautiful which I do like it's sort of like a double-edged sword it's minimalist on like a simply like eye candy perspective it looks generally like beautiful really I think it's a very nice looking desktop environment because of its uniformity but this causes problems in terms of how you manage your system and you know doing things like oh I want to change the theme to my GTK programs I want to read dark mode I have to go all the way over here and install GNOME tweaks and GNOME software which is the program that's running here barely worked for me I don't know if it's just like Arch Linux being annoying but it would take considerably more time to install software from GNOME's inbuilt store than it would you know from the terminal not that I would ever really install any packages not by the terminal simply just to try out the GNOME ecosystem and yep GNOME store marketplace whatever they call it it's not any good I don't recommend you use it as your package manager use your terminal or at most use Octopy which is very very good as GUI package manager anyway so that's pretty much all I really had to say I hope you enjoyed this little presentation I hope you enjoyed this video on GNOME I've switched back to KDE now but you know I enjoyed my time with GNOME I enjoyed the kind of stuff that I discovered and it gave me a more nuanced look on both it and KDE so now I have a different view on KDE I might eventually do something like this for XFCE and maybe like a window manager like open box or something but please let me know what you thought of this video in the comments and if you want please subscribe and goodbye