 If you've been watching the channel for any amount of time, you'll know that I'm not the biggest Ganon fan in the world. There are many reasons for that. It's just years of experience of going through and trying to make Ganon work for me just hasn't worked. And that's mostly a me problem. I'll be right up front and say that the reason why Ganon doesn't work for me is just because I prefer plasma better. That's just the way it is. And that's perfectly fine. That's the way Linux is supposed to work. That's why we have choice and why Linux is so amazing. You don't like one thing, go use something else. That's great, right? But Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution out there. I don't care what DistroWatch says. Ubuntu has the most users by far, probably combined. There's probably more people who use Ubuntu or an Ubuntu-based flavor than use all other Linux distributions combined. I would probably say that that's true. I don't have any real numbers to back that up, but I feel like that's the case. With that being the way it is, I feel it's important to think about how Ubuntu portrays itself and puts itself out to the Linux desktop community. Now, we should just say that the desktop for Ubuntu is not a priority. It hasn't been for years and that's just the way it is. If you don't make any money on the Ubuntu desktop, their money comes from the server area. So any changes that go into the desktop are mostly community related. And while they do obviously put a lot of effort into it, the small desktop team does put a lot of effort into the Ubuntu desktop. It's still not the priority of Canonical at large. So the changes that I'm suggesting or more the reasons why I think they should change probably aren't going to happen and maybe they shouldn't even happen. These are all my opinions, so I just thought I would put them out there. So today I'm going to be talking about five reasons why I think Ubuntu should ditch GNOME. The first reason is that GNOME isn't the most customizable desktop out there. In fact, I would say that other than elementary OS, the Pantheon desktop, GNOME is actually the least customizable desktop out there. And I'm not saying that you can't customize it. There's tons of stuff you can do if you work hard enough for it. But in terms of actually wanting to go through and change themes, fonts, cursors, all that kind of stuff, there are hurdles in the way of doing that. And even the tweaked version of GNOME that Ubuntu uses is not as customizable as say something like Plasma. Now, maybe Plasma takes it too far. If you want to customize something in Plasma, you can do so because there's tons and tons of settings and it's very complicated and complex and all that stuff. So maybe Plasma takes it too far and GNOME doesn't go far enough, but there should be a middle ground there. And customizability I think is important after you've been using Linux for a while because once you've used Linux and you've gotten your apps and stuff together, you want to experience the things that make Linux great. And one of the things that makes Linux great is the ability to customize your desktop, make it look the way you want to look and work the way you want to work. And for years, GNOME has been very anti customization. They blocked the ability to use themes because they considered a hack, which it probably is. Technologically speaking, it is. Same thing with icons and all that stuff. They make you install a custom app called GNOME Tweaks in order to do a lot of the stuff that you probably should be able to do right of the box. And that's the same with Ubuntu stuff. Even if they've added some customizability into it, it still hasn't gone the whole way there. The extensions system that GNOME and Ubuntu uses is also very step childy. It's not a word, but it feels like it's the weird cousin that you don't want to talk about and shows up to reunions every now and then. And the reason why it feels like that is that they have an extensions app, but you don't install extensions from there. You have to install them from a browser using a browser add-on with a certain package installed that you install from the terminal. And it's a rigmarole to get an extension installed for the first time. And then it's a little bit easier after that, but the first time is just to pay in the ass. And for years it felt like GNOME just didn't want you to use extensions at all. And I think that that's true. With the invention of the extensions app, it feels like they're paying a little bit more attention to extensions because they realize that they've taken so many features out of GNOME over the years that extensions are kind of necessary. But still it feels very much like they don't want you to use these things. They want you to use GNOME the way they want you to use it. And for them, there's no other way. Now, moving that into the Ubuntu sphere, Ubuntu has tried their hardest to go through and make GNOME usable for their vast number of users. They've added a light and dark theme, which is not something you get in GNOME without using GNOME tweaks. They've added a few extensions to make things usable like desktop icons and an icon tray up in the bar. These things that all desktop environments have because they're things that people use. And GNOME feels, for whatever reason, people shouldn't have these things. And that's one of the reasons why I think that Ubuntu should use something else because GNOME likes to take features out of GNOME instead of adding features. They're very feature, they're very anti-feature and much more focused on maintaining the status quo. Let's put it that way. So the second reason is that the GNOME foundation is horrible. And this is for many reasons. One of them is that they don't seem to be interested in advancing GNOME in any way. Now, this is more of an argument before GNOME 40 came out. GNOME 40 at least shows some signs of change and progress and stuff, but it's still very much GNOME. But outside of that, GNOME politically, I don't really like talking politics on the channel, but some of their political stuff is just not great. And the fact that they're involved politically is probably the biggest problem. I don't care what their political ideals are, but if you're running a false software system or whatever, don't get involved in politics at all because that's not where you should be. And it feels more like GNOME lately has become a political organization rather than a software organization. And that's a problem, I feel. Especially because if you're a boon too, you're being associated with the GNOME foundation's politics. And maybe they don't care. Maybe they agree or whatever. I noticed a lot of the people who work on a boon too signed that letter for the Richard Stallman stuff. So maybe they don't care that the GNOME foundation has these political ideas and isn't shy to share them. So personally, I feel that the GNOME foundation tarnishes itself by having political ideals at all. But that's just, again, my feelings. So the third reason kind of relates to the first one I talked about is that cinnamon is better. Now, I'm not a big fan of the cinnamon desktop either, but that's just more of a me problem again. But for people who come from Windows, cinnamon is actually better because I feel that it's more like Windows. If you're moving from Windows to a boon too, they don't look anything alike. And there's a lot of things there that might confuse you. I also think that cinnamon is more user friendly. It's also more, because it's more customizable, it's very good for people who aren't straight out of the box Linux noobs. And they will be able to go through and customize their desktop much easier than they can with GNOME. So cinnamon, I think, is the prime candidate for replacement for GNOME. Now, some would say that that's an argument to use Linux Mint. That's a perfectly reasonable argument. Personally, I think that Linux Mint has its own problems. So we want to get into that. So the fourth reason is something that I've talked about a little bit already is that the GNOME foundation and the people who develop GNOME are not feature forward, they're feature backwards. GNOME is spending time taking features out of their desktop environment while Ubuntu has had to spend time working on extensions and tweaks to their settings panel and stuff to enable features that should have been there out of the box. Other desktop environments like Plasma and Cinnamon and even Mate, which is based on a paradigm that's 15 years old, they spend time putting features in. They spend time making their desktop environments better instead of trying to desperately hold onto that status quo. Now, like I said, this argument was much better before GNOME 40, because GNOME 40 did show that they are at least willing to make some changes. But I've used GNOME 40 and I'm going to tell you right now, it's not a big paradigm shift away from what GNOME has been since GNOME 3 was installed, you know, came out. It's still very much GNOME. It's still this is way you're going to use GNOME and if you don't like it, don't use GNOME. That's the way it seems to be. It's still very much hard to customize. So the fifth reason that Ubuntu should ditch GNOME is performance. GNOME has gotten much better and much faster over the years. It used to be very, very slow. I mean, like, you know, almost completely unusable slow in terms of like animations and stuff taking forever and all this stuff. That stuff has gotten better. It's still not as fast as other desktop environments and even past the whole speed thing. If you're looking at a low resource system, Ubuntu is not a great choice because it takes a lot of resources to run GNOME. Almost always a gigabyte right out of the box. That's idle right after startup. You're going to use between 800 megabytes and a gigabyte of RAM in order to run GNOME. That's just the way it is. And that's the way it's been for ages. It used to be more than that. It used to be well over a gig. So they paired it down a little bit. But again, they did that by taking features out and they're still at a gig. And that's not a great thing. Now obviously, if you're on a seriously system, if your system is seriously constrained on resources, chances are Ubuntu is not the best option for you anyways. It has nothing to do with GNOME. You should probably go with something like LXQt or XFCE. Ubuntu probably is, but I mean, those systems are much more tailored towards systems that are resource constrained. So this whole argument that Ubuntu should be lighter on its feet, maybe not the best one. But I feel that even on systems that have a ton of resources, using a gig out of the box is not the greatest thing in the world, especially when it leads to poor performance in other areas, like startup times and launch times with the applications and stuff like that. And that's if all plays into it. And that's mostly a GNOME problem. Now there's a whole SNAP thing that goes on. Ubuntu uses SNAPs for a lot of their programs. And those things are slow and always have been slow. They have gotten better, but they're still much slower. So that part there has nothing to do with GNOME. But add it all together and it feels much slower than it should be. So those are the five reasons I think that Ubuntu should ditch GNOME. I do have two reasons why they should stick with GNOME. The first one is that is something that I mentioned before we started, is that hardly anyone uses the Linux desktop anyways. And the server side is where Canonical makes all their money. So what they choose really doesn't matter. And on top of that, there's so much choice out there in terms of the Linux desktop. If they don't change, and they lose people using the desktop, it's not going to matter to them monetarily. And because there are other options, if you don't like GNOME, you can go use something else. So really none of this stuff really matters. What I was saying is this video is pointless. But what else is new? Also, in a similar point or whatever, in the long run, it probably would seem to Canonical that switching to a different desktop environment would be a waste of resources because so many people, so few people would be affected by it. So the second one is probably the biggest one. The reason why they should just stick with GNOME is that users hate change. If you're using GNOME right now and on Ubuntu, chances are you like it. Maybe you have some complaints about it, but you don't dislike it enough to move away. So if you like the look and feel of Ubuntu, chances are you won't want them to change, and you would probably be pissed off if they did. So those people who don't like Ubuntu and have the same arguments that I have, have probably already moved away from Ubuntu or used one of the flavors or whatever. So people don't like change, and that's probably the best reason for them just to stay where they are. So it's also an argument against them being able to change in the first place. I don't think that at this point Ubuntu can actually change away from GNOME without making a huge political or maybe not political, but public relations nightmare for a lot of the people who they depend on. So those are the reasons why I think that Ubuntu is probably going to stick with GNOME. I gave you five reasons why I think it should get to GNOME. So let me know what you think down in the comments below. Let me know if you think they should stick with GNOME. If so, why? If you think they should switch away, what should they switch to? I'm really interested to know what you all think. So thanks for watching. You can follow us on Twitter at Linuscast. You can also follow us on Facebook at Linuscast, and you can support us on Patreon at patreon.com. Make sure you leave a like, and a subscribe, and hit the notification icon bell. And I'd like to take a moment to thank our current patrons. Devon, Marcus, Meglin, Donnie, Sven, Merrick, Camp, and Mitchell. Thanks everybody for your support. Thank you for watching. I'll see you next time.