 If you've watched the channel for any amount of time, you know that I have a very mixed relationship with the GNOME desktop environment, and it's only recently that I've really come around to the idea that it's even any good. So now that I've thought about that, and I've kind of went on this journey when it comes to GNOME, I've been thinking about what the best version of GNOME actually is, because for a lot of people, they're going to experience GNOME in any number of different places, and every distro that ships GNOME ships a different version. And I'm not talking about version numbers, I'm talking about an implementation of GNOME. So if you use Papa West, at least as of right now, you're going to see a very customized version of GNOME being shipped to you. If you use Ubuntu, you're going to be seeing a very customized version of GNOME. If you're going to use Fedora, you're going to be seeing a very vanilla version of GNOME because they use vanilla GNOME. So depending on what distribution you use, you're going to see GNOME look, feel, and have different features than on other distributions. And that will lead to the question, what distribution has the best version of GNOME? Now, this is going to be very personal, it's going to depend on how you truly like to use GNOME. If you prefer the vanilla way of doing things, Fedora is the best and maybe only option for you. Well, I mean, you could download it on Arch. Arch is going to have a vanilla experience as well. But when it comes to a distribution that comes pre shipped with GNOME, if you want the vanilla options, Fedora is the way to go. If you aren't attached to the vanilla way of doing things, and you prefer a more customized and customizable experience, then the best distro to use GNOME on is Ubuntu. It's not even really all that close. Now, some people would argue PopOS, but I'm discounting PopOS simply because they're not going to be using GNOME for very much longer. So they're not even really in the race simply because they won't be using it for more than a year. Like sometime in the next year, they're going to be coming out with their own desktop environment called Cosmic. So I really don't want to recommend you go use that and then have to change a year from now, you know, if you if you're preferring GNOME. So the best experience if you want a customizable version of GNOME is from Ubuntu. Now Ubuntu uses GNOME as its default desktop environment. It has many other flavors, but the Ubuntu GNOME version that they ship on their website is their primary ISO, it's their primary version. And they have done an enormous amount of work to get GNOME looking and feeling the way they wanted to do. So I'm going to talk about a few of the features that they have built into Ubuntu that vanilla GNOME lacks. Now, I'm not saying that vanilla GNOME cannot have these features. All of the features that are in Ubuntu come from extensions, at least for the most part. And you can get those extensions on Fedora and vanilla GNOME if you want to. It's really simple. All you got to do is download them and enable them. So if you want to have the Ubuntu experience in Fedora on GNOME, you can do that it's just going to take work on your part. So the features that I'm talking about specifically in Ubuntu are several. So the first one is going to be icons on the desktop. This again comes from an extension, but it's a feature that GNOME pulled out of the standard GNOME desktop four or five years ago at this point, maybe three years ago. And it's just not there. If you want it, you have to have an extension. But by default, you can have icons on the desktop in Ubuntu on GNOME. And I think that a lot of people downplay the importance of this type of feature simply because they think it's weird or stupid or whatever. Like I don't ever want icons on my desktop, but you would be surprised at how many people want that stuff there. And it's kind of like a marquee feature, right? It's one of those things that people look at like, yeah, I want that. And as of right now out of the box, it's only available on Ubuntu unless you do some extra work elsewhere. So that's one feature. The one is a task tray. So this has icons up in the upper right hand corner of running applications that have taskbar icons, things like Dropbox and peak cloud and discord and Todoist and OBS, all these applications have icons that go up there. Now it's not that big a deal in most cases simply because you can access OBS from the dock if you wanted to. But things like Dropbox and peak cloud, those aren't applications that run in the dock. They run in the background. And the only way oftentimes to actually interact with those programs is through that icon up there in the bar. Vanilla GNOME does not have this functionality Ubuntu ships it by default. So that's another one. Another big one is the ability to move the dock around. So by default in vanilla GNOME, you can't do it. It's where it is. Now you can actually install dash to dock if you want to it, it's fairly simple to do so. But by default in Ubuntu, you can move that thing wherever you want. By default, it's on the left hand side, and it looks like the traditional Ubuntu dock, but you can change that thing to a panel. You can change it to a dock. You can move it from the left hand side to the bottom to the right, wherever you want it to, you can make it so that auto hides. And that is a functionality that they built right into their settings panel. And it works really, really well. Another feature that the Ubuntu version of GNOME has is accent colors. So if you want to change the accent color of your entire system, you can do so with Ubuntu. This will change things like the highlight color in the applications. It'll change the folder color, and it will look just really, really nice. And you can choose from like five or six different colors. And it's just a great way of customizing things when themes aren't necessarily always going to be available to you. Another thing that the Ubuntu guys have done really well in their version of GNOME is added customized ability when it comes to things like dark mode and stuff like that. Now, vanilla GNOME has finally gotten dark mode. And that's great, but Ubuntu was there first. Okay, it just was. And it's great that they're pushing a lot of stuff up into the mainstream. And a lot of the Ubuntu features will eventually probably filter back into vanilla GNOME, but some of the ones that I've talked about so far just aren't there. So that's definitely something to keep in mind. So those are the main features that Ubuntu has and has implemented that make their version of GNOME so much better than vanilla. The just the amount of customizability is kind of miles and away better than vanilla GNOME. Now, it's not like they're including GNOME tweaks out of the box. They're not. But you can see that they've done a really good job of making their version of GNOME as customizable as possible while still maintaining the feeling of GNOME overall, like it still feels like the GNOME desktop environment. But you have some extra options that you can mess around with to make it look and feel like your own as well. And that's not something that happens with vanilla GNOME, at least out of the box, you can obviously get there. But it, you know, would take some effort. So in my opinion, the Ubuntu version of GNOME is the best version of GNOME out there. And I don't think, again, that it's even really all that close. So if you have thoughts on GNOME and which distro does it better, leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Mastodon and Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the Linux cast. Just like all these fine people. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the channel just will not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very, very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.