 Today, I want to discuss a little bit of some of the drama going on within the Linux community right now, and it's going to combine several different video topics into one video because people have asked me to comment on Solas moving away from GTK to EFL, which is the Enlightenment toolkit. And people want to know my thoughts on PopOS creating its own cosmic desktop environment and trying to move away from relying on GNOME at all. People have also asked me to comment on the Linus Tech Tips videos where Linus over at Linus Tech Tips has not had a good experience using desktop Linux, specifically PopOS and the Linus Tech Tip video that really got a lot more eyeballs on Linux content because now people are seeing this very popular YouTuber, you know, with tens of millions of subscribers and he's trying out Linux for the first time in this case PopOS and he's having a bad experience. He's got all these bugs, you know, that he's got hardware problems and things like that and then people go and harass, in some cases, the PopOS developers to the point where, you know, they are actually getting tired of some of the negativity being directed toward them. People, you know, should open issues, file bug reports and things like that, but they've got people, you know, being nasty to them, especially on social media and PopOS is really getting this, you know, double because of not just the Linus Tech Tip stuff, but I mean, right before the Linus Tech Tip video, the negative video about PopOS, you know, you had PopOS mentioning that they were having problems working with the GNOME team and then they wanted to basically create their own desktop environment. They want to write their own desktop environment using the Rust programming language. And of course, right now is a very delicate time because Windows 11 was recently released and I really thought that we could make some inroads here. We could have some major market share gains on desktop Linux because so many Windows users are looking to get away from the Windows platform and Linux is definitely a viable alternative. But what's going on with some of these Linux desktops right now, the state of the Linux desktop right now is a bit of a dumpster fire and that's been the case in my opinion for at least the last 10 years because when we talk about the year of the Linux desktop, you know, every year is the year of the Linux desktop. This will be the year that the desktop is going to be so good. Everybody's going to leave Windows and Mac and come over to Linux. No, the year of the Linux desktop, that whole thing that that died in 2011. 2011 was the year of the Linux desktop. And when I say it was the year of the Linux desktop, 2011 was the year that we officially killed the Linux desktop. And for those wondering why 2011, 2011 was the initial release of GNOME 3. So they killed GNOME 2 and moved to GNOME 3 and to me and to millions of other desktop Linux users, that was kind of a warning sign, right? That was a big red flag that said, hey, we are not going in the right direction because previous to GNOME 3, we had a fantastic desktop environment that attracted millions of users from Windows over to Linux. It was called GNOME 2. We also had a fantastic alternative desktop environment, KDE 3, that actually killed itself in 2008. And, you know, let's talk about that too, because in 2008, KDE moved from 3.5 to KDE 4. And the release of KDE 4 was a disaster. It was slow. It was bloated. It was buggy. It was very buggy. It was practically unusable. And KDE 3.5, many people have such fond memories of it. There's a lot of people that have been using KDE for, you know, 15, 20 years that still to this day swear KDE 3.5 was the best desktop environment they've ever used. And what did KDE do? We reached this point of perfection, essentially, you know, there's nothing wrong with this desktop environment. Let's completely script the whole thing and start over. And of course, this caused many KDE users to just leave KDE and move to other desktop environments, such as GNOME 2. And what did GNOME 2 do with all of this new popularity? All these people that are just loving their desktop environment, they saw what KDE did to destroy itself. Three years later, they did the exact same thing. They had reached ultimate perfection. GNOME 2 and the comp is a fix and every all, you know, we just had this great desktop environment. Let's just blow up the whole dang thing. So now you've got really two unusable desktop environments. And we didn't have a million desktop environments, you know, 10, 12 years ago, it was essentially every major Linux distribution used either GNOME or KDE. And now both of those desktop environments had done these major switches and it's not just like the desktop environments are new, new features, it's just completely alien. I mean, that was a part of the problem too. But these things were buggy. They were alpha quality software. And now you couldn't use, I mean, nobody wanted to use GNOME 3, nobody wanted to use KDE 4. So what did many Linux distributions decide to do? They decided to create their own desktop environments. And essentially, that's how we've got ourself into this mess. Because in 2011, with the birth of GNOME 3, no distribution wanted to move to GNOME 3. So once GNOME 2 reached the end of life, that's when you had the birth of Monte and Cinnamon and Unity and Budgie and probably a dozen other desktop environments that basically grew out of the dumpster fire that was GNOME 3 and KDE 4. Now fast forward to 2011, Solus wants to get away from having to work with GNOME at all. They don't want to use the GTK toolkit anymore. They want to move to EFL, the Enlightenment toolkit. And that's probably a smart decision because it's not like Solus is the first team that has tried to get away from GNOME or had problems with GNOME and POP OS. Now, they want to no longer base off of GNOME at all. They want to create their own desktop environment because before they were really just GNOME with a bunch of custom extensions and those custom extensions break with every single GNOME release. And I'm surprised POP even did that to begin with because we've we've had 10 years now to see what GNOME does. So GNOME 3 2011, it rolls out, you know, GNOME 3 and immediately Ubuntu has to figure out what to do. And they try to ask the GNOME team to make some concessions with the GNOME shell, the new GNOME 3, GNOME shell. And one of the things is, hey, we really need a global menu as far as in the top bar. We need that to be a global menu, kind of like the Mac OS has the global menu, you know, file, edit and everything in the top panel. And Canonical was really wanting that. And that was something that was very important to what they wanted to do. And GNOME just flat out refused to do that. I don't know why, because if you've ever seen GNOME 3 or even now GNOME 40, GNOME 41, that top bar has nothing in it. Right. It's a wasted. I don't even know why they have a panel. The panel is just a big black panel. It's got the time and date in the center of it. Why that's in the center? I don't know. But it's got all this just unused space. You couldn't put a global panel in there for Canonical. GNOME team, I guess not. So eventually, Canonical just said, well, hey, we'll just not use GNOME at all. We're just going to go ahead and create our own desktop environment called Unity, which was basically a fork of compias. And then Mint, of course, didn't want to go to GNOME 3 and Mint's based off of Ubuntu, but they really weren't sure about the Unity desktop environment that the Ubuntu team was going to create as well. So they created their own desktop environment. Cinnamon, which the early days of cinnamon, cinnamon was essentially GNOME with some extensions. And those extensions were buggy and they tended to break with new versions of GNOME. So eventually, cinnamon became its own desktop environment. They quit, you know, just being GNOME with extensions. So, you know, seeing some of what has gone on with these desktop environments in years past. And I think there's enough evidence out there now over the last decade. We know the GNOME team does not play well with others. They don't listen to others. They're really not interested in your input at all if you're outside the project, right? Because your project is your project, they're going their own way. And I have no problem with that personally. And it's one of the things I think at this point, GNOME is actually right on this. If you want to build your own desktop environment, build your own desktop environment, don't take GNOME and then try to take it in a direction that GNOME is not going and then put in all of these feature requests or even, you know, in some cases, putting in the code yourself and doing a merge request and thinking they're going to accept it, they're not, right? At some point, you just have to create your own desktop. You know, forget about GNOME. And at this point, GNOME really kind of killed itself in 2011 when they went from GNOME 2, which was easily the most popular Linux desktop on the planet. And again, it got millions of people to actually try out Linux back then because Windows was kind of a mess. That was around the days of Windows Vista. And of course, Ubuntu exploded in popularity because Ubuntu's main desktop back then was GNOME 2. But really, when GNOME 3 came around, that was it. And that should have been that should have been a warning sign to all of these distributions because so many distributions use GNOME as their default desktop environment because GNOME 2 was so good and made sense. But we've had more than a decade of all of this craziness. Now that these distributions like pop and like solace and like Ubuntu and anybody that has worked with the GNOME project should know now just to leave those folks alone. That you at this point, leave GNOME behind. If you're using GNOME, leave GTK behind because honestly, Qt QT the Qt toolkit, it is a good option. If you're if GNOME is your default desktop environment on your Linux distribution these days and you don't want to create your own desktop environment because that's a major undertaking, then why put in all of that work when KDE Plasma is fantastic? Now, KDE finally righted the ship, right? So KDE 3 was fantastic. KDE 4 was horrible. Nobody wanted to use that thing. But you know what, KDE 5 Plasma was great. It is great. I like it's probably the best, most mature, most feature rich desktop environment we have available on Linux right now. But nobody uses it as far as a default desktop environment. Mainstream distributions, they typically still default to things like GNOME, you know, or at least another GTK based desktop, maybe the ones they created themselves. And I don't know why a lot of this is just legacy, right? It's just history. You know, we were everybody was just using GNOME 15 years ago. So now we're still kind of living in that GNOME world, right? That that GNOME ecosystem. And at some point, we just have to accept that maybe we pick the wrong side, like the Linux desktop. Like if it was always a battle, GNOME versus KDE back in the day. Well, at this point, I don't think it's really a contest anymore. At this point, I think more distributions need to seriously consider moving away from GTK based desktops and actually give Plasma a try. I think I mentioned this on a recent video about Ubuntu. I think if Ubuntu moved to Plasma, they would see a resurgence in their popularity. But right now that desktop environment that Ubuntu is shipping with, which is kind of this weird bastardization of GNOME with some weird extensions. That thing is just not good. Now, the good thing about Popo as Popo West does actually have developers. They've got a lot of developers on their team that their REST programmers. So they're going to build their new desktop environment using the REST programming language. So pop can actually create their own desktop environment. Many small Linux distributions, though, they can't create their own desktop environment. They don't have those kinds of resources. What Solis is doing is interesting using the EFL toolkit and you're moving away from GTK to EFL, the Enlightenment toolkit. And I think that is interesting because it's one of those things most people don't know that there are other options other than GTK and Qt. Qt. A lot of people just assume that that's it. GTK Qt is just this duopoly that we've had on Linux for decade. Really, since the beginning, but there's other toolkits you could use. They're not popular, you know, like EFL, you know, most people probably of watching this video have never heard of it, but it's out there. So we don't have to be stuck with the tools that we've just been used to. Right. There's other things out there that we could explore, make better. Just move on to something else at this point. Right now, people are trying. You're trying to fit a square pig into a round hole. You're trying to work with the GNOME team. And again, I don't want to, you know, say I told you so, but I've seen this coming for years. You know, I've had this video channel on YouTube for four years, and I've warned so many times about the direction that GNOME is going, not just their desktop environment, but the leadership, the foundation. Just just everything about it just seems all wrong. Right. Like the warning signs have been there for years. And I don't know why so many people still stick with that dying project. Me personally, I'm very excited to see where these new desktop environments go. I'm very excited about PopOS and their new cosmic desktop environment that's going to be written in Rust. I'm also very excited about Solus moving Budgie away from GTK to EFL. And that is interesting because four years ago, actually, many people don't remember this, but four years ago, Solus announced that they were going to move away from GTK to Qt, the Qt toolkit. And that never happened because they announced that the next major version of Budgie was going to switch from GTK to Qt. But then right after they made that announcement, the lead maintainer of Solus actually left the project and then they just never could get around to rewriting Budgie for Qt rather than GTK. That just never happened. So that they just got put on the back burner. But now four years later, finally, they are leaving GTK. But instead of Qt, they're moving to EFL, which I think is an interesting choice. I can't wait to try that out. And I hope these two desktop environments are well received and I hope they knock it out of the park because honestly, at this point, we need other options and we need something other than GNOME because at this point, anybody that's been paying attention for the last 10 years knows that GNOME has really been holding Linux desktop back and they've been holding it hostage and we need to move in a different direction because it's one of those things, you know, insanity is just repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. We're not going to get a different result, right? We've already tried GNOME. We tried it for 20 years. Now, that is not the way forward. Now, before I go, I want to thank a few special people. I want to thank the producers of the show. Devin Gabe James, Matt Mitchell, Paul Scott, Wes Akami, Alan Chuck, Commander, angry Kurt Dayoka, David Dillon, Gregory Hickey, Lee Maxim, Michael, Mike Nitrix, Erion, Peace, Archon, Fedora, Alexander, Polytech, Raver, Red Prophet, Steven, Willie, these guys. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode you just watched would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. It's just me and you guys, the community. If you enjoy these kinds of rants about, I don't even know what I talked about today, but if you enjoy these lengthy rants, please subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace.