 Hey everybody welcome back to the channel. Today we're going to talk a little bit about GNOME. Now after trying GNOME for a few weeks while trying Ubuntu 2010, I've come to the conclusion that I might have been just a little bit wrong about GNOME as a desktop environment. Not a lot wrong, but a little wrong. It takes quite a lot for me to, I was wrong, so everybody should be happy about this. Now let's go ahead and jump to the front, just to the main screen here, so you can actually have something to look at. So today I just thought I would go through and talk about the five reasons, five or six reasons why I was wrong, and then maybe at the end explain a little bit why I still feel GNOME isn't that great. So I've installed Fedora on a virtual machine here. So I want to start off with this. Fedora was the easiest desktop environment in our distro. I've ever installed a virtual box. It was flawless. It was so good. So we're just, that has nothing to do with the video. I just wanted to point that out and it's completely off script because I actually did write a script for this, which I've proven that I can't follow. So anyway, so let's just jump into the reasons why GNOME is better than I thought it was. So the first reason is it's faster than ever. In the good old days GNOME was the slowest piece of trash that ever existed in the Linux desktop. It was just so slow. It was usable in the barest sense. At least this was true once GNOME 3 became a thing. Prior to that GNOME 2 was actually really good. It was very popular. The speed and performance was one of the reasons why the Matei project exists after all. The developers there didn't care for the performance of GNOME and they didn't care for the UI of GNOME 3. So they stuck with the GNOME 2 paradigm and went on from there. These days GNOME is so much faster. It's kind of awesome. So I've been using this just a little while. So it does have some usual first time running problems. But for the most part, as you can tell, this is very fast. I mean this is so much faster than it used to be. And this is in a virtual machine with four cores and eight gigabytes of RAM. So imagine what we would run on bare metal. So I mean it would be really good. And it does run really good on bare metal. I've done it before. So it's really fast. Well I wouldn't go so far as to say that GNOME is the fastest desktop environment out there. That's because it's not true. And it's definitely not the lightest by long shot. I mean if you want a light desktop environment you look at XSE or LXQt or LXDE even though that's really old or you know a window manager of some kind. So it's not lightest. But comparing it to where it was three years even three years ago, it's not completely night and day. It's so much faster. It's completely usable. I wouldn't have a hard time adapting to using it every day as my daily driver if there weren't other things that piss me off which we'll talk about later. Part of the reason why it's faster is because the animations. Now I can't show you that in the virtual box because for the most part animations are off in virtual box. Like for instance the app drawer here. There's no animation. I believe on bare metal there still is an animation. But for the most part the animations are so much faster than they used to be. Previously the animations in GNOME were so slow. It took like 20 seconds for that door thingy to roll itself out. Kind of like a teenager wanting to go to not wanting to go to class. I actually did write that down in the script. That's funny. Now it's almost instantaneous as you saw. If you turn animations off in GNOME like on bare metal, like I said using GNOME tweaks you have to do. It's even faster. No weight at all. I mean you wouldn't even notice the difference. App launch times have also improved. So like we have files here. Nautilus is a notoriously bloated app. It just opens instantaneously. And like I said this is on a virtual machine. It's very very fast. So in one area where it used to be really really slow was with snaps. Now I can't show you anything snap on here. I don't know if this actually ended up working. Yeah there we go. That's what I wanted. That's what I was trying to do. I had to learn how to install software on footer. I had never done it before. So it's something completely new for me. It did take a long time to install. But I think that's just because it's had to update the repos or something. Anyways snaps used to be notoriously slow for startup times. They're just so bad. You know and even now the reputation persists. But they're better than they used to be. And I still don't like the closed-source nature of the snap store. But they're way better than before in terms of performance. They're also better in terms of theming but and that's going to get even better in the next year according to some of the things that I've read. Okay reason number two. The new theme is good looking. So this is an Ubuntu specific version of GNOME thing. So the classic Ubuntu thing was nice for the first few years of it. Then it got boring and old and then it went beyond that. Now I know what you're thinking. Matt isn't this an Ubuntu thing? Not a GNOME thing. Yes. And I want to talk about for a little while. Wow. For most people their only experience with GNOME is going to be Ubuntu. They're not going to come here to Fedora and use Fedora even though I think people should use Fedora because I'm telling you right now the installation of this thing was so much better than any experience I've ever had with Ubuntu. At least in virtual machine. It's just so good. Anyways for most people their only experience will be the Ubuntu version of GNOME. And they will never experience vanilla. Fedora and GNOME are run by the same company. And this is if you want vanilla GNOME that's what this is. That's what you're going to get. It's going to look like this. The vanilla version of GNOME is you'll be using the adewata, adewaita, whatever it's called theme, whatever this is. This is adewata or whatever. I don't know how to pronounce it. Nobody does. Even the developers don't know how to pronounce it. I'm guarantee it. It is ugly as it's always been. Seriously, whoever designed this should just stop designing because they're bad at it. They should retire and be done with it and find a new day job. It's just this is not what a modern UI should look like in terms of theming. It's just not. That's the reasons why this reason here is because I focused on Ubuntu. The new Ubuntu, I can't show you because I'm in Fedora, but the new Ubuntu theme, which is called Yaru I think or something, is really good looking. It's really nice. It's consistent. It's modern looking and it looks like the designers actually knew what they're doing in that. I know technically this point here was a point against GNOME, but I think because the biggest representation of GNOME out there is Ubuntu, it's actually a point in GNOME's favor because it has, it's just a good theme and that's the way most people will experience it. Now, if they go to use Fedora, they'll experience this nonsense. As we'll talk about later, there's no way to change this theme. If you use Fedora, this is the theme you're going to use unless you use GNOME tweaks, which is basically aka GNOME hacks. It's a hack is what that is. I mean, all theming is hack. That's what the GNOME people will tell you and whether that's true. I'm not technologically advanced enough to know, but this is the theme and the fact that you can't change it. I mean, as far as I know, I'm not sure if in vanilla GNOME, you can change the color. So it's not the color displays? No. So like in Ubuntu, you can go through at least enable the dark mode. I'm not seeing that here at all. It might be here and I'm just not seeing it, but the fact that you can't is just that's horrible. This is just a bad thing. Anyways, reason number three. And actually, I should probably close that because that was my next one. The settings app is good. It used to be about two years ago, I think. GNOME revamped its settings apps. It was messy before. I don't really remember all the specifics of it before, but I just remember that it was messy. As I have in my script written here, it was a convoluted mess. It's much better now than it was before. The choices in the app are streamlined. For the most part, you can find things that you need to find. It's easy to navigate. It's just simple. And comparing it to the mess that is KDE settings app, which has every setting under the sun, this is a great settings app, especially if you're a new user. So it's a good thing that it's different than KDE because KDE is not for everyone. And despite my eternal love for plasma, I'll be the first to admit that it's a very complicated thing that you really shouldn't point new users towards. On the other hand, which I'll talk about later, this being so limited really kind of limits the power users ability to control and customize things, which you can do in plasma. So my next point is it's very stable. The one thing you can always say about GNOME Session and Mudder, which is what the window manager usually is, is stable. It doesn't crash. It's really hard to mess up because it's so locked down you can't make changes to it for the most part. I mean, I was looking to see if it even has the extensions app pre-installed, which it does not, which we'll talk about later. But anyways, you can't change this so much at all. So it's very stable. The one thing about GNOME is that it's always been more stable than most other DEs, desktop environments. There have been some showstopping bugs in the past, and there have been some releases that have been unusually buggy, I guess, or unusable because of performance issues. But for the most part, GNOME is one of the most stable DEs you can find. I still don't care for the way Mudder or GNOME shall manage windows and workspaces, which I'll talk about in a little while. But for the most part, because it's so stable, if you want a stable, you know, desktop environment, GNOME may be the best choice. Now I want to show this here. We're going to lock this screen. This is the lock screen. And it is way prettier than it used to be. It used to be just the box. If I remember, I'm pretty sure I didn't have a picture. I didn't have a name. It just was literally the password box. It might have even been a dialogue box. I don't remember, but I know this is way better looking. I mean, and I'm pretty sure you can customize this just like you can, or you used to be able to. So that's one of the, you know, it's a good thing, right? Because I mean, KDE has really good, really good looking lock screens. And now GNOME does too. So I'll walk right in. So the last one I have is something that's a little bit iffy, because it requires an app, which I'm not sure where you can actually find. Yeah, right here. This is the GNOME extensions app. It still does not come pre-installed on GNOME. It's really weird. And I'm not sure why it does not do that. It really should. It still, it makes GNOME extensions. For those of you who don't know, extensions basically allow you to install little plugins so that your desktop environment will, you know, can do extra things like have icons up here at the top or folders on the desktop. And that's not something you can do by default. You have to have an extension. And that's really annoying for the most part. But the GNOME team is inching a little bit closer towards making extensions more, I don't know. I want to call them first-class citizens, but that was before I knew that the extensions app wasn't actually installed by default. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about extensions later, but it's closer than it was before. It used to be you had to install GNOME tweaks in order to install an extension. Now you don't have to do that. You just have to install this, which is why not just install GNOME tweaks? I'm not, we'll talk about that. We might as well just move right into that. So as you can tell, I still have some problems with GNOME. It is better than before. So some of my problems include extensions. We're just talking about it. They still feel like second-class citizens, meaning that GNOME doesn't really want you to use them. It feels like they want you to not use them and just go about their vision of using GNOME. No extensions. This is the way it's going to be forever and ever, and just live with it. I mean, they make these extensions. That's why they don't install it. So despite the new extensions, the extensions are still hard to install. So you have to install this thing. You have to install a browser extension. You have to go into the GNOME store on the internet, select your extension you want to install, and go through all these hoops. Why the GNOME extensions aren't in the software store? I don't know. It's really weird. They really should be. I don't know why they're not. So extensions make no usable, and the fact that they're still treated as taboo by the GNOME team is mind-boggling. So I can't really show this next one. Workspaces are bad in GNOME. So especially if you have multiple monitors, if you want to switch the workspace, I can't remember how to do it. These are workspaces, and you can have as many as you want. But if you have multiple monitors and you switch between one and two, it switches between one and two on both monitors. That is trash. That means you basically, both monitors count as one workspace, and that's just not the way I want things to work. So that's another reason why it's just not good. That's just not the way things should work. And as long as it's that way, I would never be able to use GNOME. So the design thing really bothers me. In vanilla GNOME, this theme is not, it's not good. It's ugly. It's better than it was. It's less brown than it used to be. At least now it's more gray, I guess. But it's still not good. And the file app, these icons, go away with these icons are so bad. And it wouldn't be so bad if you could theme it, right? You can't theme vanilla GNOME or even really Ubuntu GNOME, whatever. At least in Ubuntu you can change the dark theme. The dark theme is, but is okay. And the Ubuntu theme, just regular light, is completely different than this. It's orange and black and whatever. It looks good. This, you can't change it unless you install GNOME tweaks. And that's a hack. And most new users aren't going to know that. So they're going to be stuck with this. And this is what they come to Linux for. This is ugly. I mean, this is just not, this is not pretty. And the GNOME team considers stemming to be a true hack. And maybe technologically it is, but it is still something that most every GNOME user will want to do because this is bad. But, I mean, and you can tell that users want to be able to think because every non-Fedora GNOME distro like Ubuntu and, you know, some of the other ones, they all theme stuff, even though technically it's quote unquote, a hack. So I've always thought that GNOME is best used as a keyboard first desktop environment. So there are key bindings in this desktop environment. How you find them, I'm not sure. I think you go down here and about and no, I have no clue. Keyboard shortcuts are here. Yeah, you can find these, but they're, you know, look at all these keyboard shortcuts. That's awesome, right? But they're hard to find. They're not intuitive. The only one you can use, you know, super gets you to some places, but what are the other ones? Most of these are disabled. So they're not, they don't even exist in the first place. I still maintain that it's the best use with a keyboard outside of a, you know, a tiling window manager. But because it's their hopes are to discover, and because there's some things you just can't do with a, like I'm pretty sure, like you can move to monitors, you can move to workspaces. But you can't say you want to move this app over to this side and have it tile over here. You have to use the mouse to do that. And because everything else can be done with a keyboard shortcut, the fact that you still have to use your mouse is kind of annoying. Anyways, that's just kind of a minor grip compared to everything else. So, um, so conclusion time, I've been ranting on this for 20 minutes. I'm no longer hate, you know, my biggest problem beforehand with it outside of the theming, because I'm a big, I'm a big theme guy because I'm a power user. I can install GNOME tweaks and theme the damn thing. So that's not a huge deal for new users. It is, but for me, it really is not that my biggest problem was always performance. It's because it was so slow. Now that it's taken, that is mostly taken care of. It's perfectly fast now. It's just as fast as any other desktop environment out there. Yes, maybe it's not as fast as a tile window manager, but you really can't compare those two things. It just isn't for me. I don't care for the UI or the hackiness of GNOME tweaks. I don't want to have to install GNOME tweaks in order to do things. I don't want to have to install, if it was easy to install extensions, like if the extensions were in the GNOME software and it was easy to install, great. It would allow me to add the features that GNOME, the GNOME team keeps insisting on taking out and we'd be able to work, but you can't do that. You have to go through these, run through these hoops in order to get to them. It just feels like the moment the GNOME team might... I compare GNOME to Apple's philosophy. It just feels like the GNOME team might take any of your abilities away to use GNOME tweaks completely away. It just might take them completely away and then GNOME would be even worse because then you can't do the hackiness that gets you to make it look okay, make it function good. If you remember back about five years ago, Apple would play cat and mouse with jailbreakers on their iPhones and the hackers would find out a loophole so they could jailbreak it and then Apple would patch it and then back and forth and back and forth they would go. Honestly, that's the best way I can describe GNOME. It feels like a walled garden much like Apple's ecosystem does. The only thing that seems completely different is that GNOME designers don't know how to design like Apple does. GNOME has complete control over the desktop environment and while that's great for new users, for more experienced users, you have to find hacks and you have to find tweaks and you have to find extensions and all these things in order to make it usable. It's just not for me. For now, if I have to use a fold, the plasma will remain my choice. That is it for this show. That was just one gigantic long-ass rant. Basically, me saying GNOME is better than it used to be, but it's still not for me. I was wrong about GNOME though because I've told for years people to hit my headphones on the damn microphone again. Anyways, I've told people for years not to use GNOME because it's slow, it's not pretty, it's not... the GNOME team has been notorious for taking Victor features out of the desktop instead of putting new features in. But now, while some of that stuff is still true, at least it's taken care of the biggest thing I've always had against it, which is the performance. So that is it for me this time. I want to let everybody know, give us a thumbs up, a thumbs down, subscribe all that nuts, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.