 So over the last few years there has been a lot of discontent with the GNOME foundation and the developers of GNOME itself and some of this has been political and we're not gonna get into the political stuff whether you agree or disagree with the GNOME foundation and the GNOME developers having their own political opinions is really a personal choice Personally, I don't care whatever It's the software decisions that I have always had a problem with as you know I've made several videos Decrying the lack of customizability on GNOME and even after spending a week using nothing but GNOME and coming away with Well, yeah, I kind of understand why it's like this. I still feel like it goes against what Linux stands for because at least for me Linux is all about choice and GNOME limits choice now that being said it is your choice to use GNOME So if you make that choice, then technically you still had the same choice as everybody else had but That's beside the point now I'm not the only one in the Linux community who has had problems with GNOME and I'm talking specifically about desktop environment maintainers and distro maintainers those people who use GNOME to either base a desktop environment off them or just use GNOME itself and Their problems lie more within the realms of development and ease of development and customizability in terms of Developing things for the desktop environment. We've seen the likes of solace take them to task for implementing new libraries that take away choices from the developers and solace themselves are moving away from GTK and GNOME in order to do something with the Enlightenment libraries which will Fundamentally change solace as we know it what when that happens will be sure to give it a try But it'll be interesting to see how they go about doing things Using something that's completely different and something that's not all that popular So it wasn't surprising this morning when I got up and found an article on omg Ubuntu That tells us that system 76 is building its own desktop environment now for those of you who don't know system 76 makes pop o s pop o s is a growing distribution a lot of people like it for gaming and such because it's very very stable and is Very well developed and it started off as just a clone of Ubuntu and then they slowly started Diverging away from Ubuntu. It's still based on Ubuntu, but they were always just using a regular like GNOME shell and Slowly they transitioned into something called the Cosmic desktop, which looks something like this and I've tried the Cosmic desktop. It's Okay, but it is just GNOME basically I mean it has extra features that GNOME doesn't have obviously that they've coded into it using GNOME extensions really But it's at its foundation. It's still just a fork of GNOME So when I saw this I was like well, this is just another nail in the coffin for GNOME I have a feeling that this is going to be just another Or one in the long line of distros that are going to just abandon GNOME because of the Tension between GNOME developers and the developers outside of the GNOME Ecosystem, so let's talk about the news first and then I can get more into that my opinions on it So what we know so far isn't a lot other than they're going to be abandoned in GNOME and coming up with their own Desktop environment. We know that it's going to be Written in rust so they get the meme of using rust. It's not that rust is a bad language, obviously I mean, it's a very good language, but you can't deny it has become a bit of a meme But they are going to be basing this in rust and it's going to look somewhat similar to what the Cosmic desktop looks like now So they're also going to be it says in this article that they'll be using things that already exist in order to Save on development time so things like Mudder and K-Win and so on in order to actually Not have to redo like a compositor or a window manager things like that They'll use those things and then focus on the layers on top of it, which is a good idea So that's literally all we know when this will come out We don't know what it will feel like how it'll perform. We don't know I will definitely try it on the channel when a beta release comes up because it'll be interesting to try now There has been a lot of tension between pop OS and GNOME over the last year. There's the developers of the two Of the operating system and the desktop environment just don't seem to be able to get along now They have said that that tension has not was not the cause of Pop OS moving away from GNOME Whether or not you believe that or not, I don't know personally I think it has to have played at least some small part You don't have that kind of tension boiling over for a year before Something has to give, you know, so I think that it does have something to do it But maybe it's just that they want to have more control over their own destiny in terms of You know or more control over their own distro really in terms of you know being able to Customize it the way they want to enable their own libraries and stuff like that Now the thing is system 76 has going for it that something like solace doesn't is that system 76 has a business that Goes along with the desktop environment in the the distro that makes money And that means that they can pay developers and actually build up an ecosystem of their own in order to make this a very robust desktop environment something that like Solace won't have because solace is just an independent project. It's very small and relies mostly on community donations So it'll be interesting to see because these are the first two Distros and I call them big distros that are moving away from GNOME. So the question I have is Twofold and one of those is was asked in the OMG article. Do we need another desktop environment? I'll answer that in a second But the other one I find even more interesting is will other distros follow So are we going to see a day where Ubuntu moves away from GNOME? I don't know. I think that they should personally. I think that they should I would love to see them bring unity back I saw some of the unity x stuff that the that community that small community is still doing and it looks really good It looks like they have a lot of ideas that are just Really really good and what and that would definitely benefit from having something like canonical behind it in order to develop it further and it wouldn't be the first time that Ubuntu has Abandoned unity gone back, you know gone to something different and then gone back to unity They've done that two or three times in their history. So it wouldn't be surprising If they chose to go back to their own desktop environment, which is unity My preference would be to see them just to make KDE the default because they'd never be able to complain about not being able to Anything that's for sure and it doesn't they can still make it look like a boon to if they want to and Those extra options that plasma gives would confuse new users Most new users don't go spelunking into the settings application anyways So it's not wouldn't be that confusing They just use their computer and only go into the settings app when something goes wrong So as long as the documentation ended up being you know boosted up I think it would be good. So my thoughts on will there be other distros that follow along From this, I think that there will be I don't think that Ubuntu will be one of them immediately If that does happen, it will be down the road some but it wouldn't surprise me to see other smaller distros that have traditionally shipped GNOME move to something different, especially if This thing from system 76 ends up being good because they'll distribute that to other places And it's possible that that gathers a community around it and other distros that use it So that could be really cool if it ends up being good again Obviously if it's horrible nobody will use it So the other question that I asked was do we need another desktop environment now? There's a lot of talk always in the Linux community about fragmentation and too much choice and stuff and I can see that but I Don't think That this really matters all that much because we already have so many. I mean, what's one more? I mean if you already have 30 desktop environments 31 is not going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back and spells the doom of Linux. It's just not so For me as a content creator, I see more than area, but as a Linux user I don't think it really matters all that much. I think that instead of focusing on limiting Developers choice and what they do which we can't do anyways. We should instead focus on building a better place for resources for new users That will help them choose what's right for them because obviously there's the choice isn't going to go away The number of choices is only going to get greater and greater over time What we can do for new users is go through and make sure that they have the resources to make the choices that they need To choose what's best for them and that's not something that currently exists in Linux I mean if you do That's part of the problem with the Linux tech tip things is they googled best Linux distros and came up with 12,000 listicles that all have different answers So it's not that that is a bad thing, but we do need more definitive Resources out there for people who are making that choice the impact of a new desktop environment on that Situation is minimal. So those are my thoughts on the new desktop environment. I think that GNOME will hopefully have to kind of respond to this influx of Developers leaving their Ecosystem and hopefully that will make them change their ways that'd be cool because Despite all the problems I have with GNOME I don't think that it deserves just to die off and nobody use it or just become a Niche desktop environment I don't think it deserves that because it does have some good that it does and it Obviously works well for those who are interested in using Linux in a certain way So maybe the GNOME developers will finally learn to listen to their community. That's maybe Would be the best outcome of all this So that is it for this video if you want to get in contact with me You can do so by leaving a comment in the comment section below You can follow me on Twitter at the Linux cast you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash Linux cast Before I go I'd let's take a moment to think I current patrons devon crest east coast web gen 2 is fun To Patrick L. Marcus make one decks with a tool steve a Mitchell art center and Matthias Merrick camp Joshua Lee J. Dogg and the BSDs rock. Thanks everyone for watching. I'll see you next time