 A week ago, I issued myself a challenge, or more I guess I issued a lot of people a challenge. I challenged people to use something that they dislike because people are very loyal to the things that they use and are very opposed to the idea that other people use different things. And it happens a lot, and I find myself in that position a lot of times too. I don't understand why people use X software. I don't understand why people do things a certain way. And I try to move myself away from that viewpoint and empathize with the fact that we're not all the same. We can all have different workflows, and it's what makes being human kind of awesome. So with that mindset in mind, I decided to use GNOME for a whole week because GNOME is one of those things that I just don't understand why people use it. I think it's a horrible piece of software. I think we'd all be better off if no distrum used it as their default desktop environment. I had that opinion for the longest time, and for those of you who watch the podcast or listen to the podcast, you'll know that I spent an inordinate amount of time bitching about GNOME. And I do, and I know this about myself, and I try to tone it down a bit, but I'm not always successful. So like I said, I've been using it now for a whole week. Now to be transparent about it, I did not use GNOME full time. I used it mostly full time. I did leave it a couple times to do things that I had to do outside of it. So I recorded an awesome window manager video earlier in the week. So I was in awesome window manager for a couple hours at a time. I recorded the podcast from DWM just because I'm more comfortable in DWM and I needed my key bindings and stuff the way they needed to be, and I didn't want things to go wrong for the podcast, but both of those times I immediately switched back to GNOME when I was done. So I just wanted to be transparent about it, that it wasn't 100% of the time over the last week. So I have used GNOME a fair bit this whole week, the vast majority of the time. And I have some thoughts. So first, let's go ahead and show you my screen right now. This is GNOME, and this is my setup of GNOME. I want to start off positive. I want to start off with my positive thoughts on the GNOME desktop environment because there are some positives here. The first thing I will say positive about it is that I really like the rounded corners. Now, you can't really tell that this has rounded corners because Firefox doesn't do well with rounded corners when you have turned on userchrome.css. So if I actually look at the file manager here, you'll see rounded corners, and you'll see rounded corners everywhere in the operating system except for Firefox. And I really like that. So there's one thing that I like. Now, I started off with small potatoes and something very low-hanging fruit, if you will, and I like that design decision. I also like that it's fairly fast because for years, my thought process on GNOME was that it was just the slowest desktop environment ever. And every time I used it, GNOME just backed that thought up because it was really slow. Now, it's not slow at all. It used to be when you hit the applications thing down here and you selected that. The animation was just, I mean, it was slow. It took like what felt like a half a minute in order to fan out all of the icons in a pretty display of graphics, and I'm surprised there weren't fireworks. Every time you hit that button, it just was fanning out like crazy. And it was slow, now, not slow. And I like that. Saying I like that it's fast is kind of disingenuous because being fast as a desktop environment should be, it should be something that you take for granted because if your desktop environment is slow, it's unusable, at least in my opinion. So that it's faster than I thought it was was a happy thing for me because I wouldn't have probably made it a whole week if it had been slow as it used to be. In terms of memory usage and stuff like that, I can't really say anything on that because I have so much RAM. It really doesn't make a difference for me whether it uses a gigabyte at idle or not. And I could go through and show you what my RAM usage is right now, but I have audacity and OBS and Firefox all running, so it wouldn't really do much in terms of giving you any data points for in terms of performance or anything like that. I haven't noticed any slowdowns, and I've had like six or seven workspaces open at a time when a ton of different stuff open at the same time, and it's always been very fast. I will say I have had a couple of instances where the entire shell has frozen, like the GNOME shell has frozen. When I get into this view here, it just freezes for whatever reason, and I've actually had to go into the TTY and reboot the computer in order to do it. It kind of gave me flashbacks to hitting control, delete when I was a Windows user. And that was not a good experience, but that's only happened a couple of times, and very small might be that I was missing a dependency at that time or I needed an update or something who knows. So the last positive that I'm going to talk about is a big one, because I've had some insight as to why people actually use GNOME. And that insight is that if you just want to get work done and you don't care one IOTA how your computer works, functions, or looks, GNOME is probably the best desktop environment that you can use, or one of the best I should say. And I say that because they don't offer any out-of-the-box functionality at all. None whatsoever. So this theme that I'm using right now is not something that you could actually use in terms of, like, icons and stuff. I think I'm just using Adawaita for the actual GTK theme. But even then, as of this moment, you couldn't get this theme because you can't change to a dark theme in GNOME. I'm moving under the bitching part a little bit, but you can't change it. So the fact that you can't change stuff for some people, I think, could be a good thing because it just allows them to use their computer. These people spend all their day in an IDE, or they spend all their day in a browser, and they don't care one IOTA what their desktop environment looks like or how it functions. They don't want to tweak any of that stuff. And that's fine. It can be very kind of freeing if you don't have to deal with changing your themes or messing around with your key bindings if you don't want to, or literally doing anything to customize your computer. You don't have to do that because you can't, unless you really want to install extra programs in order to enable you to do so. I've come to the point where I could empathize with those people because I've been using this now for a week. And yes, I've gone through, and the only thing I've done in terms of customization is I've downloaded Good Home Tweaks and I've changed the theme. That was all I did, and I changed the wallpaper. That was all I did. I installed no extensions. I made no other tweaks other than changing the key bindings. And I can understand the mentality now a little bit better why people would want to use this because it is freeing, at least a little bit, to not have to think about, oh, well, I'm going to go rice something when I should be doing something else. And I stumble into that scenario a lot because I like changing things and I like tweaking things, and I like trying out new patches in DWM if I want to, or I like trying out new window managers and stuff like that. And a lot of people aren't like that, so I can understand, at least a little bit more, how freeing Good Home can be for those people and why they have this mentality of not allowing their users to customize. Now, I think that that can lead to a lot of productivity if you're that type of person. If you aren't the customization type of person, having a system like this can lead to you being much more productive. For me personally, I'm not that type of person. I'm not the type of person who can be OK without the options that something like KDE or a customized window manager would give me. I like having those options, even if I choose not to use them. And I think that's where my argument against Genome kind of starts, is that what I would like to see is them give their users the option of changing things. Now, in Genome 42, which should come out, I think probably next year, they are going to give you a dark theme option. So that's one step in the right direction. The other thing that they really desperately need to do is make it easier to install extensions. And I have not done, like I said, I've not installed any extensions at all. And I didn't want to. I wanted to use Genoma in its purest form. I thought about it a couple of times. Like there's there's a tiling extension that I could have used that sounds really interesting. I tried it way back in the day when it first came out and it was horrible. But apparently it's actually really good now and I wanted to give it a try. But I decided that I just want to wanted to use Genome in its purest form in the way that the Genome developers meant you to use Genome. Now, I had to change the theme. I can't stand that I wait to theme. I can't stand the at a weight icon theme. I would literally not have made it an hour in Genome if I had to use that theme. I just can't stand it. It's so bad. But I want, like I said, I wanted to go through and use Genoma in its purest form. So I didn't install extensions, but I think one of the things that they should do is make extensions easier to install. Because right now you have to install something from the terminal in order to get the Genome shell stuff to, you know, be able to be installed. And then you have to install a browser extension. Then you have to go to a website in order to install the extensions. Then you also have to install the extensions app. And then you have to go through and enable the extensions. It's a huge rigmarole, and it could be so much easier if they just simply made an extension store or allowed the extensions to be in the software store or something. Literally any solution would be better than what they have right now because it makes extensions feel like they're not being supported by the Genome foundation or the Genome developers. And they're not being supported. They don't want you to use extensions. Extensions are hacks. Now, they have warmed up to extensions a little bit in the last couple of years by creating the extensions app. But they still don't like them. And you can tell that because every time you go through an update, you know, your extensions break and sometimes they do. It feels like they do that on purpose. So I think that one of the things that they really could do is make it easy to install extensions and change the way your desktop, you know, functions, even if they had even if they decided to curate the extension so that only certain extensions could be, you know, installed that way, whatever, it'd still be better than the way it is now. So moving on to a few of the things that I just can't stand about, Genome. The first thing is workspaces. Now, for whatever reason, at the time that I installed Genome, Genome 41 had not been in the Arch repose yet. So the version of Genome was Genome 40 and workspaces on Genome 40, not Genome 41 are really weird. The way they do it is that, especially if you have multiple monitors, in fact, I don't know how it works for a single monitor, but with when you have double monitor, dual monitors, your first monitor has all the workspaces. Your second monitor has just one and you can't change that. And the only way you can change it is by downloading Genome tweaks and actually changing that. That is a horrible way of doing it. Now, in Genome 41, they have fixed that and allowed you to go through in the settings app. And I was able to go through and change this in the settings app once I was updated to Genome 41. And then it worked as Genome does workspaces. And that kind of transitions me into how Genome does workspaces because I'm very used to having workspaces be separate and contained inside the monitor. So, for example, in DWM, I have nine workspaces on monitor one, I have nine workspaces on monitor two. Now, even in window managers that only have nine workspaces total, the workspaces are still separate by monitor. So if I say in BSPWM, I would have workspaces one through five on monitor one, six through 10 on monitor two, they're separate. So if I start on workspaces one and two on the monitors, on the respective monitors, I could keep one on workspace one on the first monitor and go to workspace four or whatever on the second monitor and I could change them however I want. In Genome, if you change from workspace one into workspace two, it changes on both monitors. So the workspaces are actually set so the monitors are tied together. So you change the workspaces in one place on one monitor, it changes on the other monitor and you can't change that. So if I wanted to go through, like right now, I have Firefox and Nemo up on the screen on this monitor. And on this monitor, I have OBS and Audacity. If I wanted to keep OBS and Audacity on this monitor in this workspace, but switch to another workspace on monitor one that say had LibreOffice on it for whatever reason, whatever, it doesn't matter. I couldn't actually do that without actually moving OBS and Audacity to that other workspace. That is just, it's infuriating because that's not the way workspaces should work. It's the dumbest way of doing a workspace I've literally ever seen. And it's probably the one reason why I could never use Genome as my daily driver. I just couldn't. I could deal with every other thing that I'm gonna talk about in terms of Genome, that way of doing workspaces, I just couldn't. I use workspaces too in depth. I use them all the time and I rely on them too much in order to use them in this way. I always wanna be able to control what workspaces on which monitor at any given time. And the fact that I can't do that with Genome is a deal breaker. Another thing that I dislike about Genome is the weird animations that happen sometimes. Now, I think I've figured this out. So when I'm here and I minimize this window here, the animation has it go up here to the activities icon. And maybe you didn't see that. Let me do it again, because it was pretty quick. And you see it there. Now, for whatever reason, that just doesn't jive in my brain. I don't know why it goes up there when the icon is down here. Like every other minimize animation that I've ever seen goes into the icon. Now, I think I understand that it's going into the activities view. This is the activities view. And when you minimize it, it goes into here. I think that's the way they're thinking of it. But for me, for whatever reason, it just really bothers me because I don't know why it's going up there. Now, normally, I couldn't care less about animations, but if you're going to do animations, at least make them make sense. And this just didn't make sense to me. It just doesn't, like it doesn't jive in my brain. Another thing that is really weird about GNOME is that the notifications are kind of worthless. They remind me a lot of Dunst notifications because Dunst notifications, you can't actually do anything in terms of actionable things on those notifications. It just shows you the notifications. You click on them and they literally just, they go away. And I understand that that's the way Dunst works, but in a desktop environment, I would expect there to be actual actionable notifications here. At least open the application that the notification is linked to. So if it's linked to my email client, open up the email client. For whatever reason, it doesn't do that. They just go away. And to me, that's a completely useless notification system, at least in a desktop environment. If it was just Dunst, I can understand because that's the way Dunst has always worked. It's the way it should work. And you can even change Dunst so it does have at least linked to the application if you want to. But whatever reason, that's just not a function here. The last thing I want to talk about, well, I guess the second to last thing I want to talk about is key bindings. Now the default key bindings are trash and they're garbage and you should definitely change them. But there are a few that you can't change. So, and I'm not going to demonstrate this because I don't want to ruin my recording by accidentally pressing something that I shouldn't. But by default, these icons that are your favorites have key bindings that are mapped to them. I'm pretty sure they have something to do with the super key and then the number keys. And the reason why I'm pretty sure is that it's not consistent in terms of them actually working that way. I've just noticed a couple times and especially if you use the super key for other things. So I have it set up so that I can do super one, two, three, four to switch between workspaces because that's what I'm used to in a window manager. And I always use that. And I call also super shift one, two and three and four to move a particular window to a certain workspace. But really the problem here is that I'm so used to using the super key or the windows key or the mediki or whatever you want to call it. For those key bindings, it conflicts a lot with the things that GNOME uses the super key for. And the super key is used for a lot of things in GNOME. It's used to bring up this view. If you press it again, really fast, it brings up the application tray. It also goes through if you in certain instances will go through and launch one of those icons that are in my favorites. And you can't get rid of those is the problem. And I understand every desktop environment slash window manager has their own default key bindings. But there are some key bindings here that you just can't remap. They're hard coded into GNOME and you can't get rid of them. And that really bothers me because I'm so used to using the windows key for certain things. Sometimes it interferes with those hard coded key bindings and things don't work the way I expect them to. That's a big deal when the desktop environment itself is really meant to be used with key bindings. I should have talked about this back when I was talking about the positive things. I like that this desktop environment is meant to be used with key bindings. And it is. It's not meant to be used with 100% mouse usage like something like KDE. KDE, you are meant to use that thing with a mouse. Now you can use it with key bindings, but it's not meant to do that out of the box. You have to go through and do a lot of setups. You know, a lot of setup in order to get that to work. For example, to switch workspaces on KDE, you actually have to go through and enter those key bindings in in order for them to actually be there. They're not set by default. And while I'm not expecting GNOME to have the level of customizability as KDE does, in fact, I think it would probably ruin GNOME. I would like to be able to go through and just kind of set whatever key bindings I want. I want to be able to remap every key binding so that I can go through and make it so I can use this in a certain way instead of having to use it the way the GNOME developers want. So again, we come back to that customizability thing. The last thing I want to talk about is has really nothing to do with GNOME itself is that I found it really, really weird to be in a floating window manager. I haven't used a floating window manager full-time since I was a KDE guy. I was a big proponent of KDE for a couple of years, at least a year and a half or so. I was always just, it was KDE was my thing. And I loved it because obviously you can customize the hell out of it. And I was used to at that point having windows stacked on top of each other and being able to move them around and having to deal with tiling like this. And if I wanted to do this in here and like this and whatever and having to do Alt-Tab in order to go through certain things and whatever, I was used to doing that. I've been using tiling window managers for so long now that this is just weird for me. I found myself using these windows as kind of a fidget spinner. Every once in a while, I'd go through and do this stuff. And because it looks weird to me. Like you can't do this very well in KDE without pressing a key binding and getting something into float. You can't do, I misspoke there. You can't do this kind of stuff, that kind of stuff in DWM without pressing a key binding and getting it into floating mode. So this kind of annoyed me. I don't think that I could go back to using a floating window manager or floating desktop environment like this by default. I just don't think I could because this would constantly distract me because I'd just sit here and do this. I don't know why I do this. It has something to do with, I don't know, like nervous energy or ADHD or something. I don't know. But I was always doing this all the time. And I could sit there and just do this for no reason. Like while I was watching a YouTube video, I'd be over here on my other monitor, which you can't now see this. But I'd be trolling this thing around while I was watching a YouTube video just because it's something that, nervous energy. Now like I said, that has nothing to do with genome. I'd probably do the exact same thing in plasma or XFC or whatever. But that was part of the experience. It was just weird for me. So, final thoughts. I probably could have said a lot more. There will probably be a five or six things that I remember after I'm done recording that I should have said. But just to kind of summarize my experiences with genome and to leave you off with what happens next. I don't hate genome itself as much as I used to. I can at least now understand a little bit more why people use it. And I think that that is going to help me empathize at least a little bit more with those people and kind of understand it a little bit more. I still have major qualms with the genome developers. And I still think that there are many things that they could do better if they just offered a little bit more customizability. I'm not talking about taking it all away to the whole KD Plasma level of customizability. I'm talking about make extensions first class citizens. Include them in your desktop environment. Make that app better so that you can install the extensions right from that app. You have an extensions app, make it good. I mean, literally make it good. Allow people to install stuff right from there. Allow them to install that stuff by default without having to go through a rigmarole in order to actually be able to install extensions. Get rid of the browser extension. Get rid of the website. Make that app a first class citizen so that you can actually install extensions right from there. They're gonna do the dark mode. I think a dark and a light mode is a perfect compromise for their theming crisis because they don't like themes. I can understand it. It's their desktop environment. Personally, I love themes, but I can understand not wanting to have to kowtow to every third party theme developer. I can understand it. Now that they're giving a dark mode, I think that's perfectly fine. A third, get rid of that stupid, stupid, ugly, add a way to icon thing. Get rid of it, find yourself a new developer. The person who likes that, just, they need something different. It's bad, it's old, it's outdated, it's ugly. Now I understand these are my thoughts and my opinions, but I think the vast majority of people probably think the same way, but I'm probably making assumptions that I shouldn't make. Probably many people out there who like it. If you are one of those people, leave it in the comments below. We'll have a fight because it's really, those icons are, they're bad, especially when there are so many good options out there. I mean, like they could just switch to papyrus. I mean, it's cliche, but everybody uses papyrus. It would work fine with add a way to probably, the rest of the GTK theme, it would be fine. And you can't, I'm not gonna get too far into the icons, it's okay, man. They just need to change the icon. So if they did those three things, make extensions better, I forgot what the second thing, I forgot what the second thing was, but change the icon theme. You know, just do these, those three things, even if I couldn't remember the second one, I've been doing these video for way too long. And I think Anom would be really, really good and be really, really, really usable and way more even usable than it is now. Because it is usable, but it could be better. And I think that it would make so many people happier. I think it would make developers happier if they did those things. And I think that it would make it more likely that people, especially to destroy maintainers, that I think it would make them less likely to go through and change a whole bunch of stuff if they did those things. So am I gonna continue to use Ganon? Fuck no. No, of course not. I'm not gonna continue to use Ganon. I'm a tiling window manager guy. And that's, my time with Ganon has not changed that. Just because I can now empathize with people who do use Ganon better, doesn't mean that it's for me. It's just not for me. Maybe, maybe, no, I was gonna say maybe if it was a little bit more customizable, I would give it more of a try and say I was gonna use it for a whole month and I really like it. But I don't think I'd even go that far. I'm a tiling window manager guy. Ganon was just not for me. And I think that's what I've come away from this from is that I've now used this for a week. I'm happy that I did, because it's kind of changed my perspective on it and allows me to empathize with people who like it so much more than I do more. And I think that that was a good thing. I think it was a healthy thing. But it didn't change my thoughts so much that it's gonna move me away from my tiling window managers. So those are my thoughts on Ganon. If you have thoughts on Ganon, if you use that, if you really like it, if whatever comments you have, leave those comments in the comment section below. I really truly do appreciate everyone who leaves the comments. It really does help the channel. Make sure you like and subscribe if you haven't already. This is the kind of content you can expect. Rambly kind of content. I don't script anything. I've tried scripting things before and I was made fun of for it because I'm not good at it. You know, I was rightfully made fun of for scripting because I'm just like, I'm not good at scripting. So this is the kind of rambly type of nonsense you can expect. If you liked that, hit the subscribe button. You can follow me on Twitter at TheLinuxCast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast before I go. I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. Devon, Chris, East Coast, Webgen2isfun2, Patrick L, Marcus, Megalyn, Sven, Jax, Knife and Tool, Steve A, Mitchell, ArtCenter, Merrick, Camp, Joshua Lee, J-Dog, and the BSTs Rock. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.