 Like it or not, GNOME is the most popular Linux desktop environment out there, mostly because the two largest Linux distributions out there use GNOME, Ubuntu and Fedora. By default, GNOME kind of has won that race. But usually when something is popular it has a lot of detractors and GNOME is no different. I have definitely been one of those detractors over the last two years. I'm not a GNOME guy, I really don't care for their lack of interest in customizing their desktop. They seem to take everything out of their desktop environment that allows their users to customize, or at least that was the case. They're slowly getting better. A few months ago, or at least a few releases ago, they announced that they were switching away from what they used to do, which allowed people to basically theme however they wanted with GNOME Tweaks, to a new system called LibAdwaita. And it sparked outrage amongst the racing community because it pretty much killed all of the themes that had been able to be used on GNOME for years. The process of theming pretty much died at that point, or so we thought. See LibAdwaita, if I'm saying that right, which I'm probably not, seems to be much more customizable than we ever thought possible. And what I'm going to be showing you today is an application called Gradience. Gradience is a flat pack that you can install via FlatHub and it allows you to customize every single aspect of your GNOME desktop, at least in terms of applications. It is amazing, it is like so, so good. So let's go ahead and show you what Gradience will do and maybe you'll be like me and it will change your mind just a little bit about the direction GNOME is heading in. So here we are in Fedora. Now this is the standard Fedora ISO and I've done nothing to this other than install Gradience and change the wallpaper. That's all I've done. I've also installed FlatHub of course because you're going to need FlatHub in order to actually install Gradience. So once you have installed it, all you have to do is either enable FlatHub and then install Gradience from the GNOME Software Center. So you would go into software and type in Gradience like so and then you go here and then you hit install. That's all you'd have to do. But you obviously have to have FlatPack or FlatHub installed in order for that to show up. Once you have it installed you can open it just by searching for Gradience and this is what you get. Now there will be a small little tour at the beginning that I didn't have a chance to record because I can't get it to show again but the interface of it is fairly intuitive and the greatest part about this whole thing is that it tells you what colors are going to be applied where. So under each heading you have a little blur of text that tells you exactly what these colors are going to be applied to and as you can see there is just a ton of settings that you can choose from for each and every little part of the window. So there is a load of different customizations that you can make. Now the best part about this is two-fold. The first is that you can make your theme completely customizable. You can change everything from the button colors to the header colors to the application background and foreground. Every little piece of the application window is customizable here outside of the actual icons themselves. This is just about colors. The second thing that is really cool is that this also comes with the ability to download other people's themes. So if you click this button here which is called presets you can go to the explore tab in this window here and you'll see just dozens of different themes that have been made by other people that you can automatically apply. So for example let's just say you wanted grove box. So we would click this button here and then we would click this button here apply and then if you have the adw gtk3 theme installed which I will leave a link to in the video description. If you have that installed this will also apply to every gtk3 theme not just gtk4 theme. So you click this hit apply and now when you let's say you launch the terminal application you have a grove box theme. We can launch another application let's go ahead and launch software. You can see that this has a grove box theme. That's really cool right? If at any point in the past before libatawaita was here you themed your GNOME desktop with a GNOME theme that came from wherever on the internet using GNOME tweaks you could have done this exact thing but it was harder. The reason why this is so impressive to me is that when you use to install a theme you have to go find the theme download it unzip it put it in the right file right folder open up GNOME tweaks if you have installed or you have to install it first and then open GNOME tweaks then choose the theme right that whole process well not necessarily all that difficult was definitely more steps than opening up gradients opening up the presets folder hitting or window and then hitting the explore tab and then downloading the one that you want this is way way easier and the fact that there are just tons of them so let's just say you want a Dracula you could do that so Dracula we'll go back to gradients here hit apply like so make sure that it also applies to GTK3 applications again you have to have that app that theme installed hit apply and now we have Dracula as a theme so that's honestly my favorite part those presets the fact that those exist is amazing now you can import your own presets you so if you have a preset save somewhere you can import that you can also go to the github page where all of these are found which is where the explore tab is pulling from and you can see what these things look like so if you these are just JSON files so you could in theory create your own you could create your own and then save it somewhere and then transfer from computer to computer share it with other people that's also really cool right if you go through the process of making your own themes so you can save let's just say we wanted to make the header bar a completely different color so we'll go down here to the header bar colors we can click on this here and these are all the presets that you have but you can actually do any color you want so we can just let's make it really bright green it doesn't really matter select there and obviously that's not very appealing but you could do it hit apply and now every application is going to have that green as the header bar now it doesn't change dynamically so if you want any of this stuff here to come back you'd have to close it and then reopen it so we'll reopen firefox and then you'll see it now has that green header bar that we chose so it's not quite as dynamic as it might have used to have been but it's still really nice the thing is is that if you go through the process of making your own theme so you go through the tedious process of choosing the proper colors for every single one of these things that you can change once you can let me change the header bar back for so you can actually see this if you've gone through and changed all those things that you can change you can hit the save button name it and it will save all of your presets so it will become your own preset you could upload it to your GitHub page you can change transfer from computer to computer different you can save it for later whatever happens to be this is then your theme right and that is again really cool so you can actually create your own GTK for theme using gradients it's just that neat and I love that part because I really do have aspirations of making my own theme someday now I'm not sure that I'm very good at designing in order to do that but it's still something that I've always kind of wanted to do and this makes it so easy right the only downside is that this is not going to work outside of you know so that's kind of disappointing but the fact that this exists is actually really nice another feature that gradients has is this ability called Monet and I'm not actually been able to get this to work I'm sure I'm doing something wrong but apparently what it will allow you to do is set a background and then it will pull the colors from that background and set a theme to it so it says it's Monet is an engine that generates a material design three palette from an images color so you can find the background image that you want I don't have anything here and then hit apply and it would then create that palette for you so that is another thing so if you're interested in the whole material you think that Google's been going on about for the last couple years this is something that allows you to do that honestly my favorite part is the presets that were created by other people the fact that this thing exists is really cool and I expect there to be more presets as this thing becomes more popular so things like ever forest might show up here ever blush things like that and that's just it really makes me quite happy that that might exist sometime in the future so here's like cat who's seen or how the hell you say it and here's a one dark pro if you're interested in one dark so you can apply that so those presets are my favorite part of this whole thing and like I said the beginning I'm not a genome user and I don't think that this is going to change that but there was some time while I was playing around with this before it started recording that I was thinking wow this could really make me like no like this one aspect just kind of changes everything when it comes to my thoughts on genome because genome in my mind is the most un-customizable piece of crap software in the history of Linux that's in my mind whether that's fair or not can be argued I don't know whether or not it is fair because they've obviously been working towards being a little bit more customizable over the last couple versions so that's obviously changing but in my mind that's still the way that I've always just kind of looked at genome because they're always pulling out features that allow users to do anything to their desktop environment that doesn't suit the way genome and their developers want things to happen so that's just the picture of genome I always have in my mind with gradients now and with the ability to choose dark themes and the ability to choose accent colors and all this stuff coming to genome that reputation is slowly going away in my mind and gradients has changed my mind quite a bit on the customized ability of genome now it really hasn't changed it on the workflow of them it still doesn't really suit me I'm a tiling window manager guy and I'm always going to be and while I know you can get tiling in you know I'm fairly easily it's just still not really for me but it's definitely way better than it used to be and that makes me actually quite happy so that is gradients if you have thoughts on this you can leave those in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you you can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast you can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey those links will be in the video description you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the Linuxcast just like all these fine people thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon and YouTube you guys are all amazing amazing people I can't even begin to say how grateful and thankful I am that you guys support me so thank you for that thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time