 I have a well-known dislike of the GNOME desktop environment. It is something that I talk about quite a lot on the podcast and elsewhere on the internet. I don't like GNOME for many reasons and I could go into those reasons and we could be here for the next, you know, 45 minutes to an hour just while I sit here and mention about GNOME and it may be something that you're interested in hearing. But that's not the point of today's video. Everybody on Reddit on r slash linux asked a good question. Why do most distros choose GNOME as their default desktop environment? And I thought this was a really good question because I wasn't actually sure and it got me thinking and I think that there are several reasons why then some of these ideas came from the comments section of this post but I have a few of my own. So to answer this question we really have to kind of divide what distros we're talking about because we all know the reason why Fedora chose GNOME as their desktop environment was because the Fedora people in Red Hat develop GNOME. They're the primary supporters of the GNOME foundation and the developers of GNOME. So of course they're going to choose GNOME as their desktop environment. So we don't have to answer the question for Fedora or any distro based on Fedora. The reason why they use GNOME is because GNOME is theirs. Once we've gotten past that point we can ask the question why do other distros choose GNOME as their default desktop environment despite not having really any investment in the GNOME project itself specifically we're looking at Ubuntu in this case. And the answer to that question is I think because it was easier to make GNOME look like Unity than it was to have KD Plasma look like Unity and kind of to go along with that. It's easier to keep GNOME looking like Unity than it is Plasma because Plasma offers the user so many options to change things and how they look. Eventually the user will have a desktop environment that looks nothing like the Ubuntu people wanted to look and that makes providing support much harder. So really it all comes down to new users because the last thing a lot of these new user focused distributions want is to give users a ton of options. And while that's my problem with GNOME from a perspective of providing support to new users the fewer options for customization you give them the easier it is to provide support because they haven't actually been able to change anything without knowing quite a bit more about Linux and installing GNOME tweaks and all this stuff. Because once you start customizing stuff it makes it harder to support because they've made changes and you might not know what changes are causing the problems. So I personally think that that's the reason why Ubuntu chose GNOME. It also has a lot to do with the fact that KD Plasma is much more complicated so it's harder to present to new users. KD Plasma also has a ton of software that goes along with it so if you choose KD Plasma as your default desktop environment you're choosing to inflate the number of packages you have to ship and the number of packages you have to maintain. Because GNOME is basically just stripped down there's a lot less in terms of maintenance that you actually have to do. There's also the fact and this was brought up in the comments section of this post I was talking about which I'll link in the video description is that GNOME has a set development schedule. It releases the same time every single year. The updates for GNOME come out the same time every single year. Plasma doesn't have a set release schedule it gets released whenever the new stuff is done. They do version increments whenever they have a batch of new stuff to release and that's quite often because they have a ton of software and a ton of projects so they're always doing releases. It's kind of like a rolling release desktop environment. So that's another reason why distros use GNOME is because they can rely on that set update schedule something that Plasma doesn't have. Another thing that was brought up in the comments section of this post was that Qt which is what KD is based on is licensed under a dual license meaning that some of it's proprietary some of it's open source and the Qt foundation or the Qt company I think is what it's called they like messing with that license quite a lot and there's always a worry that eventually they're going to take Qt and make it completely proprietary. There's been several rumors to that effect over the last couple of years that eventually they're going to make all Qt 100% proprietary or they're going to take it all and put it behind a huge paywall that you have to subscribe to and it would become infeasible for KDE to actually use it anymore so that would lead to a fork and all that stuff but it's really hard for regular distributions to rely on something like Qt when they have to maintain compliance with the GPL or other licenses that are completely open source and that rumored instability in licenses for Qt is possibly one of the reasons why some distributions just don't like KDE Plasma all that much because they're not sure if that license that is going to change in the future that could be a huge problem and yes Qt could be forked and would be forked if Qt the Qt company took the other way dealing with the process of transitioning from the main line Qt to a fork would be a process that a lot of distributions wouldn't really want to go through so that could be a problem in the future as well. So the answer to why do most distros use Genome is very complicated. It's also possible that a lot of distros just simply prefer the look of GTK applications over what Qt provides because I'm a Plasma guy. I started off using Plasma and I've always preferred Plasma over Genome but even I will admit that out of the box a lot of the KDE applications are old looking, overly complicated and inconsistent in their design. Let's just put it nicely that way. Now it's gotten better over the last couple years that's for sure but if you open up something like K Mail or K Organizer or literally any of these KDE Plasma applications they all are overly complicated and many of them just look like they were designed in 1998. They look old. Even if you can go through and customize them and make them look way better out of the box they don't look that way. And looks are important for a desktop environment. It's one of the things that will differentiate you from other distributions and other desktop environments and the fact that KDE Plasma stuff out of the box looks kind of archaic could be a problem. And people like the Genome stuff because it's simple, it's consistent. It's not necessarily easy to theme but at least it's simple and consistent. So that could be another reason. In the comment section below let me know why you think that most distros use Genome as their desktop environment. And let me know if you prefer they use something different because it's possible that there's a lot of KDE fans out there and I know I was disappointed when Ubuntu chose Genome over KDE so maybe you're like that as well. Leave that in the comment section below. Make sure you hit the like button and the subscribe button if you haven't already. You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast. You can support me on patreon.patreon.com. Before I go I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. 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