 The GNOME desktop and I have a very interesting relationship. We have been through some tough times over the last two and a half years. Since I really started doing proper Linux reviews and all that stuff for this channel, I've used GNOME many times. And at the beginning, I hated it. I hated everything that GNOME stood for. I could not fathom why anybody would want to ever use it. And it just was a very tough time between GNOME and I in terms of our relationship. And then as I used it more and actually dedicated myself to learning what GNOME was all about, my thoughts on the GNOME desktop transitioned into meh, right? It was okay. And I could understand why other people would use it, but it was never going to be for me. That has been my basic stance on GNOME for the last year and a half or so since I did my last long term review of the GNOME desktop environment. My thoughts on GNOME have, however, over the last few weeks taken another transition. And it's going to be quite shocking for some. And for Tyler, who I do a podcast with, he's going to laugh his ass off when he sees this video. My thoughts on GNOME are that it's actually really good. Now, some of this is that they have finally started to have a good vision towards what GNOME can do in terms of customization and things like that. They've also made it a lot faster than it was when I first started using Linux. I mean, when I first started using Linux, GNOME was the slowest desktop environment out there and it used up a ton of resources. It still uses a lot of resources, but it's no longer as slow as it was. But over the last two weeks or so, maybe even a little bit longer than that now, I've been using GNOME on several of my computers, not my main one, but on the computer behind me, as you probably can see, and on a couple of my laptops. And I have to say that I think that my biggest problem with GNOME in the past is that I truly didn't understand it, right? There is a way you have to use the GNOME desktop environment. And if you don't use it that way, it feels weird. So if you are a traditional mouse and keyboard user, you're probably not someone who can truly get how the GNOME desktop is supposed to work, because it's really not meant to be used with a mouse. You can use it with a mouse, but it's not going to be as efficient as if you were to learn the key bindings. And by default, there are many key bindings that you should learn. So the reliance on the meta key or the super key is something that you're going to have to get used to, because that's going to bring up your view like you see in the window behind me, where it kind of shows the desktop in a shrunken view and then has the dock along the bottom. And then you can press that button again in order to get to all of your applications if you want, or you can assign that to a different keybinding whatever. You'll also use the super key and the numbers to launch the things in that dock. So one through how many ever icons you have in the dock. So there are key bindings that you are supposed to use in order to navigate through the GNOME desktop environment. And if you aren't used to using the keyboard, or like me, never really took the time to realize that that's how you're supposed to use it, then you're going to have a little bit of a hard time actually using GNOME, especially if you've never used it before. So for example, and you'll see this in B-roll as I'm talking, out of the box, GNOME has nothing on screen when you first launch into it. It's just a blank wallpaper and a black bar at the top. That's it. And if you've never used Linux or you've never used GNOME before, what are you supposed to do? Well, I mean, it really doesn't take a lot of curiosity to eventually navigate your way up to the bar at the top because it's the only thing there and then clicking on the activities word. It doesn't look like a button. It just looks like a word. You click on that and then you get the view that's behind me. That's not the most intuitive thing in the world. And it drives me nuts that that's the way they have it. And it bothers me for several reasons. First of all, lack of discoverability. If you aren't used to GNOME at all, you have to click basically a whole bunch of different places or be very lucky to know that that's where you're supposed to click or you have to start pounding keys on your keyboard and get lucky to find that meta key, right? The other reason why it bugs me is that it hides things away. Like, I understand that you're trying to make things as clean as possible, but that dock along the bottom there is essential for everyone's use. And there's no reason why it can't be on the desktop by default along the bottom. It would look very nice. We know that because it's basically MagOS's layout. It would work very well and it can hide itself away when there's a screen or a window that's open. That'd be perfectly fine. But the fact that it's not there by default means that people have to discover how to get to it. And that is not as easy as you would think it is. Now, they do have a tour, but is the most pansy ass, half ass tour you'll ever going to see. It's like three slides long. Maybe it's four slides long now. There's, I don't even remember if there's animations to it, right? So, I mean, technically, yes, there's a tour. Maybe it has the information that you're looking for there. But I would bet you money that the vast majority of people who are new to Genome bypass that tour without ever even looking at it. And probably because they assume that Genome is easy to use out of the box. And they're not going to have to discover too much in order to actually use it. And that's almost true. But there are certain things that you have to know in order to actually, you know, get to the places where you need to be. Now, the other reason why I don't like this is that it teaches people the wrong way to use Genome. It teaches them to go up and click on the activities button every time they want to get to the bar at the bottom. And that's not the way. I mean, you can use it that way if you want to, but it's a long way for your mouse to travel every single time you want to get to that view. So they are training people to do things the least efficient way. And that's not fantastic. So as you can tell, I am very much a person who is entrenched in thinking of Genome negatively. That's the reason why I've just spent the last three minutes talking about Genome in a negative fashion. These are the things that bug me about it. And I should have been talking about why I've decided I like it. But I have this mental block in my brain that has conditioned me to think of Genome in a negative light. It's why I always, whenever I say something about Genome, almost always it has become negative. Even as I've started to think more positively of Genome over the last year and a half or so, I still have had many negative things to say. I usually focus on those things instead of thinking of the positive things. So let's now that I'm 10 minutes into recording this video, let's talk about the reason why I've started thinking differently of Genome. Well, first of all, like I said, I've kind of discovered how you're supposed to use it. So it's very much a keyboard centric workflow. So if you manage to discover the default key bindings and then maybe edit the key bindings so that they're more in line with your workflow, like I have, it works really well. So the meta key and the numbers launched to apps in the bottom, I've set it up so I can switch work spaces with alt and the numbers. I've set it up so that I can close windows with super queue. I've set it up so that I can tile things with one key binding and so on and so forth, right? I've created a whole bunch of my own key bindings and it really does take the mindset of a tiling window manager user to really get everything out of Genome because it is a keyboard centric workflow and the people who are most used to dealing with that type of workflow are people who spend their time in a window manager and that's me. So once I realized that Genome is supposed to be like that, I started to enjoy it more. Now, there are other things that I've really truly come to like. I have always been a plasma fan, right? I like the customizability of all the QT applications and all the KDE stuff. I've always been a very big proponent of that kind of thing, but there is something to be said for simplicity and the Genome application suite is very, very simple. It doesn't have a ton of frills, a ton of customization. It doesn't have any of that stuff, but all of it works really, really well. I've had many words about Nautilus in the past that have been negative, but the Nautilus file manager is pretty good. It's very simple. You're not going to get, it's not going to win any awards for having the most options or anything like that, but it works really well. The extension of the Nautilus file manager, which is the GTK file picker, that's garbage. I don't want to talk about that. That's horrible. They should rewrite that thing from the ground up. It's really, really bad. But the Nautilus itself is actually pretty good. It's never going to replace Crusader for me, so don't worry about that, but it's still really good. And the thing is, is that it now looks really good too. So they have managed to finally get rid of those like beige, brownish folders that they used for years and years and have gone with a blue tinted folder. It looks way better. I mean, like night and day, it looks so much better. And because you can't customize those things, you are always stuck with those beige things unless you knew how to customize those things, which has always been kind of a hack, right? And you can still customize them now, but I find less reason now to customize those things because they don't look so bad. And if you're using Ubuntu's version of GNOME, you can actually change those colors because it uses a completely different theme and it has the ability to change that kind of stuff in the settings panel. Regular vanilla GNOME does not have that stuff yet. Hopefully that's coming soon. But overall, that's the thing about the GNOME suite is that it all looks really good now and they've done such a good job of kind of polishing the edges that just kind of makes it kind of fun to use. Now, like I said, you're never going to find the most customization in any GNOME app and that still bugs me quite a bit, but I enjoy the simplicity of stuffs from time to time and using those applications has really been kind of a joy. Now, like I said, none of them have really won me over. I don't think that you want to use them any of them long term, but from my time of using it over the last few weeks and kind of really diving deep into the applications, I have to say they're all really good and they've done a good job of covering all of their bases. They have music players and maps and weather and text editors and all this stuff. It works really well and it all works well together and it's just a really good experience. And then all kind of leads me into the next thing. Customization has always been a problem when it comes to GNOME. They don't like you to customize stuff or at least that has been their mantra for the last how many ever years. They really don't want you to theme, they don't want you to put in new icons, they don't want you to do any of that stuff. It's always been a hack in order to do those things. It feels over the last couple of releases that they're finally easing up on that just a little bit. With the introduction of LeBata Weta, there are now official ways of changing a lot of the theming capabilities of GNOME itself. So with the application called Gradients, you can use that to basically make your applications look however you want. And it's no longer a hack, it actually truly works and is I believe developed by someone who is closely related to the GNOME project. I'm not, don't quote me on that part, but it works really, really well. Now there are still portions of the desktop environment that aren't really customizable at all. A lot of things in the applications aren't customizable. You still can't change the icons. You can't change the GNOME shell theme easily without installing GNOME tweaks. So there are still things there that you're not going to be customized. And it's obviously not as full-fledged in terms of theming as hacking was back in the day. When you installed GNOME tweaks and was able to go download a theme and you can make Nautilus look like something crazy. You can still do that obviously, but it's still a hack with the officially sanctioned way of doing it, you can just change the colors, which is enough. And that's kind of the point is that they have done enough in terms of allowing customization with a third-party application at least that I never really felt the need to download GNOME tweaks. Like I haven't downloaded GNOME tweaks on any of the GNOME instances that I've been running. Not at all. And that is weird. I mean, GNOME tweaks is the application that I'd almost always download first even before like Firefox or my text editor or what I mean, usually even before Vim, right? Before I installed them, I'd always installed GNOME tweaks because I had to change certain things about the operating system that was driving me nuts. And this time, it didn't bother me whatsoever. Now, there are still some things that I'd like to change that I just worked around. So things like being able to minimize is one of the things that I would like to have. And you can only do that with GNOME tweaks. So, you know, there are some things there that are still missing that need to be rectified. I don't know what their opposition is to being able to minimize an application. They should definitely put that back into the, I mean, what has hurt? I mean, seriously, it doesn't feel like that's a feature that would bother anybody and would be useful for a lot of people. So I don't understand their opposition to that but whatever. Now, the question that all this leads to is does that mean that I'm going to be making, you know, my default desktop environment? No, I don't like it that much. I like it more than I used to before. And I would say that I'm leaning towards liking it more than KDE lately, just simply because I've had so many problems with KDE over the last six months in terms of bugs and stuff like that. Just for whatever reason, KDE just hates me. So I think that that's another reason why I've kind of transitioned to being okay and more open-minded when it comes to GNOME is because my beloved KDE has decided to turn its back on me. But even all that stuff, I'm still a tiling window manager guy. And while I know you can get tiling in GNOME, it's not the same. So I am very much a dedicated I3 user. I've been using Sway on a daily basis and I like those things. I like using a tiling window manager and GNOME isn't good enough to get me to switch away from that. That being said, I would probably be okay with GNOME being my desktop environment on my system. I almost always start off with a regular distro that comes with KDE or GNOME or something like that and then build on top of it. And I install my window managers and all the stuff that goes with it. So I wouldn't be opposed now to using GNOME as that situation instead of using KDE, which is what I usually do. So that's where I'm basically at with GNOME right now. A few weeks ago, I talked about XFC and XFC is still my favorite desktop environment. It's better than GNOME. I will put that out there right now. This whole video wasn't me saying, hey, I'm now a GNOME fanboy. That was not the meaning of this video. Instead, what I was trying to get across to you is that GNOME, if you understand how to use it properly with your keyboard and learning how to navigate through GNOME with your keyboard, if you understand the workflow, you're going to be much happier with GNOME than you probably would be if you used a mouse. And that's my situation. Now that I know that it's a keyboard-centric workflow, I'm much happier with it now and I'm happy using it. So it's going to stay the primary desktop environment on that computer there, maybe for a little while. I'm doing some testing of open SUSE right now. So it's probably gonna be switching back and forth, but when that goes back to Fedora, it'll be the GNOME version. The laptop that I've been using, which is old and clunky and soon to be replaced, has Ubuntu on it and that has GNOME. So I'll be using GNOME on my other computers for quite a while. And I actually, like I said, I like it now. And that is such a change, right? I know I'm going to get made fun of by my friends because I've been so anti-GNOME for so long, but I've come around. Like it's pretty good. And I'm happy to say that I'm not going to, like I said, say that it's my favorite because it's not my favorite, but it's still really, really good. So that is it for this video. If you have thoughts on this topic, you can leave those in the comment section below. Please, for the love of all that is holy in the universe, do not correct my pronunciation of GNOME. I will provide you with a link every time you try to tell me how it's pronounced. And all you need to know on that aspect is that I'm right and you're wrong. Unless you pronounce it GNOME also, in which case, you're pronouncing it correctly. Anyways, you can tell I get that comment a lot. I do. You can follow me on Master's Honor Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast, just like all of these fine people. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the channel just would not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very much for your support. 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