Also "Ricing" is a term which comes from japan, Car enthusiasts would customize their cars, and some of the first popular mods used a rice, and glue combination to add visual flair. (don't ask how it managed to look good, idk).
Nowadays RICE - stands for Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancement. Usually only the HERO 1 car had the powerful engine mods and all other cars in Fast and Furious were just riced to look good from a distance. But this is not a positive flag. Mainly financially broke boys and girls riced their Civics and other cheap cars without any matching performance mods. Back In the 70's the rice car meant an asian import sports car, also not a very positive statement.
@@TheLinuxEXP I don't think it comes fro Japan. from my experience and what I can find, it comes from an American term "rice rocket" which is a derogatory way of referring to Asian motorcycles and cars and ricing can refer to the performance and cosmetic mods added to cars.
idk if you have seen it but someone already made a MacOS theme for gnome 42 and libadwaita, and they said it was super easy even tho they haven't written a theme before, but the difficult part was getting it loaded/applied.
I love GNOME, I use most of the defaults because they match my workflow, but I also throw in dash to dock, and blur me for some visual flair, and easy access to my most frequently used apps
I think you repeated twice "You'll get the activities dock for gnome, but always visible at the bottom" at 5:35 :) . Great video anyway ! I don't regret switching back to Gnome from Kde a few months ago. Things have changed dramatically since I left.
I noticed it as well. I played the part again to check if it was really an editing error in the video. But it was. No problem. :P Thank you so much for your video! I know about the older Gnome Tweaks and I have used that a lot, and also I know that they are replacing that by Extensions, but I was not really aware that this also involved a so much extra add-on options that you can install now. I am thinking about doing more with Gnome, although currently Xfce is my favourite on Arch for it's high customizability as well in combination with very lightweightness, but I have more systems installed in dual boot, and I like to try other things again, thinking about Fedora again, which gets almost too many updates every day, but which is also very modern and comes with so much more a vanilla version of the desktop than crappy Ubuntu.
8:40 it actually is possible to theme libadwaita, while it doesn't respect the theme set using gnome tweaks, it follows the GTK_THEME envvar, you'd just have to set it universally
Did you verify this? Cause this is contradictory to what the developers say, the theme is supposed to be essentially hard-coded and specifically detached from the global GTK theme, that's the whole meaning of libadwaita separating from GTK4. I mean I wish what you said was true but I don't think it is, and if it is for you, perhaps you're not running the same version of the software?
@@DMSBrian24 I also head this myth that the theme is somehow 'baked in' into the application. I don't know where it comes from, but it is definitely not true. libadwaita still builds on GTK, and GTK uses stylesheet providers that can be changed at runtime. It is not possible to 'bake in' a theme into any (non-proprietary) GTK application, and you will always be able to override the stylesheet with the GTK inspector. By the way, changing libadwaita to not overwrite the global theme can be done in ~10 Lines of code in the adw_style_manager file in ilibadwaita. Distros could just decide to ship a custom verson of libadwaita (or provide two versions that people could choose between) and once themes are updated to support libadwaita's widgets, theming wouldn't be a problem anymore. I don't know how nice that would go over with the GNOME devs, though.
@@til98c Shortwave is an example that I could for the life of me not manage to theme. It seems to be hard coded and no matter what I set or install, it does not care.
I think we need two words for "customizable". GNOME is kinda customizable. Extensions are a (bit hacky) way of runtime modifying of code that doesn't always play nice with everything. By the same vain, Windows is extremely customizable too. I mean, just go over the net and look for all the customization tools available for Windows. There are a lot of tools that use almost the same mechanic as extensions to extend Windows. Ofcourse, on the flip side, GNOME has some developer support and user support for extensions and I think that GNOME Devs thinks about the extensability when adding new features. But anyways, there is the distinction. GNOME *can be* customized, but it isn't, like some others, built to support customization. The case isn't as bad as with Windows, it actually is even "good". But customizability wise I think we can safely say GNOME is customize-able but not customizable.
@@kavinunethsarakoswattage3516 Gnome devs let you add extensions because they don't need to give support to you when there is a bug, and it let them focus on something else.
@@ashtaka oh, I am not saying their approach is inherently wrong or that GNOME should be more customizable. Afterall, GNOME should be GNOME, not KDE. I am just saying it isn't customizable per se.
As it turns out libadwaita is also very customizable. There was a post on the gnome subreddit where someone showed it was trivial to change the colourscheme of libwadwaita apps. Infact it seems to be even easier than creating a gtk css stylesheet theme
The issue is that that isn't a theme. It's not a different design language or anything like gtk themes were, it's more like windows 10 settings. If you like that, that's cool, but I'm not satisfied.
Honestly all I need is to switch that warm grey dark mode to cooler tones or towards Nordic. If i could access stylesheet and replace warmgreys I'd be set
Hello Nick, and thanks a lot for this video in general, and in particular for your review of Blur my Shell! It is really encouraging to see people enjoy using it, and for those of you who are interested, a pretty big update is coming, with support for finally blurring apps, and most importantly great-looking preferences!
There is only one problem.... What happens if you update Gnome? Gnome is great, but the creators of Gnome had not "customization" in mind (and that is okay)
I never understood the people that install lots of extensions and tweak everything they can on Gnome to make it look/behave like another desktop environment and then complain when an update breaks things. If they want to make it work like an unmantained DE I get it, but if they want it to be like Mate or Cinnamon or KDE then install Mate or Cinnamon or KDE. I imagine them adding things to a motorbike so it looks and behaves like a car. I love Gnome as it is, I just have one extension installed (no, not any of those dock ones) and for me it works flawlessly, lets me focus on work rather than fixing that extension that breaks or whatever.
@@lucacavedale676 no, it's top bar scroll or something like that, it basically let's you switch workspaces by using the mouse scroll wheel on the top bar.
@@JoseMVelazquez i love workspaces. helped me get rid of my urge to have multiple monitors. i just set different workspaces with custom names, use tiling extension, and have every workspace dedicated to something. for example i have one with a terminal and HTOP always ready, another one with all my messaging apps, etc etc that extension is useful, thank you. i used to have to use ctrl + alt + arrow keys to switch workspaces quickly
Great job, Nick! I had no idea that GNOME was customizable at all and was thinking I was stuck with the default Pop!_OS desktop environment. I'm on 20.04 and it didn't have a dock and I would have to go into Activities every time to get to my apps. Thank you for showing me this was possible and I didn't have to switch to KDE!
It seems to me like Gnome benefits a lot from being the #1 DE in terms of popularity and I never really understood how that happened in the first place. I only started using Linux in 2011 so I never used Gnome 2; maybe if I used that version I would like Gnome more today out of nostalgia? But really I suspect it's down to the license and freedom of the entire stack Gnome uses (recent worries about Qt 6 show that having something like GTK really does matter). Anyway, clearly I don't prefer Gnome but it looks like it's improving steadily in recent years 🙂
Well gnome is default on many popular distros, and gnome actually did something new, no one else have the balls to do that. And its fairly complete out of the box with sane defaults.
As I understand, Gnome's popularity is because historically most distros shipped versions 1 and 2 of it as the "standard" DE, so to say, due to KDE's reliance on QT, which irked the more Free Software (as opposed to Open Source) purist Linux community from back in the day. That was long before KDE struck their deal with Trolltech/Nokia to be the stewards of the open source side of QT. Or so I gather.
Gnome 2 was default on Ubuntu when it was the new hotness and everyone and their mother ran it, Mint, Fedora, & others ran it default. That's how it got popular and many people just keep using Gnome because they had always run Gnome. Gnome 2 still lives as the Mate De.
@@wallyhackenslacker is QT fully open source today? Or is it just backed by Nokia? I know there's a paid version if you want to use it for commercial software
I would switch from KDE to GNOME thanks to the good Wayland support , but those thick (not or less customizable) title bars in windows are a little bit off putting in my opinion. Mostly because of the unnecessary real estate they fill on the screen, but also for aesthetic reasons. Thank you for the video! People new to gnome customization will greatly appreciate it.
Firstly, i also thought like that but after a plasma release when they made titlebar and toolbar the same color, oh my(i realized), just put them side by side and saw how compact the gnome style is. Yes you can hide these bars in plasma apps but that would hide functionality too. But i agree on the non-gnome apps having thick titlebars is truly a waste.
In my opinion, at least GNOME puts those title bars to use with headerbars and mini toolbars, whereas in other DEs they would have to take up space somewhere else, below the title bar that only serves to show the title and window controls.
I discovered how customizable GNOME Shell really is when I developed an extension for it. (EasyEffects Preset Selector - It lets you select EasyEffects presets (sound profiles in a sense) directly from your statusbar). It really lets you do whatever you want to do. You can change the behavior and look of GNOME Shell completely. Extensions are not add-ons which are their own separate applications, instead when they are activated they become a part of GNOME Shell itself and it gives a great opportunity and power to it.
i agree, it is customizable, but because its a open system, not because the devs want you to customize it, not like KDE that makes it basically a feature to customize anything you can out of the box
Providing an extension API makes it customizable. If the devs didn't want you to customize it, it wouldn't have an API. It's nice that KDE provides options out of the box, but those options work less reliably in my experience than GNOME extensions and I'd personally rather add the options I want rather than work around options I don't want.
@@RustyLoaf the devs actions show that they dont you you to modify it, lib awaita is there to prove it, and each experience is different, in my experience gnome is far less stable than kde, i run gnome on my laptop and kde on my desktop, both highly modified, and gnome gives me way more headache than KDE
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@@RustyLoaf Literally every update breaks every extension. You better keep updating your extension with every GNOME shell update, because they will make sure your 3.36 extension won't work in 3.38
I love Gnome cause if you want you can custumize a lot, but also, if you love the simple and basic experience like me, you don't have to deal with all the options always being there
I'm a novice and have fully customised Gnome with Sweet theme, Candy Icons and then I used an app from the Flatpak repo to theme the adwaita apps which aren't touched by normal themes. It's a little more in depth than theming KDE but it's not hard and the results can look very different from plasma due to Gnomes UI and extensions.
Another great thing about Gnome is that you can code your own extension! If you need a feature that doesn't exist on the default Gnome shell (or existing extensions), you can code it to your own liking. Of course, there might be some limitations but I've seen very advanced extensions proving that you can do almost anything 😁 I was missing a feature that I'm using on my android phone (Bedtime Mode), a couple of JavaScript lines later, BOOM, now I have it also on my desktop. Nice! 😉
@@ArunG273 Exactly, I don't get why most people need the customization in KDE. I'm happy that it exists and it lives alongside Gnome, but I want the distro to choose those for me. I want the design of every part of the computer to work in harmony. This doesn't work when you don't have any consistency. I like how much GNOME pushes their Human Interface Guidelines for their GUI apps.
@@ArunG273 "Too much customization" how does that even work? If the UI looks cluttered then remove the clutter. The beauty of customization is that it can look however you want it to. Also fuck gnome for doing away with the menu bar which is objectively superior to a hamburger menu. Convergence design is a plague.
@@dracostyx And pointing to a list of gnome tweaks that break with every update and saying "look how many options" instead of having those options built in like they used to be isn't copium? lol
I’m using Debian 11 with GNOME. I compiled the Pop Shell and it’s been great. I can also switch it out and get something more windows like. I’ve tried KDE in the past and while it’s nice I like the ease of use and extensions that GNOME has
7:35 i completely agree, those super flash effects are one of the main the reasons why i fell in love with linux , despite the fact that they arent usefull in the day to day, too flashy.
GNOME is a good DE depending on the device you are intended to utilize, which is mainly for desktop PCs with large screens and touchscreens. On laptops is definitely a no way to go because of the limited screen size and the need for a global menu (as an example), so you have to gain every pixel of that corner. That's why I usually recommend people to utilize KDE or cinnamon for a laptop as DE and GNOME exclusively for larger and/or touchscreens!
9:09 that term originates from car culture. A ricer is someone who makes purely cosmetic mods to their car that don't improve performance. It is a negative term, as ricers usually have consumer cars like Honda Civics, and will try to make them "look cool" with big spoilers, lowered suspension, and loud exhausts.
great video, just wanted to mention a great extension called "just perfection". it's super useful if you want to tweak some of gnome shell's attributes like configuring the top bar, the dock and animations or just removing them, and a lot more. it also has a very active dev, he has his own yt channel and posts updates covering the latest changes. you should check it out!
Been forcing myself to use stock gnome (except blur my shell, it should be the default look). It is really nice and totally functional. I flip between Gnome and KDE and both do the same thing very nicely and are ideally suited for the users that enjoy each. This ability to choose is a good thing. Also, no need to only have two options. I’d love to see Mate get more love to keep that Input Scheme alive.
wdym input scheme. Also blur my shell causes some lag on old laptops, that is (probably) the reason it is not included by default. I know it lags because I use a old laptop
honestly if mate didnt look so outdated id consider it, but to me its an eyesore that i dont want to look at when i use my laptop, and i dont want others to see me using
On Gnome I just use two extensions: dash to dock and just perfect. That's it, I really don't think I need anything else other than that and the tweak tool for font size.
No System Tray? I you use Shutter, OBS, Smart Screen Recorder etc. It is so much better to control the software without opening the main window. Plus, you don't get to record your own main software window. It is a very basic OS interaction that was removed for some reason.
There is an extension called colortint that allows you to apply an overlay to your screen. Using a low opacity grey tint, you can reduce the contrast of everything, which can be good if you usually use lower contrast theme and think libadwaita theme has too much contrast. Honestly I don't even know if KDE or sway even can do this on wayland.
To be fair, some heavily customized distros (Pop and Ubuntu for example) aren't always going to work well when given other extensions as they will conflict with that is set up - I noticed this in Pop with Cosmic unless I turned Cosmic off). Ubuntu isn't as bad, but you may need to go into dconf editor to adjust some things. Going for a vanilla Gnome (Debian, Arch, Fedora, etc.) will be easier to adjust without a preconfig having a fit.
I came to love the default gnome experience. I do add some extensions such as app indicators but nothing like dash2panel or dash2dock. It can take some time to get used to since I assume most people grew up on something like Windows but now I wish my work laptop (which runs windows) had some things such as the hot corner
5:37 You'll get the activities dock from GNOME but always visible on the button. You'll get the activities dock from GNOME but always visible on the button. His name was Robert Paulson.
I’ve started using Linux from a week ago. I started using Fedora 36 beta after watching one of your videos, and let me just say that it feels really nice to be exploring a new OS which is this customizable . Although I have figured most things and love it, I just hate not having a minimize button in GNOME. Any ideas how to get one?
The only issue with these extensions is they need to be updated regularly or they fall out of compatibility pretty quick. I wish they settle on a base code structure for the extension SDK.
That's cool, but just like you said, I wouldn't recommend using it on anything other than Debian based distributions. On Arch almost every time there was a bigger update for gnome some extensions broke, and I had to wait days, or even a week before they were updated. I just jumped the ship later and use KDE. Couldn't be happier.
Gnome devs would prefer you to don't customize it. Whenever I ask for help with problems on Gnome the first thing I'm told to do is to disable all the extensions
Layan theme is the only good looking white theme I know. And Vince actively fixes any issues. Although I'm a user who came back after switching to KDE just a week ago ( Fedora KDE updating via Discover GUI broke it ), It's not Customizable. If Installing Extensions app & gnome-tweaks is fair, then installing UX patcher in Windows, power toys, Rain meter should also be fair. Even though they are GNOME apps, they are not there by default on any dists. Just my opinion.
GNOME is customizable, but I think other desktop environments are better customizable. Do you need an extra app for changing themes in KDE Plasma for example?
I think that Gnome is great out of the box w some tweaks. As far as a simple minimal desktop it does exactly that and my favorite non tiling wm. I use bspwm, and i3 on my desktop but will always use gnome on my more modern laptops. I never really understood the hate.
awesome work. I really like your channel. decent. focused. I can't imagine how labour intensive it is but if you can manage to put some time into it I would love to hear about courses how to develop/customize gnome and linux in general. I've been searching for this but I didn't find anything other then linux foundation ones and they are focused on the internals.
Well, the statement „gnome is not customizable“ is not true in general, but it is „politically correct“ towards the developers intentions ;) they just don’t want you to! But of course you always can do practically anything you want…
The reason we don't have any decent alternative solution to the system tray (app indicators) is that no viable alternative really exists. The System Tray is intended to provide quick access to interactive user-applications that are running but do not have open windows. Some programs exist *exclusively* in the system tray. We don't have an alternative because it's already the most simple way you could possibly handle it. Removing them breaks some apps, and renders features of others unusable. Putting them in a sub menu adds additional unnecessary clicks and gets in the way. Where they're at and what they do is already the ideal situation for what they're meant to do.
I feel like extensions, as they break all the time shouldn't really count vs Kde which just has options out of the box. This is especially true since they've indicated they want less and less power with extensions. The de itself has far less customization. to be honest the main thing I dislike is I never want open apps to combine and want the individual app window text to always be visible to save time. Also, I've never gotten this mentality of removing useful features for """clean""" aesthetics. Do people just sit staring at their desktops or do they use their computers to do work? Always pisses me off when software I'm using goes that route. """clean""" design is my enemy. If I became king I'd just ban moves like that.
I grew to like Gnome over the past Year or so since i began my Linux journey but when they realy kick customizastion with 42 or Cosmic forever my backup plan is called Cinnamon
Last night I installed Window Buttons in my Manjaro MATE instance. (Yes Manjaro I know it and Arch are not the same piss off.) My always-visible bottom panel just has my app launcher, window list and window buttons, while my always-hidden top panel has show desktop, workspace switcher, notification area, window title and clock. Can't imagine replicating that in GNOME Shell…
I don't know whether it's still the issue or not but previously I was kinda bothered by the idea that even basic things might require installing something called Gnome *Tweaks*. I get the idea of opinionated DE but treating "add/remove apps from startup" as a tweak and not as a basic functionality is pretty weird.
There's a few things in GNOME Tweaks that have no business being there, startup applications being chief among them. They've been slowly moving stuff over from GNOME Tweaks into the settings application, so I have a feeling eventually startup applications will make their way over, but in the meantime it's super stupid. 🙃
I'm curious how much longer the GNOME Tweak Tool is going to be around for. It seems like they're steadily moving the more commonly used settings from the tweak tool into GNOME Control Center, and the tweak tool isn't getting many updates. Honestly I wish they'd just move most of the remaining tweak tool settings over into the control center and drop the tweak tool entirely, especially now that theming is going away. I think most of the tweak settings would feel right at home in the system settings with a little bit of a UX refresh.
I used to use 20.40 LTS I was never able to "Blur" my Dock or Panel or even Windows. And I wanted Rounded corners for all windows (which is available in Windows 11) but there was no way to do it in Gnome.
Except you can't use it on a 1 year old budget 15" laptop with a resolution of 1336x768, extension settings and app settings get cut off below screen, not allowing you to see all settings or to apply them..
dash to dock and dash to panel will not let me hide both at the same time without locking the bottom dock down before the top panel has been exposed... :(
I think the statement "GNOME is not configurable" is about the fact that you need to do an extra step and use extensions to perform some tweaks that, perhaps, could be done via GNOME Settings instead extensions. I don't mind using extensions, but I cannot argue that some setting should be on GNOME settings instead an extension.
So what I get is: GNOME is customizable, as long as you're willing to look for and install a dozen or so of extensions, and are OK with them breaking after updates to the DE, so not really that stable. The fact that you need to install a 3rd party app just to install extensions is really troublesome imo.
Where I live in California "Ricers" are hot rodded Honda Civics, Subaru WRX, or Mitsubishi EVO's. How that term got applied to the Gnome desktop I have no idea...
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4d ago
I am using Manjaro Gnome 41. It took me a heck a lot of time to customize gnome 41. And a heck of extensions later, I am ok. Customizable? very hard
Also "Ricing" is a term which comes from japan, Car enthusiasts would customize their cars, and some of the first popular mods used a rice, and glue combination to add visual flair. (don't ask how it managed to look good, idk).
Nice to finally know!
I always though rice was Race inspired cosmetic enhancement maybe that's just in north America
Nowadays RICE - stands for Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancement. Usually only the HERO 1 car had the powerful engine mods and all other cars in Fast and Furious were just riced to look good from a distance. But this is not a positive flag. Mainly financially broke boys and girls riced their Civics and other cheap cars without any matching performance mods.
Back In the 70's the rice car meant an asian import sports car, also not a very positive statement.
@@TheLinuxEXP I don't think it comes fro Japan. from my experience and what I can find, it comes from an American term "rice rocket" which is a derogatory way of referring to Asian motorcycles and cars and ricing can refer to the performance and cosmetic mods added to cars.
@@TheMaxAwesome You basically said the same thing just differently
idk if you have seen it but someone already made a MacOS theme for gnome 42 and libadwaita, and they said it was super easy even tho they haven't written a theme before, but the difficult part was getting it loaded/applied.
Nice!
Please share the theme
link?
link or it didn't happen
I love GNOME, I use most of the defaults because they match my workflow, but I also throw in dash to dock, and blur me for some visual flair, and easy access to my most frequently used apps
I think you repeated twice "You'll get the activities dock for gnome, but always visible at the bottom" at 5:35 :) . Great video anyway ! I don't regret switching back to Gnome from Kde a few months ago. Things have changed dramatically since I left.
Woops, editing snafu
I thought my phone was acting weird there!
@@TheLinuxEXP You should add a pause or an audible clap next time so it attracts your attention while editing
nice PFP lol
I noticed it as well. I played the part again to check if it was really an editing error in the video. But it was. No problem. :P
Thank you so much for your video! I know about the older Gnome Tweaks and I have used that a lot, and also I know that they are replacing that by Extensions, but I was not really aware that this also involved a so much extra add-on options that you can install now.
I am thinking about doing more with Gnome, although currently Xfce is my favourite on Arch for it's high customizability as well in combination with very lightweightness, but I have more systems installed in dual boot, and I like to try other things again, thinking about Fedora again, which gets almost too many updates every day, but which is also very modern and comes with so much more a vanilla version of the desktop than crappy Ubuntu.
8:40 it actually is possible to theme libadwaita, while it doesn't respect the theme set using gnome tweaks, it follows the GTK_THEME envvar, you'd just have to set it universally
That's nice!
Did you verify this? Cause this is contradictory to what the developers say, the theme is supposed to be essentially hard-coded and specifically detached from the global GTK theme, that's the whole meaning of libadwaita separating from GTK4. I mean I wish what you said was true but I don't think it is, and if it is for you, perhaps you're not running the same version of the software?
What is Gnome tweaks setting then, if it's not the GTK_THEME ? I'm kinda confused here
@@DMSBrian24 I also head this myth that the theme is somehow 'baked in' into the application. I don't know where it comes from, but it is definitely not true. libadwaita still builds on GTK, and GTK uses stylesheet providers that can be changed at runtime. It is not possible to 'bake in' a theme into any (non-proprietary) GTK application, and you will always be able to override the stylesheet with the GTK inspector.
By the way, changing libadwaita to not overwrite the global theme can be done in ~10 Lines of code in the adw_style_manager file in ilibadwaita. Distros could just decide to ship a custom verson of libadwaita (or provide two versions that people could choose between) and once themes are updated to support libadwaita's widgets, theming wouldn't be a problem anymore. I don't know how nice that would go over with the GNOME devs, though.
@@til98c Shortwave is an example that I could for the life of me not manage to theme. It seems to be hard coded and no matter what I set or install, it does not care.
My issue with extensions is that they usually break with each Gnome upgrade! Because they are not "officially" supported or endorsed by Gnome!
give it 2 years before they officially kill extension support
I think we need two words for "customizable". GNOME is kinda customizable. Extensions are a (bit hacky) way of runtime modifying of code that doesn't always play nice with everything.
By the same vain, Windows is extremely customizable too. I mean, just go over the net and look for all the customization tools available for Windows. There are a lot of tools that use almost the same mechanic as extensions to extend Windows.
Ofcourse, on the flip side, GNOME has some developer support and user support for extensions and I think that GNOME Devs thinks about the extensability when adding new features.
But anyways, there is the distinction. GNOME *can be* customized, but it isn't, like some others, built to support customization. The case isn't as bad as with Windows, it actually is even "good". But customizability wise I think we can safely say GNOME is customize-able but not customizable.
A good analogy is modding proprietery games. You are basically modding the DE, instead of the DE providing a way to extend it.
@@kavinunethsarakoswattage3516 Gnome devs let you add extensions because they don't need to give support to you when there is a bug, and it let them focus on something else.
@@ashtaka oh, I am not saying their approach is inherently wrong or that GNOME should be more customizable. Afterall, GNOME should be GNOME, not KDE.
I am just saying it isn't customizable per se.
@@kavinunethsarakoswattage3516 Okay i see what you mean
except for rainmeter
Thanks for this, Nick! I recently tired to use Gnome and I ended up thinking it wasn't really customizable. This surely helps!
As it turns out libadwaita is also very customizable. There was a post on the gnome subreddit where someone showed it was trivial to change the colourscheme of libwadwaita apps. Infact it seems to be even easier than creating a gtk css stylesheet theme
This could really be the start of a color API for libadwaita which is probably good enough for most people
But it won't look exactly how you want
@@roundabout-host That's why KDE exist
The issue is that that isn't a theme. It's not a different design language or anything like gtk themes were, it's more like windows 10 settings. If you like that, that's cool, but I'm not satisfied.
Honestly all I need is to switch that warm grey dark mode to cooler tones or towards Nordic. If i could access stylesheet and replace warmgreys I'd be set
Allow me to say: XFCE is very customizable :P
Yeah very customizable I hope it gets full compatibility in Wayland someday though
It looks horrible on first boot though.
I use arch by the way
Hello Nick, and thanks a lot for this video in general, and in particular for your review of Blur my Shell! It is really encouraging to see people enjoy using it, and for those of you who are interested, a pretty big update is coming, with support for finally blurring apps, and most importantly great-looking preferences!
There is only one problem....
What happens if you update Gnome?
Gnome is great, but the creators of Gnome had not "customization" in mind (and that is okay)
I never understood the people that install lots of extensions and tweak everything they can on Gnome to make it look/behave like another desktop environment and then complain when an update breaks things. If they want to make it work like an unmantained DE I get it, but if they want it to be like Mate or Cinnamon or KDE then install Mate or Cinnamon or KDE. I imagine them adding things to a motorbike so it looks and behaves like a car.
I love Gnome as it is, I just have one extension installed (no, not any of those dock ones) and for me it works flawlessly, lets me focus on work rather than fixing that extension that breaks or whatever.
@@JoseMVelazquez i bet its the app indicator, right? :) at least is the must have for every DE, the rest is just, well differents workflows...
Depends on the updates. Anything top bar related is practically never broken. Most of the time it breaks at my pc is when the kernel updates
@@lucacavedale676 no, it's top bar scroll or something like that, it basically let's you switch workspaces by using the mouse scroll wheel on the top bar.
@@JoseMVelazquez i love workspaces. helped me get rid of my urge to have multiple monitors.
i just set different workspaces with custom names, use tiling extension, and have every workspace dedicated to something. for example i have one with a terminal and HTOP always ready, another one with all my messaging apps, etc etc
that extension is useful, thank you. i used to have to use ctrl + alt + arrow keys to switch workspaces quickly
I've been saying this for years. Not only is GNOME very customisable, but it makes customising SIMPLE too.
Great job, Nick! I had no idea that GNOME was customizable at all and was thinking I was stuck with the default Pop!_OS desktop environment. I'm on 20.04 and it didn't have a dock and I would have to go into Activities every time to get to my apps. Thank you for showing me this was possible and I didn't have to switch to KDE!
It seems to me like Gnome benefits a lot from being the #1 DE in terms of popularity and I never really understood how that happened in the first place. I only started using Linux in 2011 so I never used Gnome 2; maybe if I used that version I would like Gnome more today out of nostalgia? But really I suspect it's down to the license and freedom of the entire stack Gnome uses (recent worries about Qt 6 show that having something like GTK really does matter). Anyway, clearly I don't prefer Gnome but it looks like it's improving steadily in recent years 🙂
Well gnome is default on many popular distros, and gnome actually did something new, no one else have the balls to do that. And its fairly complete out of the box with sane defaults.
@@fredrik2008 "no one else" 👀 budgie, pantheon, unity
As I understand, Gnome's popularity is because historically most distros shipped versions 1 and 2 of it as the "standard" DE, so to say, due to KDE's reliance on QT, which irked the more Free Software (as opposed to Open Source) purist Linux community from back in the day. That was long before KDE struck their deal with Trolltech/Nokia to be the stewards of the open source side of QT. Or so I gather.
Gnome 2 was default on Ubuntu when it was the new hotness and everyone and their mother ran it, Mint, Fedora, & others ran it default. That's how it got popular and many people just keep using Gnome because they had always run Gnome. Gnome 2 still lives as the Mate De.
@@wallyhackenslacker is QT fully open source today? Or is it just backed by Nokia? I know there's a paid version if you want to use it for commercial software
I would switch from KDE to GNOME thanks to the good Wayland support , but those thick (not or less customizable) title bars in windows are a little bit off putting in my opinion. Mostly because of the unnecessary real estate they fill on the screen, but also for aesthetic reasons.
Thank you for the video! People new to gnome customization will greatly appreciate it.
Firstly, i also thought like that but after a plasma release when they made titlebar and toolbar the same color, oh my(i realized), just put them side by side and saw how compact the gnome style is. Yes you can hide these bars in plasma apps but that would hide functionality too. But i agree on the non-gnome apps having thick titlebars is truly a waste.
There's a AdwCompact theme you can use with Gnome 3, same adwaita but slimmer.
I'm here for exactly that reason. Need to put these huge honkin' title bars on a mega diet. They're HUGE! Can't find how to do it!
In my opinion, at least GNOME puts those title bars to use with headerbars and mini toolbars, whereas in other DEs they would have to take up space somewhere else, below the title bar that only serves to show the title and window controls.
Thank you. I appreciate your space and how you keep us interested souls informed in your very informative and entertaining way. Thank you.
I discovered how customizable GNOME Shell really is when I developed an extension for it. (EasyEffects Preset Selector - It lets you select EasyEffects presets (sound profiles in a sense) directly from your statusbar). It really lets you do whatever you want to do. You can change the behavior and look of GNOME Shell completely. Extensions are not add-ons which are their own separate applications, instead when they are activated they become a part of GNOME Shell itself and it gives a great opportunity and power to it.
Imma stick to KDE
I just love how customizable it is and how the KDE Plasma developers haven't hidden anything from jump when they started.
I agree, Gnome is great and very customizable. I've been a happy gnome user for years now.
i agree, it is customizable, but because its a open system, not because the devs want you to customize it, not like KDE that makes it basically a feature to customize anything you can out of the box
Right? in 8:45 he even mentions how that is not the point. Someone has to find a way to bypass it.
@@enkiimuto1041 he does, indeed
Providing an extension API makes it customizable. If the devs didn't want you to customize it, it wouldn't have an API. It's nice that KDE provides options out of the box, but those options work less reliably in my experience than GNOME extensions and I'd personally rather add the options I want rather than work around options I don't want.
@@RustyLoaf the devs actions show that they dont you you to modify it, lib awaita is there to prove it, and each experience is different, in my experience gnome is far less stable than kde, i run gnome on my laptop and kde on my desktop, both highly modified, and gnome gives me way more headache than KDE
@@RustyLoaf Literally every update breaks every extension. You better keep updating your extension with every GNOME shell update, because they will make sure your 3.36 extension won't work in 3.38
I never understood why people says gnome is non-customizable. With literally 2 or 3 extensions you can make it look just as you want
I love Gnome cause if you want you can custumize a lot, but also, if you love the simple and basic experience like me, you don't have to deal with all the options always being there
I'm a novice and have fully customised Gnome with Sweet theme, Candy Icons and then I used an app from the Flatpak repo to theme the adwaita apps which aren't touched by normal themes. It's a little more in depth than theming KDE but it's not hard and the results can look very different from plasma due to Gnomes UI and extensions.
Another great thing about Gnome is that you can code your own extension!
If you need a feature that doesn't exist on the default Gnome shell (or existing extensions), you can code it to your own liking. Of course, there might be some limitations but I've seen very advanced extensions proving that you can do almost anything 😁
I was missing a feature that I'm using on my android phone (Bedtime Mode), a couple of JavaScript lines later, BOOM, now I have it also on my desktop. Nice! 😉
It's all just JS? How does the GNOME shell run these things, is it running Node or a skinned down browser under the hood?
I appreciate you for doing this man.
KDE will always be king when it comes to customising.Nice to know gnome can be customised but still very limited for my needs.🙂
TBH, limited customisation is enough for an average user. KDE provides too much at this point, the UI looks cluttered and confusing.
"Needs"
copium
@@ArunG273 Exactly, I don't get why most people need the customization in KDE. I'm happy that it exists and it lives alongside Gnome, but I want the distro to choose those for me. I want the design of every part of the computer to work in harmony. This doesn't work when you don't have any consistency. I like how much GNOME pushes their Human Interface Guidelines for their GUI apps.
@@ArunG273 "Too much customization" how does that even work? If the UI looks cluttered then remove the clutter. The beauty of customization is that it can look however you want it to.
Also fuck gnome for doing away with the menu bar which is objectively superior to a hamburger menu. Convergence design is a plague.
@@dracostyx And pointing to a list of gnome tweaks that break with every update and saying "look how many options" instead of having those options built in like they used to be isn't copium? lol
I always found that adding more add-ons to gnome ended up using a lot of memory, where using kde had a low memory footprint and lots of options.
I loved using gnome. However many extensions i used, broke when there was a new version of gnome released.
I hope to switch back someday
I’m using Debian 11 with GNOME. I compiled the Pop Shell and it’s been great. I can also switch it out and get something more windows like. I’ve tried KDE in the past and while it’s nice I like the ease of use and extensions that GNOME has
7:35 i completely agree, those super flash effects are one of the main the reasons why i fell in love with linux , despite the fact that they arent usefull in the day to day, too flashy.
GNOME is a good DE depending on the device you are intended to utilize, which is mainly for desktop PCs with large screens and touchscreens. On laptops is definitely a no way to go because of the limited screen size and the need for a global menu (as an example), so you have to gain every pixel of that corner. That's why I usually recommend people to utilize KDE or cinnamon for a laptop as DE and GNOME exclusively for larger and/or touchscreens!
9:09 that term originates from car culture. A ricer is someone who makes purely cosmetic mods to their car that don't improve performance. It is a negative term, as ricers usually have consumer cars like Honda Civics, and will try to make them "look cool" with big spoilers, lowered suspension, and loud exhausts.
Just installed Manjaro Gnome. Perfectly timed video. Thanks Nick!!
great video, just wanted to mention a great extension called "just perfection".
it's super useful if you want to tweak some of gnome shell's attributes like configuring the top bar, the dock and animations or just removing them, and a lot more. it also has a very active dev, he has his own yt channel and posts updates covering the latest changes. you should check it out!
Been forcing myself to use stock gnome (except blur my shell, it should be the default look).
It is really nice and totally functional. I flip between Gnome and KDE and both do the same thing very nicely and are ideally suited for the users that enjoy each.
This ability to choose is a good thing. Also, no need to only have two options. I’d love to see Mate get more love to keep that Input Scheme alive.
wdym input scheme. Also blur my shell causes some lag on old laptops, that is (probably) the reason it is not included by default. I know it lags because I use a old laptop
@@vardhanpatil5222 as in the gnome 2 style of desktop interface. Mate is a continuation of Gnome 2
honestly if mate didnt look so outdated id consider it, but to me its an eyesore that i dont want to look at when i use my laptop, and i dont want others to see me using
@@lootria if it was just Ubuntu 10.10 I would use it.
You guys might want to use Ubuntu MATE, or at least download and apply Yaru-MATE theme, it doesn't look as awful as default MATE experience tbh
On Gnome I just use two extensions: dash to dock and just perfect. That's it, I really don't think I need anything else other than that and the tweak tool for font size.
No System Tray? I you use Shutter, OBS, Smart Screen Recorder etc. It is so much better to control the software without opening the main window. Plus, you don't get to record your own main software window. It is a very basic OS interaction that was removed for some reason.
There is an extension called colortint that allows you to apply an overlay to your screen. Using a low opacity grey tint, you can reduce the contrast of everything, which can be good if you usually use lower contrast theme and think libadwaita theme has too much contrast.
Honestly I don't even know if KDE or sway even can do this on wayland.
Gnome with the pop-os shell extension is just *chef's kiss*
To be fair, some heavily customized distros (Pop and Ubuntu for example) aren't always going to work well when given other extensions as they will conflict with that is set up - I noticed this in Pop with Cosmic unless I turned Cosmic off). Ubuntu isn't as bad, but you may need to go into dconf editor to adjust some things. Going for a vanilla Gnome (Debian, Arch, Fedora, etc.) will be easier to adjust without a preconfig having a fit.
I came to love the default gnome experience. I do add some extensions such as app indicators but nothing like dash2panel or dash2dock. It can take some time to get used to since I assume most people grew up on something like Windows but now I wish my work laptop (which runs windows) had some things such as the hot corner
I removed dash to dock after I found hot edge. This extension seems like the last piece of the puzzle to make Gnome perfect.
No its just perfection 😤
I use hot edge and just perfection both.
My fav linux youtuber showing some love to my fav linux DE i love this video
5:42 So you mean I'll get the activities dock from Gnome, but always visible on the bottom?
I love gnome too, as manjaro gnome user I really enjoy this desktop environment
5:37 You'll get the activities dock from GNOME but always visible on the button. You'll get the activities dock from GNOME but always visible on the button. His name was Robert Paulson.
You'll get the activities dock from GNOME, but always visible on the bottom.
Editing snafu
Gnome needs a botanical based theme.
Garden Gnome
The PopOS extensions are indeed in the AUR, and I’m using them myself
everybody's gangsta until gnome update breaks the extensions. The Dash to Dock extension literally took more than a month to integrate on gnome 46
dash to panel is all I needed pretty much
What a coincidence, I just saw someone on reddit post a pict of libadwaita being themed.
Nice!
I’ve started using Linux from a week ago. I started using Fedora 36 beta after watching one of your videos, and let me just say that it feels really nice to be exploring a new OS which is this customizable . Although I have figured most things and love it, I just hate not having a minimize button in GNOME. Any ideas how to get one?
Good stuff
The only issue with these extensions is they need to be updated regularly or they fall out of compatibility pretty quick. I wish they settle on a base code structure for the extension SDK.
5:38-5:49. Was it the same audio twice or was my phone just being weird?
"Stay awhile, and listen"
I see what you did there !
5:40 Is there an echo in your room?
The term "ricing" comes from the racing community, where Asian racers would frequently customize their cars.
Thank you that helped
That's cool, but just like you said, I wouldn't recommend using it on anything other than Debian based distributions. On Arch almost every time there was a bigger update for gnome some extensions broke, and I had to wait days, or even a week before they were updated. I just jumped the ship later and use KDE. Couldn't be happier.
Gnome devs would prefer you to don't customize it. Whenever I ask for help with problems on Gnome the first thing I'm told to do is to disable all the extensions
I saw someone on reddit modifying libadwaita css already
Layan theme is the only good looking white theme I know. And Vince actively fixes any issues.
Although I'm a user who came back after switching to KDE just a week ago ( Fedora KDE updating via Discover GUI broke it ), It's not Customizable. If Installing Extensions app & gnome-tweaks is fair, then installing UX patcher in Windows, power toys, Rain meter should also be fair.
Even though they are GNOME apps, they are not there by default on any dists. Just my opinion.
Most usable DE out there imho. Only caveat with extensions is that they might break for a bit in new Gnome releases if you're rolling.
GNOME is customizable, but I think other desktop environments are better customizable. Do you need an extra app for changing themes in KDE Plasma for example?
I think that Gnome is great out of the box w some tweaks. As far as a simple minimal desktop it does exactly that and my favorite non tiling wm. I use bspwm, and i3 on my desktop but will always use gnome on my more modern laptops. I never really understood the hate.
awesome work.
I really like your channel. decent. focused.
I can't imagine how labour intensive it is but if you can manage to put some time into it I would love to hear about courses how to develop/customize gnome and linux in general.
I've been searching for this but I didn't find anything other then linux foundation ones and they are focused on the internals.
Well, the statement „gnome is not customizable“ is not true in general, but it is „politically correct“ towards the developers intentions ;) they just don’t want you to! But of course you always can do practically anything you want…
The reason we don't have any decent alternative solution to the system tray (app indicators) is that no viable alternative really exists. The System Tray is intended to provide quick access to interactive user-applications that are running but do not have open windows. Some programs exist *exclusively* in the system tray. We don't have an alternative because it's already the most simple way you could possibly handle it. Removing them breaks some apps, and renders features of others unusable. Putting them in a sub menu adds additional unnecessary clicks and gets in the way. Where they're at and what they do is already the ideal situation for what they're meant to do.
9:15 my theory is that it comes from the car scene, ricing in the car scene is not that unpopular
Hmm maybe
what is the desert wallpaper? so nice
I like KDE’s minimalism
Yes, KDE the perfect minimal DE and Gnome the most customizable DE x)
Vanilla Gnome is what my clients get to use while I use about 20 extensions on my own machine.
Did you hear about nobara project? It is packages/tools to fix and prepare Fedora Linux for gaming.
What's that wallpaper at 1:40? It looks gorgeous :O
I feel like extensions, as they break all the time shouldn't really count vs Kde which just has options out of the box.
This is especially true since they've indicated they want less and less power with extensions.
The de itself has far less customization. to be honest the main thing I dislike is I never want open apps to combine and want the individual app window text to always be visible to save time.
Also, I've never gotten this mentality of removing useful features for """clean""" aesthetics. Do people just sit staring at their desktops or do they use their computers to do work? Always pisses me off when software I'm using goes that route. """clean""" design is my enemy. If I became king I'd just ban moves like that.
I'd support you to become a king. Hate removing useful features.
What's the other file manager in 9:51?
I grew to like Gnome over the past Year or so since i began my Linux journey but when they realy kick customizastion with 42 or Cosmic forever my backup plan is called Cinnamon
thanks very informative
What wallpaper are you using in the blue my shell chapter?
Last night I installed Window Buttons in my Manjaro MATE instance. (Yes Manjaro I know it and Arch are not the same piss off.) My always-visible bottom panel just has my app launcher, window list and window buttons, while my always-hidden top panel has show desktop, workspace switcher, notification area, window title and clock. Can't imagine replicating that in GNOME Shell…
best diablo easteregg i've ever seen
9:36
".Heaven"
I see you are a man of culture as well. : )
Every DE is customizable if you know how to do it, Pantheon and gnome just makes it harder than usual.
Is there any chance there will be an official equivalent to gnome tweaks in the future ?
I don't know whether it's still the issue or not but previously I was kinda bothered by the idea that even basic things might require installing something called Gnome *Tweaks*.
I get the idea of opinionated DE but treating "add/remove apps from startup" as a tweak and not as a basic functionality is pretty weird.
There's a few things in GNOME Tweaks that have no business being there, startup applications being chief among them. They've been slowly moving stuff over from GNOME Tweaks into the settings application, so I have a feeling eventually startup applications will make their way over, but in the meantime it's super stupid. 🙃
I'm curious how much longer the GNOME Tweak Tool is going to be around for. It seems like they're steadily moving the more commonly used settings from the tweak tool into GNOME Control Center, and the tweak tool isn't getting many updates. Honestly I wish they'd just move most of the remaining tweak tool settings over into the control center and drop the tweak tool entirely, especially now that theming is going away. I think most of the tweak settings would feel right at home in the system settings with a little bit of a UX refresh.
I used to use 20.40 LTS
I was never able to "Blur" my Dock or Panel or even Windows.
And I wanted Rounded corners for all windows (which is available in Windows 11) but there was no way to do it in Gnome.
Sorry, where I can find this wallpaper?
Can we move the top nav bar now?
To be honest, if your argument is that Gnome isn’t customizable, comparing it to windows on that front doesn’t say a whole lot.
I was about to laugh you out of the youtube linux sphere, but that Deckard Caine line saved you. Well played
thank you
Except you can't use it on a 1 year old budget 15" laptop with a resolution of 1336x768, extension settings and app settings get cut off below screen, not allowing you to see all settings or to apply them..
dash to dock and dash to panel will not let me hide both at the same time without locking the bottom dock down before the top panel has been exposed... :(
I think the statement "GNOME is not configurable" is about the fact that you need to do an extra step and use extensions to perform some tweaks that, perhaps, could be done via GNOME Settings instead extensions. I don't mind using extensions, but I cannot argue that some setting should be on GNOME settings instead an extension.
all this still works on Gnome 42?
So what I get is: GNOME is customizable, as long as you're willing to look for and install a dozen or so of extensions, and are OK with them breaking after updates to the DE, so not really that stable.
The fact that you need to install a 3rd party app just to install extensions is really troublesome imo.
Where I live in California "Ricers" are hot rodded Honda Civics, Subaru WRX, or Mitsubishi EVO's. How that term got applied to the Gnome desktop I have no idea...