GNOME is good, actually

While I’m normally a KDE user, I do keep close tabs on various other desktop environments, and install and set them up every now and then to see how they’re fairing, what improvements they’ve made, and ultimately, if my preference for KDE is still warranted. This usually means setting up a nice OpenBSD installation for Xfce, Fedora for GNOME, and less often others for some of the more niche desktop environments. Since GNOME 50 was just released, guess who’s time in the round is up?

Since everybody’s already made up their mind about their preferred desktop eons ago, with upsides and downsides debated far past their expiration date, I’m not particularly interested in reviewing desktop environments or Linux distributions. However, after asking around on Fedi, it seemed there was quite a bit of interest in an article detailing how I set up GNOME, what changes I make to the defaults, which extensions I use, what tweaks I apply, and so on.

Of course, everything described in this article is highly personal, and I’m not arguing that this is the optimal way to tweak GNOME, that the extensions I use are the best ones, or that any visual modifications I make are better than whatever defaults GNOME uses. No, my goal with this article is twofold: one, to highlight that GNOME is a lot more configurable, extensible, and malleable than common wisdom on the internet would have you believe. It’s not KDE or one of those cobbled-together tiling Wayland desktops, but it’s definitely not as rigid as you might think. And two, that GNOME is good, actually.

Tools of the trade

The first thing I do is install a few crucial tools that make it easier to modify and tweak GNOME. I really dislike lists in articles, but I will begrudgingly use one here:

• GNOME Tweaks: this tool gives you easy access to some hidden settings, most notably to easily switch themes.
• Extension Manager: the easiest way to find, install, update, and manage GNOME extensions. With this application, you won’t need to use the browser for extensions at all.
• dconf Editor: a tool to fiddle with even more obscure GNOME settings.
• Add Water: an application with an odd name, designed entirely to easily install and update the Firefox GNOME Theme, which transforms Firefox (or LibreWolf, in my case) into something that much more closely resembles a GNOME/libadwaita application.

After installing all of these tools, the actual tweaking can commence.

Visual tweaks

I didn’t use to like GNOME’s Adwaita visual style, but over the years, it started growing on me to the point where I don’t actively dislike it anymore. With the arrival of libadwaita, it has also become effectively impossible to theme modern GNOME applications, so even if you do change to something else, many of your applications won’t follow along. If consistency is something you care about, you’ll stick to Adwaita, but that leaves one problem unresolved: applications that still use GTK3. These applications will follow a much older version of Adwaita, making them stand out like eyesores among all the modern GTK4 stuff.

Luckily, since GTK3 applications are still properly themable, this is easily fixed: just install the adw-gtk3 theme, either by hand, or through your distribution’s repositories. To enable it, first install the user themes extension through Extension Manager, and then enable the theme in GNOME Tweaks for “Legacy Applications”. Any potential GTK3 applications you still use will now integrate nicely with modern libadwaita applications.

The one part of GNOME I really do deeply dislike is its icon theme. I can’t quite explain why I dislike this icon set so much, but it runs deep, so one of the very first things I do is replace the default GNOME icon set with my personal favourite, Qogir. This is a popular icon set, so it’s usually available in your distribution’s repositories, but I always install it from its GitHub page. Changing GNOME’s icon set is as simple as selecting it in GNOME Tweaks. You can’t get much more personal taste than an icon set, and there are dozens of amazing sets to choose from in the Linux world. Changing them out and trying out new ones is stupidly easy, and it’s definitely worth looking at a few that might be more pleasing to you than GNOME’s (or KDE’s) default.

Lastly, I open Add Water and enable the amazing GNOME theme for LibreWolf. Add Water basically makes this as easy as flipping a switch, so there’s no need to copy any files into your LibreWolf profile or whatever. The application also provides a few more small tweaks to fiddle with, like enabling standard tab widths so tabs don’t grow and shrink as you close and open tabs, moving the bookmarks bar below the tab bar, and many more.

Extensions

Since the release of GNOME 3 in 2011, extensions have been the most capable way to modify GNOME’s look, behaviour, and feature set. As far as I can tell, while the extension framework is an official part of the GNOME Shell, the extensions themselves are all third-party and not part of a vanilla GNOME installation. By now, there are over 2800 listed extensions, but that number includes abandoned extensions so it’s hard to determine the actual number of currently-maintained ones. Whatever the actual number is, there’s bound to be things in there you’re going to want to use.

Here are the extensions I have installed. Let’s just start at the top and work our way down. I guess I’m forced to do another list.

• AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support: for reasons that are clearly beyond my limited understanding of the world, GNOME does not support AppIndicators, KStatusNotifierItems, and legacy system tray icons. This must-have extensions fixes this inexplicable omission.
• ArcMenu: a very configurable application/Start menu kind of thing. Has tons of options and preconfigured layouts, and is an absolute must for me as I’m a basic guy whose second GUI was Windows 95.
• Blur my Shell: as the name implies, adds a nice configurable blur effect to various parts of the GNOME shell. An entirely aesthetic thing that adds little in functionality.

• Dash to Dock: adds a dock to GNOME. An absolute 100% must for me. I used Mac OS X back when it didn’t suck (10.2-10.6), and my love for the dock metaphor is one of the few things from that time that stuck.
• Date Menu Formatter: GNOME is remarkably limited and rigid when it comes to configuring locale-related settings, as it forces you to adopt every individual aspect of a locale (contrary to KDE, which has a very detailed settings screen for every aspect of locale). Even though I’m Dutch and live in Sweden, I always use all my software in US English, which in the case of GNOME also means adopting things like US currency, date formats, and so on. This little extension allows me to manually format the date in the top bar to be actually readable.
• Gtk4 Desktop Icons NG (DING): GNOME does not support desktop icons. I think this is a bizarre design decision. This extension brings desktop icons back, with a nice collection of settings to adapt them to your needs.

• Junk Notification Cleaner: whenever an application receives a notification, GNOME puts them in its notification center in the top clock menu. Sadly, this is also the only place where you can dismiss them. With this extension, you can set it so that the notifications of an application are cleared when you focus its window, close it, or both. I set it to both.
• Just Perfection: this extension provides you with a massive set of toggles and switches to change tons of little aspects of the GNOME Shell. I use to hide a slew of buttons and toggles from the clock and top-right menu on the top panel that I never use, as well as to move the notification OSD to the top-right.
• Lock Keys: ads a little Caps Lock icon in the top panel when Caps Lock is engaged. Very useful, especially when your keyboard lacks indicator LEDs.
• User Themes: allows you to set GNOME Shell themes from your home directory.
• Weather or Not: one of the many extensions that adds the weather to the top bar. We have two toddlers and live in the Arctic – we absolutely must have frictionless instant access to the current outside temperature.
• Places Status Indicator: puts a menu in the top bar with some frequently used locations.

There are countless more extensions to choose from, and you’re definitely going to find things you never even thought could be useful.

Miscellaneous tweaks

There’s a few other things I modify. In GNOME Tweaks, I make it so that double-clicking a window’s titlebar minimises it while right-clicking it lowers it; two features I picked up during my years as a BeOS user that I absolutely refuse to give up. I configure the dock from Dash to Dock so that it always remains on top and never hides itself, no matter the circumstances. In Settings, I disable virtual desktops entirely (I don’t like virtual desktops), and I make sure tap-to-click is disabled (if I’m on a laptop).

GNOME is good, actually

After making all of these changes, I feel quite comfortable using GNOME, at least on my laptop. It’s a nice, coherent experience, and offers what is probably the most polished graphical user interface you can find on Linux, even if it isn’t the most full-featured. The third-party application ecosystem, through modern libadwaita applications, is also quite healthy, moreso than what you find on KDE. To get there, however, I need to make a lot of changes to fix, undo, or work around some of the more… Peculiar defaults in GNOME, primarily through extensions.

And I think this is a problem.

The GNOME extension ecosystem is lively and active, but it also highlights a potential shortcoming of GNOME. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone use GNOME without extensions, and it’s honestly not hard to see why. Things like desktop icons and a system tray are pretty basic features of any modern desktop, and it’s not surprising that people seek them out, regardless of any grand design vision the GNOME team may have. GNOME developers can and should do whatever they want and what they think is right, but perhaps some of the most popular extensions should become official parts of GNOME if they are as popular as they seem.

For now, GNOME extensions kind of feel like the little block holding up the entire stack in that xkcd comic. Is it really wise to leave this linchpin to third parties, especially considering extensions run code on your machine? Sure, they make GNOME a lot more configurable and extensible than prevailing sentiments would have you believe, but perhaps not in the most convenient and safest way. Also, several of them break every time GNOME does a new release. Bummer.

In the end, though, GNOME is a product of its developers, and they alone get to decide how they want it to behave, what it looks like, and which features it will and won’t have. With how popular GNOME is, you have to be a real dishonest person to argue that what they have built isn’t a damn fine desktop environment, even if it makes some design decisions some of us find baffling. It won’t replace KDE as my desktop of choice, but having two excellent desktops like these that far outshine whatever “AI” and ad-ridden crap the proprietary vendors have to offer is truly an embarrassment of riches for the open source desktop world.