I’ve dabbled with Linux over the years, first with Ubuntu in the early 2010s, then Elementary OS when that dropped, and a few years ago I really enjoyed how customizable the gui was with Xubuntu. I was able to make it look just like WIndows 2000 which was really cool.
Which current distro has the best GUI, in your opinion? I find modern Ubuntu to feel a little basic and cheap. I guess I don’t really like modern Gnome. I’m currently using Windows 10 LTSC which is probably the best possible version of Windows, but I’d jump to linux if I could find a distro with a gui that feels at least as polished and feature rich as Windows 10 LTSC.
The distro which comes with the best customization in my opinion is Pop!_OS. Simple, clean, straightforward and comes with the POP SHELL which basically simulates a tiling window manager
I believe they plan to switch “soon™” to a new Rust-based desktop environment they are developing.
I’m actually quite excited about this, even though I don’t use Pop!_OS, since I’m not really a fan of either Gtk nor Qt, and I believe Rust has a lot of potential to make a clean, modern and stable framework for OS development that isn’t over-complicated by layers and layers of abstraction & technical debt.
A new major and modern desktop enveroinment would finally bring some fresh air to the whole *Nix desktop world!
And the good news is: Pop Shell can be installed on other GNOME based desktops. I’m currently rockin’ it on Manjaro GNOME.
I never cared for Pop!_OS or system76 for that matter. Thought they were just doing to Ubuntu what Ubuntu did to Debian 20 years ago. A theme and some different default settings and getting credit for standing on the shoulders of giants, what’s the big deal?
But then my wife wasn’t feeling KDE, she hates Gnome … so I installed Pop!_OS on it and she gets it. Just the little tweaks they did made all the difference, and she is good to go. Plug in a printer, it downloads the driver and works. They made short tutorial videos for everything, less than 2 minutes; she watched them and now she is a tiling pro with the keyboard shortcuts.
So in this very specific instance, the Pop!_OS polish, the refinements and the tutorial videos and even having a theme that wasn’t all dark mode (which hurts her eyes), was all the difference in the world. I’m pretty impressed and I don’t have to do perform system maintenance for her; its the closest to a macOS install that I’ve seen.
This is what Gnome should have been.