Hey, Phil here. You might be wondering why this looks like a desktop, or even looks eerily like ryOS from the great Ryo Lu! Well, designers can build anything these days. And I wanted to give you a taste of my favorite desktop environment, GNOME.

I grew up using Linux from when I was a young age, and I remember the transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3. In that transition, GNOME went from simply being a window manager to articulating a vision for how people should interact with computers. I felt a much more coherent one than the Frankensteined mix of macOS and NeXTSTEP that became OS X, and the slow-to-change, then perpetual following of Windows.

GNOME 3 didn't have an ever-present dock at the bottom of the screen, but it did have ever-present notifications at the top of the screen, in the center, right where your clock should be. It had a beautiful activities view, where you could just hit the Command or Windows key, and it would immediately expose all of the windows you had open, bring up the dock, and auto-select the search bar. Meaning that whenever you wanted to do anything in GNOME, whether it was open an app or browse a notification, you could just hit one button, type, and go.

I still have to do a key combination on my Mac to achieve something kind of similar, and Spotlight isn't anywhere near as good. I need to use third-party software to get close. Importantly, though it pissed off a lot of people in Linux, GNOME 3's opinionated approach to the desktop created the most tranquil and calm computing experience I've seen to date. It is underappreciated!

I've been a Mac user mostly for the hardware, and now that the new Framework laptop is out, I'm tempted to ditch Apple for good. In fact, it was that and poking around on the GNOME forums as a teenager and contributing UX help here and there that led me to want to be a designer in the first place. So call it a cliché, but you're already here and you've read my rant. Stick around and check out what makes this thing so awesome.