Crowdfunding now!
View Purchasing OptionsProject update 5 of 6
Because the MNT Reform Next aims to be a daily driver that doesn’t get in the way too much and lets you focus on getting some work or play done, I’m going to look at GNOME, one of the two major "big" open source desktop environments, the other one being KDE. We’ll look at KDE in a future installment. You can also write us to tell us what you’d like to see demoed on the Reform Next—perhaps we can make it work.
In the past, we focused on very lightweight desktop environments, especially our main one built on Sway, Waybar, Wofi and other components. This was for multiple reasons, especially Sway’s low memory and GPU footprint for the resource-constrained i.MX-based processor modules we started out with on the classic MNT Reform and Pocket Reform. We’ll also keep this environment in our system images as the main choice for keyboard-focused minimalists.
GNOME sometimes gets criticized for being too opinionated and restricting the configuration options you have when using it. While it’s true that completely re-theming window and UI styles is deprecated (although it is possible with CSS and other hacks), I was pleasantly surprised that the user experience itself is extremely customizable using the built-in Extensions system, Settings and Gnome Tweaks. For example, I immediately missed keyboard shortcuts for fullscreening an app (Super+F
) or resizing windows with Super
and dragging with the right mouse button (so I don’t have to hunt for the edges and corners of windows). But it was easy to set these (and more) up—without digging in any config files. In addition to being able to customize icon themes and fonts, since GNOME 47 you can also choose an accent color for the whole UI—nice for adjusting the desktop to your current mood.
I also installed the gnome-shell-extension-manager
package, which is a GUI for conveniently searching for and installing extensions:
For example, there’s "Dash to Dock," which provides a macOS-like Dock, or "Dash to Panel", which gives you a modern taskbar with all the bells and whistles. If you miss the system tray (like me, who wants to see the KeepassXC password manager icon there), there’s "AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support". There’s even "Desktop Icons NG" to bring back wholesome old-school icon clutter on your desktop!
For this update, I shot a 3-minute video of multitasking with various applications and games running on GNOME 47 on the MNT Reform Next prototype. It’s completely raw and unedited to give you a good estimation of what kind of performance to expect from the Rockchip RK3588 SoC with 16 GB of RAM. You can see me running the following things in the video:
I hope this demo gave you a good first impression of "big" desktop usage on the MNT Reform Next. See you next time!