GNOME

GNOME (/(ɡ)noʊm/) is a desktop environment known for its focus on being simple, intuitive, and easy to use. It is made by The GNOME Project and is composed entirely of free and open-source software. Its Mutter compositor supports both Wayland and X server, and the GNOME Shell user interface is customizable by extensions.

This article is an extension of the documentation in the NixOS manual.

GNOME is available as a module and can be enabled with services.xserver.desktopManager.

Installation

To use GNOME, add this to your configuration.nix:

/etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{
  services.xserver.enable = true;
  services.xserver.displayManager.gdm.enable = true;
  services.xserver.desktopManager.gnome.enable = true;
}

Excluding GNOME Applications

To exclude certain applications that are installed by default with GNOME edit configuration.nix as follows:

/etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{
  environment.gnome.excludePackages = (with pkgs; [
    # for packages that are pkgs.***
    gnome-tour
    gnome-connections
  ]) ++ (with pkgs.gnome; [
    # for packages that are pkgs.gnome.*
    epiphany # web browser
    geary # email reader
    evince # document viewer
  ]);
}

Configuration

Managing Extensions

GNOME extensions are managed and configured by the program "Extensions" that comes with GNOME.

Extensions can be installed with Nix, however they aren't enabled by default. To enable them the "Extensions" program can be used.

/etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs.gnomeExtensions; [
    blur-my-shell
    pop-shell
    # ...
  ];
}

Extension can be enabled and configured in your system configuration. Look at the following example.

/etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{
  programs.dconf = {
    enable = true;
    profiles.user.databases = [
      {
        lockAll = true; # prevents overriding
        settings = {
          "org/gnome/shell" = {
            disable-user-extensions = false; # enables user extensions (disabled by default)
            enabled-extensions = [
              # Put UUIDs of extensions that you want to enable here.
              # If the extension you want to enable is packaged in nixpkgs,
              # you can easily get its UUID by accessing its extensionUuid
              # field (look at the following example).
              pkgs.gnomeExtensions.blur-my-shell.extensionUuid  
              # Alternatively, you can manually pass UUID as a string.  
              "blur-my-shell@aunetx"
              # ...
            ];
          };

          # Configure individual extensions
          "org/gnome/shell/extensions/blur-my-shell" = {
            brightness = 0.75;
            noise-amount = 0;
          };
        };
      }
    ];
  };
}

Same result can be achieved for specific user only by using Home Manager module.

~/.config/home-manager/home.nix

{
  dconf = {
    enable = true;
    settings = {
      "org/gnome/shell" = {
        disable-user-extensions = false;
        enabled-extensions = [
          pkgs.gnomeExtensions.blur-my-shell.extensionUuid  
          "blur-my-shell@aunetx"
          # ...
        ];
      };

      "org/gnome/shell/extensions/blur-my-shell" = {
        brightness = 0.75;
        noise-amount = 0;
      };
    };
  };
}

To learn about settings that can be configured with dconf either look into "dconf-editor" program (provided by gnome.dconf-editor package) or type dconf watch / in the terminal and change settings from the GUI and see which options are responsible for that component/element.

Dark mode

Change default color theme for all GTK4 applications to dark using Home Manager.

~/.config/home-manager/home.nix

{
  dconf = {
    enable = true;
    settings."org/gnome/desktop/interface".color-scheme = "prefer-dark";
  };
}

Tips and tricks

To run GNOME programs outside of GNOME

GNOME platform-based applications are largely self-contained, but they still depend, for one reason or another, on some global configuration. The gnome.nix module sets all the necessary options for you but if you are running customized set-up, you might need to replicate that yourself.

For instance, if you see the following error:

dconf-WARNING **: failed to commit changes to dconf: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name ca.desrt.dconf was not provided by any .service files

you should enable dconf module:

{
  programs.dconf.enable = true;
}

Many applications rely heavily on having an icon theme available, GNOME’s Adwaita is a good choice but most recent icon themes should work as well.

{
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [ gnome.adwaita-icon-theme ];
}

Systray Icons

To get systray icons, install the related GNOME shell extension

{
  environment.systemPackages = [ pkgs.gnomeExtensions.appindicator ];
}

And ensure gnome-settings-daemon udev rules are enabled:

{
  services.udev.packages = [ pkgs.gnome.gnome-settings-daemon ];
}

To run old applications

Some old applications use GConf service to store configuration. This has been deprecated for many years but some applications were abandoned before they managed to upgrade to a newer dconf system. If you are running such application and getting an error like:

GLib.GException: Failed to contact configuration server; the most common cause is a missing or misconfigured D-Bus session bus daemon. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information

you need to add gnome2.GConf to the list of dbus packages in your configuration.nix:

{
  services.dbus.packages = with pkgs; [ gnome2.GConf ];
}

After applying the update restart your desktop session to refresh the user-specific dbus session.

Dynamic triple buffering

Warning: Dynamic triple buffering is a still developing feature that is not merged into GNOME's mutter. Some bugs and unexpected behavior can occur. Use at your own risk!

Big merge request against Mutter improves the performance of the window manager by a lot (and is already used by Ubuntu). Not merged into nixpkgs due to philosophy of nixpkgs, but users are free to add this overlay to get it too.

If you wish to try this patch for yourself, add the following to your NixOS configuration:

/etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{
  nixpkgs.overlays = [
    # GNOME 46: triple-buffering-v4-46
    (final: prev: {
      gnome = prev.gnome.overrideScope (gnomeFinal: gnomePrev: {
        mutter = gnomePrev.mutter.overrideAttrs (old: {
          src = pkgs.fetchFromGitLab  {
            domain = "gitlab.gnome.org";
            owner = "vanvugt";
            repo = "mutter";
            rev = "triple-buffering-v4-46";
            hash = "sha256-fkPjB/5DPBX06t7yj0Rb3UEuu5b9mu3aS+jhH18+lpI=";
          };
        });
      });
    })
  ];
}

You might need to disable aliases to make it work:

  nixpkgs.config.allowAliases = false;

Profiling (with sysprof)

Install sysprof as a system package (it won't work properly if installed against users). Then enable the associated service with

  services.sysprof.enable = true;

Automatic screen rotation

  hardware.sensor.iio.enable = true;

Troubleshoots

Change user's profile picture

Currently there is no way to change the user's profile picture using Gnome Control Center (see this issue) and currently there is no plan to support it officially in NixOS. However, you can modify it by copying the profile picture that you want to the path /home/$USER/.face as a workaround, i.e.

$ mv /path/to/image.jpg ~/.face

Automatic login

If you have enabled auto login (with GNOME) with something like

grep autoLogin /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

services.xserver.displayManager.autoLogin.enable = true;
services.xserver.displayManager.autoLogin.user = "account";

than add the following (as a workaround for a current (2023) problem)

# nano /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

  systemd.services."getty@tty1".enable = false;
  systemd.services."autovt@tty1".enable = false;

Also see

GNOME/Calendar