GNOME

GNOME (/(ɡ)noʊm/) is a desktop environment that aims to be simple and easy to use. It is designed by The GNOME Project and is composed entirely of free and open-source software. GNOME is a part of the GNU Project.

Install GNOME

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

services.xserver.enable = true;
services.xserver.displayManager.gdm.enable = true;
services.xserver.desktopManager.gnome3.enable = true;

Applications fails to start because dconf/gconf is missing

If you are 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

when running GNOME applications you need to add gconf to the list of dbus packages in your configuration.nix. In GNOME 3 GConf was replaced by dconf. For simplicity you can just add both:

services.dbus.packages = with pkgs; [ gnome3.dconf gnome2.GConf ];

After applying the update one also has restart their desktop session to refresh the user-specific dbus session.