# GNOME Desktop {#chap-gnome}

GNOME provides a simple, yet full-featured desktop environment with a focus on productivity. Its Mutter compositor supports both Wayland and X server, and the GNOME Shell user interface is fully customizable by extensions.

## Enabling GNOME {#sec-gnome-enable}

All of the core apps, optional apps, games, and core developer tools from GNOME are available.

To enable the GNOME desktop use:

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

::: {.note}
While it is not strictly necessary to use GDM as the display manager with GNOME, it is recommended, as some features such as screen lock [might not work](#sec-gnome-faq-can-i-use-lightdm-with-gnome) without it.
:::

The default applications used in NixOS are very minimal, inspired by the defaults used in [gnome-build-meta](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta/blob/48.0/elements/core/meta-gnome-core-apps.bst).

### GNOME without the apps {#sec-gnome-without-the-apps}

If you’d like to only use the GNOME desktop and not the apps, you can disable them with:

```nix
{ services.gnome.core-apps.enable = false; }
```

and none of them will be installed.

If you’d only like to omit a subset of the core utilities, you can use
[](#opt-environment.gnome.excludePackages).
Note that this mechanism can only exclude core utilities, games and core developer tools.

### Disabling GNOME services {#sec-gnome-disabling-services}

It is also possible to disable many of the [core services](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/b8ec4fd2a4edc4e30d02ba7b1a2cc1358f3db1d5/nixos/modules/services/x11/desktop-managers/gnome.nix#L329-L348). For example, if you do not need indexing files, you can disable TinySPARQL with:

```nix
{
  services.gnome.localsearch.enable = false;
  services.gnome.tinysparql.enable = false;
}
```

Note, however, that doing so is not supported and might break some applications. Notably, GNOME Music cannot work without TinySPARQL.

### GNOME games {#sec-gnome-games}

You can install all of the GNOME games with:

```nix
{ services.gnome.games.enable = true; }
```

### GNOME core developer tools {#sec-gnome-core-developer-tools}

You can install GNOME core developer tools with:

```nix
{ services.gnome.core-developer-tools.enable = true; }
```

## Enabling GNOME Flashback {#sec-gnome-enable-flashback}

GNOME Flashback provides a desktop environment based on the classic GNOME 2 architecture. You can enable the default GNOME Flashback session, which uses the Metacity window manager, with:

```nix
{ services.desktopManager.gnome.flashback.enableMetacity = true; }
```

It is also possible to create custom sessions that replace Metacity with a different window manager using [](#opt-services.desktopManager.gnome.flashback.customSessions).

The following example uses `xmonad` window manager:

```nix
{
  services.desktopManager.gnome.flashback.customSessions = [
    {
      wmName = "xmonad";
      wmLabel = "XMonad";
      wmCommand = "${pkgs.haskellPackages.xmonad}/bin/xmonad";
      enableGnomePanel = false;
    }
  ];
}
```

## Icons and GTK Themes {#sec-gnome-icons-and-gtk-themes}

Icon themes and GTK themes don’t require any special option to install in NixOS.

You can add them to [](#opt-environment.systemPackages) and switch to them with GNOME Tweaks.
If you’d like to do this manually in dconf, change the values of the following keys:

```
/org/gnome/desktop/interface/gtk-theme
/org/gnome/desktop/interface/icon-theme
```