In fact, most usersregardless of experiencecan get up to speed with GNOME with next to no effort.

Here, well be discussing the latest release of GNOME3.26.

To get this vanilla GNOME, weve opted to demonstrate with theFedora 27 workstation.

And so, without further ado, lets talk GNOME.

Activities overview

One of the most important pieces to the GNOME puzzle is the Activities overview.

Activities is where you access utility launchers, minimized applications, search, and virtual desktops.

If you look on the left edge of the Activities window, youll notice a bar of icons.

This bar is called The Dash.

The Dash contains what is called your Favoriteslaunchers for applications you frequently use.

Click any one of those icons to launch its associated utility.

utility overview

But what if you want to add a favorite to the Dash?

Simple, you should probably bring up the Applications overview.

To reach this tool, press the grid icon at the bottom of the Dash.

The GNOME Search tool is very powerful.

To illustrate this, Ive created a file (using theLibreOfficeoffice suite) called lifehacker.odt.

choose the entry youre looking for and it will open.

initiate the Dash and pop in online in the search bar and then hit the entry for Online Accounts.

In the resulting window (below), click Google and then walk through the account add wizard.

At this point, your Google account will start syncing to your GNOME desktop.

system menus

One last area to get acquainted with here is system menus and buttons.

For example, open Evolution.

In the top bar, next to the Applications button, a new drop-down menu will appear.

press that to gain access to the supported entries for the app.

Not every tool makes use of this menu system, and some make more use of it than others.

Once you open an software, you might notice a decisive lack of buttons in the titlebar.

And now you know your way around GNOME.

Its an incredibly easy desktop to use, for any key in of user.

To learn more about this desktop environment, verify to check out theofficial GNOME documentation.