Hey guys, the GUI and RHEL8 is powered by GNOME3 and it's a great interface when you're making use of Linux as a workstation. So let me take you in a bit of a tour. So, I've already logged in over here and you can see that we have activities at the top left when you click on activities you can search for programs to run, you can click on all applications at the bottom left over here and you can see where your applications are, you can see that it's categorized as well between frequently used applications and then we also have all applications. 

On the left-hand side of a year you can also see that we have a bit of a dock and what you could do is that you could drag the programs that you most frequently utilize onto the dock for easy access. 

Let me show you how to do that. So if you fancy that you're going to be using Pidgin as the instant messenger program you could right-click say add to favorites and there we go. And you can reorder the programs as you see fit. Rhythm box, yeah I like listening to music, let's go and add that to the favorites as well and to the top you go and of course a mail program, a mail client.

Now we have evolution over years a mail client so let's go right click that and we're going to add that to the favorites and we're going to also drag that all the way to the very top over here because email is very important to me. So again guys instead of you having to type to search for a particular program like files over here. 

I mean no one wants to do that, especially if you're using a program very frequently. Add it to your favorites, add it to the dock on the left hand side. Now something else that I really appreciate using Gnome3 is the usage of the notifications. So you want to be notified of important events, you want to be notified about emails and messages that you have.

At the top over here, where you see the date and the time, let's go ahead and click on that and you can see that I don't have any notifications at the moment also this is where you would go to access your calendar, so you could add events, you could modify events and so forth. To the top right we go you can see some information about networking so that icon over there is what you would use to typically connect to another network, especially wireless networks. 

You can see that I'm currently logged in as the student user, if you're listening to music when I make it a bit louder increase the volume you could use the sound option over here and then little things, like if you click on the user itself you could logout. I'm going to show you how to lock your as well in a moment, you could change your account settings like changing your password that's something important to be mindful of.

Of course when you're going to be stepping away for a bit of a bio break or you're going to be leaving your computer you don't necessarily want to log out and then when you return log back in again.

So, what we typically do is lock our screens and you can click on that lock over there, done.

Now how do you get back in, you could click, and you can move your mouse, you can hit any key, it will now reveal the unlock screen and I'm going to type in my password and there you go. Nice and easy.

Further to that if I needed to shutdown or restart the system, this is where you would click on the power of button over here. And now you're presented with options, do you want to restart or do you want to power of the machine I'm just going to go ahead and hit cancel.

So one thing I really like about the Gnome interface is the use of different workspaces. And this is especially useful if you don't have multiple monitors. So you're looking at my desktop over here.

You can see all this clutter, I've got all kinds of programs that are running right now and you want a better way to organize your work, your workspace.

And this is where the workspaces feature come in. So to access your workspaces go to activities on the top left hand side, click on one of your programs, click on one of the windows, click and drag it across so let's go and click on evolution and we're going to drag it all the way across over here to a blank workspace.

There's always going to be one blank workspace and we can now go and drop it.

And you'll see that as soon as we occupied one blank workspace, another blank workspace is automatically going to be created. And what I could do now is that I could go to that workspace just by clicking on it and you can see here's my email I can now go and work on my email. Now to return to the first workspace, all that I going to now do is go to activities all the way to the right-hand side again and there we go. We'd also have shortcut keys that you can make use of that would expedite the changing of different workspaces.

More about that a bit later on. So let's go create one more workspace. So over here we have the terminal that I'm using right now, I'm going to drag it all the way to a blank workspace. And you'll see that another workspace is automatically created and now I can go and sort of work on my terminal, I could go and do a bit of work on code, execute some commands, I want to go to another workspace right now, I could make use of the keyboard shortcut, ctrl alt and then the up arrow and have now gone up one workspace. 

Let's go and do that again ctrl alt up one arrow and I am back to the initial workspace where I was originally working. And right now, my first workspace, the one that I initially had when I logged in, is less cluttered. And of course if I needed to take my music and move it elsewhere well you know exactly how to do that right now. So again top left hand corner, go to activities, choose the program, drag it all the way to the right hand side and drop it. Let go of it over there and you can see right now I've got three workspaces that are currently in use.

I have a fourth one that is vacant, it's waiting for me to go and add programs to it.

Now one of the best ways to learn Linux is to use it as your workstation to do everyday tasks and the GUI allows you to accomplish just that.

So, my recommendation, get your hands dirty with the Graphical User Interface.