A couple of months ago we dedicated an entry to this section, in which we show you as are the desktops of Ubunlog publishers and how they are customized. In the previous post, specifically, we showed you the desktop with Xubuntu 14.04 LTS by Sergio Agut. In this post I will show you how to customize my desktop with Ubuntu GNOME 15.04.
As you well know, GNOME has always been one of the most used desktop environments, due to its great customization capabilities and minimalism. However, in GNOME 3 quite radical changes were implemented that completely changed the aesthetics of the environment. In this post, through the customization I will teach you, you can see how to have a GNOME a little more similar to before.
Table of Contents
My beginnings in Ubuntu
To talk about my beginnings in Linux (Ubuntu), we have to go back about 5 years ago. I was in 4th grade of ESO and my passion for computer science had started recently, although I had always been curious. All of a sudden, my desktop computer, for whatever reason, became inaccessible. So I commented to a friend who was also beginning to take an interest in this world and he advised me that instead of reinstalling Windows, I should install a new Operating System that I had tried. this was Ubuntu 10.10 with GNOME.
I remember that one of the things that surprised me the most, as Sergio Agut commented in the previous post in this section, was that the drivers are installed automatically along with the installation of the Operating System. Then, once it was installed, I was completely amazed. That was totally new to me. I didn’t even know it was a terminal, but I knew I was going to get along with it that which I had just installed. In a couple of days, I already had the fully custom desktop and was already starting to fight with the Terminal. That it ran so fast on my PC that it’s nothing out of this world, fascinated me.
Over the next few years I learned the basics of Linux and how to “move” through the terminal. I also remember getting addicted to trying distros and graphical environments I had never tried. I remember using it Lubuntu, Kubuntu and, many more out of Ubuntu like gnewsense, One hundred OS, Fedora, Linux Mint i Open Suse.
The customization I use
When I installed Ubuntu GNOME 15.04 I was completely amazed at the changes that GNOME 3 had. The last time I had used GNOME was at 10.10 so I had to get used to the changes and make a couple of adjustments so that everything worked a little more similar to what I remembered.
Enabling buttons to maximize and minimize
The first thing that surprised me was that in GNOME 3, by default, the buttons to maximize and minimize do not appear. Although this is not a problem because, to re-enable the maximize and minimize buttons, we must find the application Retouching tools which comes installed by default, go to the tab Windows and enable the “Maximize” and “Minimize” buttons, as shown in the following image.
Adding the Applications and Places tabs
Then, I added the GNOME Casicas tabs which appear at the top left, as are the tabs of applications i places. To do this, we must return to the Retouching Tools application, but in this case you must access the tab extensions. “Extensions” are a series of programs for GNOME that we can install over the Internet, specifically using Firefox, in this website. Once we are on the Extensions tab within the Retouch Tools, we need to enable the buttons Applications Menu i Places Status Indicator as you can also see in the following image.
installing Dock
As you may have noticed in the image above, there is another button activated, called Dash to dock. This extension is not installed by default, so if you haven’t installed it, it won’t appear. To install it just go to the link about the extensions I talked about in the previous paragraph, look for the “Dash to dock” extension and install it. Remember that this extension system only supports Firefox, and you must have the Firefox plug-in Gnome Shell Integration activated. So when you enter this website, pay close attention to the window that will appear in which you will be asked if you want to activate the pluggin.
Once you have installed Dash to dock, the dock will appear on your desktop, which is exactly the same as what you see when you access activities in the upper left corner. Right-clicking the Dock to dock icon will give you the option to configure Dash to dock. This is where you can change the look of the dock. If you want the dock like mine, you have to remove all the opacity from it, so that it is 100% transparent.
Changing window theme and icons
If you want to have the same theme for windows and icons as me, below I will tell you how to install them. The theme of windows is called Numix and we can download here. To install it, we need to unzip the file you downloaded and copy the unzipped folder (which usually has the same name as the same theme) into the directory / Usr / share / themes. To do this, we open a terminal and place ourselves in the directory where we have the theme folder to install. Then to move the folder we run:
its mv foldername / usr / share / themes
Then, if we go back to the Retouching Tools, on the Appearance tab, we can select the topic in the drop-down for GTK.
As for the icons, the theme I use is Numix circle, And we can install it through your repository with:
its add-apt-repository ppa: numix / ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install numix-icon-theme-circle
To activate the theme, we must go again to the Retouching Tools, and the Appearance tab select Numix Circle in the drop-down referring to the icons.
As a curiosity, Numix is a free project dedicated to designing icons and themes for different platforms, in your GitHub page we can find all his projects, including the ones we mentioned in this post.
The programs I use the most
One of the programs I use most often is Amarok, A wonderful music player that lets you see the lyrics and tablatures of the song that is playing. To install it, you can simply do it with:
sudo apt-get install amarok
Another program I use often in my day to day life as a student is NetBeans for programming in Java and the text editor vim to program in C and other languages like Ada. You can install Vim using:
sudo apt-get install vim
Installing NetBeans is a bit more complex. You need to download the Java Development Kit (JDK) and NetBeans. But rest assured that Oracle allows you to download both in the same package. For this we go to this link, We accept the License Terms that appear at the top of the whole, and click on the Linux x64 (64-bit) link. Once downloaded, we go through the terminal to the directory where we downloaded the package and run:
sudo sh name of the package.sh
Then we will get a graphical installation wizard with which we can install JDK and NetBenas comfortably.
Anyway, I hope you had a good time reading the post and had another idea to customize your desktop with if you have Ubuntu GNOME.
