Claudio Ramirez: Notes from my Unity -> Gnome3 migration

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, dropped a bombshell: Ubuntu drops Unity 8 and –by extension– also the Mir graphical server. Starting from the 18.04 release, Ubuntu will use Gnome 3 as the default Desktop environment.

Sadly, the desktop environment installed by default and used by millions of Ubuntu users –Unity 7– has no path forward now. Unity 7 runs on X.org graphical stack, while the Linux world –including Ubuntu now– is slowly but surely moving to Wayland. It’s clear that Unity has its detractors, and it’s true that the first releases (6 years ago!) were limited and buggy. However, today, Unity 7 is a beautiful and functional desktop environment. I happily use it at home and at work.

Dead code (soon-to-be) is dead code, so even as a happy user I don’t see the interest in staying with Unity. I prefer to make the jump now instead of being two years with a desktop on life support. Among other environments, I have been a full time user of CDE, Window Maker, Gnome 1.*, KDE 2.*, Java Desktop System, OpenSolaris Desktop, LXDE and XFCE. I’ll survive :).

The plan of this post is to collect (as post-it) changes I felt I needed to make to a Ubuntu Gnome 3 setup to make it work for me. I made the jump 1 week before the release of 17.04, so I’ll stick with 17.04 and skip the 16.10 instructions (in short: you’ll need to install gnome-shell-extension-dashtodock from an external source instead of the Ubuntu repos).

The easiest way to make the jump is, of course, installing the Ubuntu Gnome distribution. If you’re upgrading, you can of course do it manually. In case you want to remove Unity and install Gnome:
$ sudo apt-get remove --purge ubuntu-desktop lightdm && sudo apt-get install ubuntu-gnome-desktop && apt-get remove --purge $(dpkg -l |grep -i unity |awk '{print $2}') && sudo apt-get autoremove -y

Changes so far:

1. Install Gnome 3 and extensions to customize the Gnome 3 experience:
   $ sudo apt-get install -y gnome-tweak-tool gnome-shell-extension-top-icons-plus gnome-shell-extension-dashtodock gnome-shell-extension-better-volume gnome-shell-extension-hide-activities gnome-shell-extension-move-clock gnome-shell-extension-refreshwifi gnome-shell-extension-disconnect-wifiI also liked the Pixel Saver extension a lot, however it feels unnatural on a 3 screen setup like I use at work. In case you want to use it:
   $ sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-extension-pixelsaver

2. Start gnome-tweak-tool and enable “Better volume indicator” (scroll wheel to change volume), “Dash to dock” (a more Unity-like Dock, configurable), “Disconnect wifi” (allow disconnection of network without setting Wifi to off), “Hide activities button” (Remove “Activites” on the topleft), “Move clock” (move clock from middle to the right), “Refresh Wifi connections” (auto refresh wifi list) and “Topicons plus” (put non-Gnome icons like Dropbox and pidgin on the top menu). On the Windows tab, I enabled the Maximise and Minise Titlebar Buttons.
3. Make the window top bars smaller if you wish. Just create ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css with these lines:
   /* From: http://blog.samalik.com/make-your-gnome-title-bar-smaller-fedora-24-update/ */
window.ssd headerbar.titlebar {
padding-top: 4px;
padding-bottom: 4px;
min-height: 0;
}
window.ssd headerbar.titlebar button.titlebutton {
padding: 0px;
min-height: 0;
min-width: 0;
}

That’s it (so far ).

Thx to @sil, @adsamalik and Jonathan Carter.