GNOME

In March of 2010, I finally moved from my venerable XFCE4 + Xfwm setup to a glitzy GNOME + Compiz desktop. The experiment is largely successful thus far.

Disabling gnome-shell

gnome-shell, from what I can tell, is launched as part of the session definition file (/usr/share/xsessions/gnome.desktop). You can copy this to gnome-fallback.session in $XDG_CONFIG_DIR/gnome-session/sessions and run gnome-session out of .xsession without arguments, or (probably better) provide the --session argument to gnome-session and keep the modified file somewhere personal.

Screenlets

• The terminology is apparently "Widget Engine"?
• Anyway, I like screenlets.org...for now. gDesklets?
  • It's said to be a dead project...
  • I like the WaterMark screenlet

Compiz

• Get compiz running via compiz --replace.
  • Add this to GNOME's startup applications to make it your default window manager
  • Better than this command in your .xinitrc/.xsession is changing the "Window Manager" element of GNOME's Session-RequiredElements registry key.
• Enable Alt+Tab window switching via the "Application Switcher" plugin
  • I don't like the zooming effect; scale it to 0x
• Enable Super+Tab folded window switching via the "Shift Switcher" plugin
  • Has some conflicts with "Application Switcher" by default; I disable all but "Next Window", "Previous Window" and "Initiate"
  • Be sure the "Text" rendering plugin is enabled to get window titles
• Enable desktop backgrounds with the "Wallpaper" plugin
  • You'll want disable Nautilus's attempt to manage the background: use gconf-editor and unset apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop
  • Note that this will disable your desktop icons.
• Enable Ctrl+Alt+arrow virtual desktop switching via the "Rotate Cube" plugin
• "Trailfocus" handles general transparency
  • Set "Window to Start Fading" to 1
  • Change opacity levels of unfocused and focused windows to 60 and 95, respectively
• Cube: I use
  • transparency on rotate (requires that Compiz draw wallpaper)
  • Spherical deformation on rotate
  • Inside-the-cube view

Other Plugins

• I like the "animations" plugin
• The "Window Titles" plugin is useful in conjunction with SSH forwarding
• Go ahead and use "Bicubic Filtering" if you've got the horsepower

Keybindings

• "General Options" -> "Key Bindings":
  • Toggle vertical maximize: Ctrl+Up
  • Toggle horizontal maximize: Ctrl+Right
  • Disable everything else save "Close Window" (Alt+F4), "Window Menu" (Alt+space)
• "Commands"
  • /usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator: Alt+F1
  • /usr/bin/x-www-browser: Alt+F3

Nautilus

• Video thumbnailing requires totem-video-thumbnailer, part of the totem package
  • You'll also likely need raise the limit on thumbnailable media files; I thumbnail any local file < 1G

GNOME Panel

• Users of taskbars (the "Window Selector" applet) will want to look into Compiz's "Window Preview" plugin
• Transparency can be had regardless of the GTK theme if using compiz's "Opacity, Brightness and Saturation" plugin
  • Add an opacity rule (I use a value of 50): "(class=Gnome-panel) & !(type=PopupMenu | Dialog)"
• I use avant-window-navigator now

GNOME Control Center

• Ensure hinting and subpixel ordering is optimized via a trip to the Lagom LCD Test page
• Don't set wallpaper here if Compiz is handling it

See Also

• Xorg page