How to make GNOME Shell look like Unity

Pablo Aparicio

2 minutes

GNOME Shell with Unity image

Since last week, any post that is signed by Mark Shuttleworth is becoming big news. A few days ago I informed the community that, as of Ubuntu 18.04, the operating system developed by Canonical would use the GNOME graphical environment again. Shortly after, he gave another piece of news that may be more worrying: Canonical will use Ubuntu GNOME as the default desktop and will focus on its development. Well, for those who prefer to continue using the current environment, in this post we will teach you how to do that GNOME Shell has an image like Unity.

It was podcaster Stuart Langridge who posted a series of extensions With which we will make GNOME Shell continue to look like Unity and the result can be seen in the header image. Here are the steps to follow to make a change that will make much more sense from April 2018, when Canonical releases Ubuntu 18.04 with the much-mentioned return to GNOME.

Making GNOME Shell look like Unity

Logically, if we do not install the full graphical environment, something that seems to be possible beyond April 2018 although unofficially, we will not be able to enjoy a 100% Unity experience. For example, him Unity Dash will not be available.

As we can read in Langridge's post, what we have to do is:

  1. Let's go to the extensions web from GNOME Shell.
  2. From this website we install:
  3. To get the same image as the one we see at the top of this post, we will have to install "GNOME Tweak Tool" (from Ubuntu Software).
  4. We open the application that we installed in step 3 and choose the theme "Adwaita" (in dark mode).
  5. We will also choose in "GNOME Tweak Tool" the icon pack "Ubuntu-mono-dark".
  6. To change the buttons of the windows on the left, we will do it by installing dconf editor, navigating to org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences and changing the values ​​that we see by:
close, minimize, maximize:

And that would be "all," in quotes. There are many changes that we could make and, as I mentioned above, I think the best way to enjoy the experience closest to the current Unity will be to install the entire graphical environment as we can do right now when installing MATE, Plasma or Budgie in Ubuntu.

Although I honestly hope I don't have to do any of this when Ubuntu 18.04 is official ...