Fun in Ubuntu Land

So I decided to play with the newly released Ubuntu 14.04 "Trusty Tahr", and having installed it alongside my trusty CrunchBang, I proceeded to tweak that universally loved and adored (or insert other adjectives of your choice) Unity desktop a bit. It's changed a little bit since I last saw it in 12.04...

My Ubuntu Desktop

Update: while the tweaks and changes described in this article had no adverse effect on my Ubuntu install, continued use of CCSM and Unity Tweak Tool (i.e. more adventurous customisation on my part) have led to the occasional big crash...


This isn't a review as such - more a 'stuff I messed with after installing' - so for an actual review of Ubuntu 14.04 I'll point you to Ars Technica.

To be honest, most of the changes I made while tweaking the desktop were just superficial aesthetic ones - the Unity desktop really isn't designed for any customisation beyond this, and even to achieve the changes I did make, I had to install third-party 'tweak' apps. Super hackable CrunchBang this is not.

The first thing I did was, after a while, to turn off the searching of online sources in the dash - this is done just in the regular system settings, and gets rid of the random online results which to me seemed to be fairly irrelevant to whatever I typed. It also (I presume) stops all my dash searches from going out into the big scary internet.

Secondly, I changed the theme from Ambience, the default dark Ubuntu theme, to Radiance, which is light. This made sense to me because most of the UI is inherently light, and the dark titlebars and toolbars seemed a bit odd to me, so I made them light. Speaking of titlebars, 14.04 allows you to move the menus from the top panel into the titlebars themselves - closer to a "normal" menu implementation, but still space saving. The menus are hidden in the actual titlebar until you mouse over them, and they don't get in the way of window dragging - but they do get in the way of double-click maximising, so I left them in the top panel.

I noticed that when searching in the dash, nothing is highlighted until it is moused over, so I presumed that one had to actually click results to activate them. It turns out that the first result is activated when enter is pressed, so that actually makes launching apps nice and quick - so much so that I have the launcher panel on the left set to autohide, and rarely use it directly.

I used the Unity Tweak Tool from the Software Center to set up some pretty nifty window snapping - not only to the edges, but also to each corner. This means that dragging a window to the screen top maximises it, to the left and right edges semi-maximises it to fill the corresponding half of the screen, and dragging to each corner makes the window fill that quarter of the screen. These settings are quite customisable.

Since I was already using the flashy and heavy (though not slow) Unity desktop, I decided that some flashy window animations couldn't hurt. I used CompizConfig Settings Manager to tweak these, and despite the fact that CCSM has the potential to break the desktop, messing with only the animations settings doesn't seem to hurt.

Apart from that, I changed the browser from Firefox to Chrome, and that's about it. Oh yeah, and with Unity's new borderless windows, a green-on-translucent-black terminal looks pretty nice :)