RIP GNOME 3 Customisation

Jun 13, 20123 min read

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Where would we be without GNOME Tweak Tool and would you even use GNOME 3 without it? MY guess is that a lot of you guys probably wouldn't be using GNOME 3 because it was painful without it I can tell you.

Extensions to the rescue I hear you say, no, sorry, they break in every new version of GNOME 3, just like GNOME Shell themes, just like GTK3 themes. Remember the good old days when you could drag and drop GTK themes, icon themes into the theme window? Oh, those where the days when Linux desktops were more customisable than Windows or OS X by default.

Now days we cannot change anything easy without our hero the GNOME Tweak Tool. It's our saviour of easy customisation that fights for the users and defends us from those Windows and OS X users, who laugh at us because we cannot change our font sizes, colours, cursors and themes easier than those evil proprietary OS's.

Published: Jun 13, 2012

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marcusklaasSep 7, 2012

I agree with you wholeheartedly. I am currently using the Ubuntu 12.10 beta and every extensions is broken once more -.- Tweak tool functionality should definitely be included by default. Why they don't, is beyond me.

TangeledWebJul 18, 2012

"Gnome 3. Any color you like ... as long as it's Adwaita."

I suppose, in hindsight, the choice of the default theme title wasn't at all coincidental, and should have given us an early clue about the Gnome project mindset.

Ah, well. Life goes on. I have re-discovered E17, and am enjoying it. Never could quite learn to love KDE.

bimsebasseJun 15, 2012

Gnome Shell + customization = Cinnamon

You should give it a whirl half-left, it's not perfect yet by any means and it inherits a great many of the drawbacks in Gnome 3 and its shell, but unlike Gnome shell the developers actually strive to make it customizable, it's on the right course.

I like Gnome Shell but customization through extensions just isn't the way to go forwards, the more extensions you add, the more unstable and glitchy the shell becomes. Also really quite ridiculous that to move the clock you add a move clock extension, a lot of these things should be built-in features and Gnome devs show no interest in making them.

half-leftJul 4, 2012

Nah, KDE4 gave me my desktop back,it's not a smart phone any more.

RolandixorJun 15, 2012

Man you hit the spot.

davcsJun 14, 2012

gnome must die!, long live to elementary

LaGaDeskJun 14, 2012

Well spoken... but there is more than GNOME out there!
I'm missing good old GNOME2 and Mate is not the future because
of all these GTK3 applications. Xfce let me miss also the
functionality of GNOME2. A while I thought it was going
down the drain with Linux desktop. But there is a really
good alternative: KDE... It's highest configurable and looks
simply beautiful after a little customization.

half-leftJun 14, 2012

Yep, KDE have done a great job in giving their users their customisation back. 4.8 is great. My desktop Settings design is still in there.

lassekongo83Jun 14, 2012

If the Gnome devs just could stop hiding behind their brick wall. But still, GTK3 is the way to go. I can't even be bothered working with GTK2, Windows, QT etc after using CSS to style the interface. Windows and OS X also break after each major update, breaking 3rd party themes etc. I'm hoping the extension website will get an auto-update feature.

It shouldn't be too hard to create a small graphical tool in python to change more settings in gnome-shell. Just look at cinnamon-settings. I'm surprised no one has tried to port it to gnome-shell yet. If that's not possible I'll probably say cinnamon or xfce is the future. Changing font/font-size in the gnome-shell.css file could also be applied somehow, if theme designers just could to follow 1 standard setting it as a default global value somewhere in the beginning of the css file.

Inoki-SakaeruJan 15, 2013

Well said. XFCE indeed is the future of all desktops. It's the only compact, highly customizable with a few, simple clicks and most of all, minimalistic.

I always found KDE way too complicated and buggy. Way too many settings and for what? I only need a few, essential ones.

Dunno why, perhaps it's fate, but KDE was never really meant for me. It so much resembles Windows it's ridiculous and that's the most irritating, disgusting part of it.

half-leftJun 14, 2012

Not going to happen, they made GNOME 3 for themselves not the users and they took all the fun out of GNOME, taking even more out of it now.

satya164Jun 15, 2012

aleciveJul 12, 2012

As you said, in my opinion GNOME is no longer listening to the community, and this is not only a big flaw, but also a hazardous double-edged sword. I tenderly remember the early days (we're talking about 6 years ago) in which I approached to linux in general and ubuntu in particular. There was this big great friend called GNOME2 in which magic appears and with which you can change your desktop's look and feel with simple and easy steps. And I tenderly remember when I started to customize by myself and to create my own themes: it was fun, and easy, and exciting to some extent.
Now creating themes is becoming a full-time job: you have to deal with a lot of problems, to stay always up-to-date with the latest versions, to work more on fixes rather than on ideas. And this is hurting both to the community and to GNOME itself, since they're trying to brand their software, to have a well-defined personality and to be instantly recognized by everyone (the same way ubuntu is doing). And this is cool, but as long as you keep the process of changing thing easy and affordable. Otherwise, people will simply move away like you. We're not that stupid.

Btw, I'm still stuck with GNOME (I find KDE very garish

), even though I'm very disappointed.