A lot has changed in Ubuntu Gnome in the past 2 years. With the release of Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 a few months ago we take the chance to do a follow-up of our 2014 post and summarize the configuration we usually apply to a fresh installation of Ubuntu Gnome 16.04.

To consider for backup before installation

Just for completeness: you might want to backup some things beside private documents, music, videos etc, e.g.:

~/.bashrc contains path variables, changes to bash behaviour etc.
~/.bash_aliases contains aliases, other additions to bashrc.
~/.conkyrc contains configuration for conky (if you use conky).
~/.bash_profile “The personal initialization file, executed for login shells ” (see bash man page).
~/bin/ may contain scripts and links to executables (as ~/bin is usually added to PATH).
~/.gnupg/: contains PGP keys (used e.g. via Thunderbird enigmail).
~/.local/share/rhythmbox if you use Rhythmbox, this folder contains your local playlists.
~/.mozilla/: contains Firefox configuration, history etc.
~/.purple/: contains purple based messaging configuration (e.g. pidgin), including possibly used OTR keys.
~/.ssh/ contains ssh private and public keys, authorized keys for ssh login and ssh fingerprints seen in the past.
~/.thunderbird/ contains Thunderbird configuration and mails.
GTK bookmarks: contains GTK based bookmarks (used e.g. by Nautilus, Nemo, Thunar, PCManFM etc). With Ubuntu 14.04 an newer they are located at ~/.config/gtk-3.0/bookmarks.
/etc/fstab contains automatic mounted partitions and folders.

Gnome Shell

In case you are new to Gnome Shell we strongly recommend reading a short intro, as this will probably save you lots of time later: Gnome shell cheat sheet one and two (they are not always updated to the newest…). Some examples for of useful features of Gnome Shell that might not be intuitive if you were using other UIs before:

The main menu of Gnome Shell style windows is hidden in the black area right next to the “Activities” button (top left) and gets shown only on click.
The message tray (lists messages from apps like Skype, Pidgin, Thunderbird etc.) is hidden as well and accessible via the shortcut Super+M.
The suspend button is hidden in the top right user menu under the power button and becomes visible on pressing Alt.
You can restart Gnome Shell with executing “r” in the Alt+F2 box without closing your applications etc. Useful to developers as well as to “soft reset” stuff in case of window freezes or other bugs. This is btw. equivalent to calling gnome-shell –replace directly (in case you do that from a tty without X server you need to specify the display – which will usually be 0 as you will typically only have one X server running: gnome-shell –replace -d :0).
Executing “lg” in Alt+F2 brings up the Gnome Shell log, which is useful in case of problems with Gnome Shell and its extensions.

Gnome Shell search providers

Type “search” in the activities view to bring up the search configuration. You might want to disable and/or reorder some choices here.
Type “privacy” in the activities view to bring up the privacy settings, which might be worthwhile to review as well.

Gnome Shell tweak tool

The tweak tool provides access to a number of tuning options. It should come preinstalled already, but in case it is not there yet:

sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool

For example:

Changing the system font size (we usually change it from 11 to 10).
Changing the cursor theme (we usually change it to the dmz cursor theme:
```
 sudo apt-get install dmz-cursor-theme
```
Change workspace behavior, so that workspaces don’t only affect the primary screen but all screens.
Change how modal dialogs are attached to their parent windows.
Window selection model, if you’re used to mouse-over window selection (as I’m personally). Here’s the difference between mouseover and sloppy in case you wonder. I personally don’t like windows to be raised to the front automatically after the mouse pointer standing still for a certain time in it. This can be changed by turning off “automatically raise windows” in tweak tool or “auto-raise” in org–>gnome–>desktop–>wm–>preferences, or by adapting “auto-raise-delay” next to it. And in case you want windows to immediately get focus as you hover the mouse over them deselect “focus-change-on-pointer-rest” in org–>gnome–>shell–>overrides.

Gnome Shell extensions

We typically install some Gnome Shell Extensions, including the following ones:

AlternateTab: don’t group windows of same application in Alt+Tab.
Dash to Dock: easy way to set maximum dock icon size + disabling “require pressure to show dock” to achieve nearly-normal dock behaviour.
gTile: a window tiling utility – supports aligning windows to tiles spanning your screen (e.g. 2×2, 3×2, 4×4).
Native windows placement: more intuitive placing of windows in the activities window.
Notification Alerts: makes the user’s menu blink on new messages in the message tray.
Recent Items: adds list of recently used items to the top bar.
Search recently used files: integrated into the Gnome Shell activities view – this seems to work no longer as it’s not compatible with Gnome Shell >= 3.14. We’re still investigating how to best include recently used files in the activities search (frankly neither the Gnome Shell search providers “files” and “documents” nor other extensions seem to do this trick).
TopIcons: although there exist more sophisticated versions this one shows Skype/Pidgin icon in top bar.
WindowOverlay Icons: shows application symbol above windows in the activities overview. With centred and enlarged icons (~150px) helps pinpointing windows fast in our opinion.

Window button layout: put buttons left

We usually change the button layout so that the buttons are arranged on the left side (like with MAC systems) – as this saves you mouse distance. For Gnome Shell the needed tool is dconf-editor:

sudo apt-get install dconf-editor

In dconf-editor changes have to be applied to “button-layout” in to org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences in Ubuntu 16.04. Our usual button layout is “close,minimize,maximize”, all on the left side.

More look and feel: themes, icons, …

If you feel the need for changing the look and feel of your Gnome Shell even more, you can add different themes, icons sets, etc to Gnome Shell (all in the tweak tool). We sometimes use these:

Super Flat Remix Gnome Shell theme – “super lightweight”. If you use conky you might want to adapt the opacity to fit this theme (its at about 15%).
Elementary Icon set – the old one from 2013, “super clean”.
Depending on your needs you might also consider installing a dock shell extension (e.g. Dash to Dock, which features a bit more options for configuration than e.g. SimpleDock).
If you are instead up for a good looking and nicely working MAC oriented theme, consider the Gnome Shell/GTK+ theme OS X 10.11 El Capitan.

Some further configurations

Custom window shortcuts

Window specific shortcuts are mostly in dconf-editor in org–>gnome–>desktop–>wm–>keybindings. Additionally to adding assignments you might need to remove some to get your configuration working. An example of what we often use:

maximize: []
maximize-horizontally: [‘<Super>Page_Up’]
minimize: [‘<Super>Down’]
switch-to-workspace-up: [‘<Control><Alt>Up’]
toggle-maximized: [<Super>’Up’]
unmaximize: []

Custom command shortcuts

User specific commands can be defined in “Keyboard–>Shortcuts”. We typically create a shortcut to open a file manager at the data partition, such as Ctrl+Alt+E for nemo /media/data or nautilus /data/media, depending on your file manager.

Show all startup applications

Since Ubuntu 12.04 some startup applications are hidden, therefore not shown in gnome-session-properties. To show those applications use:

sudo sed -i "s/NoDisplay=true/NoDisplay=false/g"; /etc/xdg/autostart/*.desktop

Special Keyboard Buttons with MS Ergonomic Keyboard

If you happen to use a MS Ergonomic Keyboard (e.g. the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000) some buttons might not work for you by default. It might be helpful to change the following:

For multimedia forward/backward: in Keyboard->Shortcuts->Sound and Multimedia: assign “Forward” and “Backward” to the previous/next track actions.
To use the zoom slider for scrolling add the following in etc/udev/hwdb.d/61-keyboard-local.hwdb
```
keyboard:usb:v045Ep00DB*
 KEYBOARD_KEY_0c022d=pageup
 KEYBOARD_KEY_0c022e=pagedown
```
Then recreate the hwdb:
```
sudo udevadm hwdb --update
```
Those might require to replug the keyboard or reboot.

Tooltip background color

The default tooltip background color is black – which is horrible for programs using dark fonts (like Eclipse). To change the tooltip background color install gnome-color-chooser and in Specific–>Tooltips change Foreground to black and Background to pale yellow, as Nick Andrik suggested here.

Application Configuration

File browser

Though Nautilus file browser has become better with the latest releases some might still not be convinced by it. One of the disadvantages it brings for power users is the missing tree view feature in the main area (the right one, not the left tree or places view). Options for replacing Nautilus include: Nemo, Thunar, PCManFM, Dolphin, and many more.
In case you stick with Nautilus:
- If you dislike the recursive-search-as-you-type feature: you can disable it (and enable the old interactive search) by enabling org.gnome.nautilus.preferences.enable-interactive-search with the dconf-editor.
- Most file browsers support the creation of files from templates in the context menu (right click -> “new document” -> select one of your templates). The location you need to put template files that should show up in this menu is ~/Templates/. If you notice that with Nautilus the “new documents” entry in the context menu is missing entirely, try creating an empty file in ~/Templates/, which should make it visible again.

Bash

We usually adapt Bash behavior to immediately log commands of all opened terminals.

Terminal emulation

Usually we also replace the default terminal emulation if it’s not very powerful (split screens, all hotkeys configurable etc.). Our current choice for Ubuntu is terminator, which features split screens and a detailed hotkey configuration – but of course there are many others out there with similar features.

Firefox

Besides enabling the “do not track me” flags in browsers other measures might also help reducing the traceability. In Firefox–>Properties–>Privacy (actual names might differ slightly, but the meaning is clear):

Enable “Firefox will record custom history”: discard third party cookies when Firefox closes
Enable “Clear history on Firefox close”: check “empty cache”, “discard cookies” and “discard active logins”

Firefox addons

Some Firefox addons we find useful, therefore tend to install straight away as well:

Adblock Plus
BetterPrivacy
DownThemAll!
FoxyProxy Standard
Ghostery
GNotifier (especially cool to embed notifications of e.g. Firefox based chat clients to system notifications)
NoScript
Perspectives
Shodan (only makes sense if you need that type of information)
SSleuth
SSL Version Control
Youtube Auto Replay
Youtube All Html 5

Thunderbird

We usually install some Thunderbird addons directly via Thunderbird->Tools->Addons. Addons we find useful are:

Lightning as calendar
Enigmail to encrypt mails using PGP
Sorting search results after date instead of relevance
Provider for Google calendar if a Google calendar will be used

Disabling unnecessary notifications

With Gnome Shell, notifications tend to get persisted in the message tray. This is a good thing, as we won’t miss e.g. that we’ve been pinged in a chat, even if we were not at the PC when the ping happened. But we also don’t want unnecessary messages to show up there, as those tend to be distracting. Usually, we disable the following notifications (and alike in other programs):

Notifications from contacts coming online/offline in Pidgin, Skype, etc.
Notifications of music players playing the next track (e.g. Rhythmbox: disabling the “Notifications” plugin).
Notifications from any all-time-running terminal, like Yakuake or Guake.

Finally: root partition backup

Discussions about backups are omnipresent, so we won’t discuss the problem again here. In case there is no automatic backup having a “clean” – but properly configured system right after installation might be a good time to do a backup. That might save you lots of time in case users mess up the system. An option for quick backups is using fsarchiver from a live media (the installation media might come in handy). For a quick start with fsarchiver we’d recommend their quick start page. We assume that your installation was not split across multiple partitions in our example. The fsarchiver-command for backing up a partition on /dev/sda1 to /media/data/backups/datetime.fsa using 2 cores (-j2), splitting archives to multiple files of 4000MB (-s4000), standard compression (-z3) and verbose output (-v) from a live media would be:

sudo fsarchiver savefs -j2 -s4000 -z3 -v /media/data/backups/datetime.fsa /dev/sda1

The fsarchiver-command for restoring partition /dev/sda1 from /media/data/backups/datetime.fsa from a live media would be:

sudo fsarchiver restfs -j2 -v /media/data/backups/datetime.fsa id=0,dest=/dev/sda1