Get classic Mint desktop in Gnome shell

[esteban1uy]

Hmmm...
I think we are going to see a bunch of people coming to this topic.
Maybe we must organize our "collection" of workarounds a little, so people can apply them safely and consistently.

[Monsta]

Wait a minute, there was no notice on the official blog. Strange

tdockery97 posted an explanation here: viewtopic.php?f=60&t=86458#p499788

Maybe we must organize our "collection" of workarounds a little, so people can apply them safely and consistently.

Would be really good if Clem & co. took a look at these "workarounds" and made them official (via updates). That's quite a lot of work for just workarounds...

[bimsebasse]

Hmmm...
I think we are going to see a bunch of people coming to this topic.
Maybe we must organize our "collection" of workarounds a little, so people can apply them safely and consistent

I think you guys should add all needed tweaked extensions in an attached zip file to make this easier to install for people not used to mess around with the shell. So it would be simply a matter of extracting one file downloaded in here to usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/ and opening gnome tweak tool to turn them on, without having to manually edit code or download from various sources on the net. The same with the theme if it needs to be modified to work with the setup, rather attach a new file than list which code to change and how.

[poodle]

Maybe we must organize our "collection" of workarounds a little, so people can apply them safely and consistently.

Yes please! I'm very interested in doing this but "I can't see the forest through the trees" as the Dutch saying goes.

[esteban1uy]

@bimsebasse

That's a good idea.
On the other hand, is it ok to distribute (publicly) a modded version of a file without its author permissons?
I'm asking because I really don't know.

[bimsebasse]

No, that should be OK.

[esteban1uy]

No, that should be OK.

Fine.
If somebody points me how to upload an attachment in a post...

[poodle]

If you post a reply, you have an "Upload attachment" tab next to the "Options" tab, right under the entry field.

[esteban1uy]

EDITED 11/30 : Doe to the regular updates to MGSE menu and windows list extensions I strongly recommend the users to search in this thread how to manually apply the tweaks by editing their own files. It's even faster than using this old attachments!

Ok, here we go.
(Use at your own risk)

First of all, make a backup of this folder /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions, save it in a safe place and then proceed.

Download the attached files (extensions.zip if you like the clock always at bottom right corner OR extensions2.zip if you want the user applet always at bottom right corner, and Minty.zip if you want to use a really cool shell theme).

Extract the contents of extensions.zip OR extensions2.zip and add it to /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions, some new extensions will be added and some overwritten.
(If you don't have permission to move the folders, type sudo nautilus in a terminal and use that nautilus to do what you want)
Then download Minty and move the Minty folder to /home/.themes (or overwrite it if you already have it).

Now press Alt+F2, type r and press Enter, Gnome-shell will restart.
Maybe some things will be looking funny at this point, don't worry, press your "Super key" or "Windows key", find "Advanced settings" (Gnome Tweak Tool) and enable only the following extensions:

Classic Systray
Menu
User Themes
Wheater indicator
Shutdown menu
Alt tab
notifications
Move clock
Window list
gnome-shell-reflection

Then enable the Minty shell theme, restart Gnome shell again (Alt+F2 r) and enjoy!

Click to see fullsize


To configure the weather applet, follow the author's instructions.

To revert:
Move back that backup you made to /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions, restart Gnome shell (Alt+F2 r), then enable the extensions you like using "Advanced settings" (Gnome Tweak Tool).

Remember, these are the tweaks I made to get a gnome shell desktop the way I like it, there are other tweaks you can use. I'm pretty sure Daniel4lm and bimsebasse have much better mods than mine!

[poodle]

Thanks a lot Esteban! It looks great. I do miss following components though: activities by mouse in upper left corner and the workspace switcher (kind of essential this one)
Any ideas?

[esteban1uy]

Thanks a lot Esteban! It looks great. I do miss following components though: activities by mouse in upper left corner and the workspace switcher (kind of essential this one)
Any ideas?

You can always get Activities with your "Super key" or "Windows key" (much more direct than travelling the whole screen with your cursor to go to that upper left hot corner!!!).
About the workspaces... let me see...

Well, using your "Super key" you can switch between workspaces at the right side of the screen... did you try?
More directly: Ctrl+Alt+Up or Ctrl+Alt+Down

Remember this is kind of a classic desktop. If you have a tablet or a touchscreen, maybe is better to stay with the default configuration.

[poodle]

You can always get Activities with your "Super key" or "Windows key"

Didn't knew that. It's faster indeed! Thanks a lot.

[esteban1uy]

If you feel confident enough, try to manually edit the original mint's extensions yourself using what was pointed in the previous posts.
As you know, if some of those mint's extensions gets updated you have to do the whole procedure again, and it's always better to work over the latest version than reinstalling some old tweaked files.

[Monsta]

I gave it a try with the default theme. Here's what came out:



(never mind that Virtualbox stuff, I didn't manage to take a screenshot from inside of it)

I've used extensions.zip. I've also enabled noa11y extension and didn't turn the weather indicator on.
Well... looks pretty close to the usual Gnome 2 setup. I wonder if there's a way to move all the logout/shutdown stuff to the MintMenu and get rid of that "user applet" for good.

[esteban1uy]

I remember that the noa11y extension doesn't work very well with the reflections extension (reflections gets rid of a11y by itself).
On the other hand, that looks great, great job Monsta!

About the user applet and the mintMenu, I think mint's coders are going to give us a nice surprise... soon!

[Monsta]

reflections gets rid of a11y by itself

Ah... so that's why a11y icon sometimes didn't show even after I turned the noa11y extension off.
In that case it seems like the reflection extension doesn't always gets this done...

[esteban1uy]

reflections gets rid of a11y by itself

Ah... so that's why a11y icon sometimes didn't show even after I turned the noa11y extension off.
In that case it seems like the reflection extension doesn't always gets this done...

Well, I don't know for sure, but in my case a11y icon never shows since using reflections.

[Monsta]

Oh, I forgot to mention one little inconvenience. The bottom panel is transparent. If you open a terminal window fullscreen and do some work in it (say, ls -l in a directory with lots of files inside), the command line eventually moves to the bottom - i.e. beside the panel. Is there a way to turn this transparency off?

EDIT: that's curious. The panel loses transparence and returns to its usual behaviour if I change the screen resolution (e.g. open my Virtualbox fullscreen or resize its window). But if I reset the Shell (Alt-F2, then r), the panel becomes transparent again.

Also the third or fourth Shell reset must have invoked some secret combination for doing a fatality, because it totally killed my desktop (except for already opened windows), so I had to run "service lightdm restart" as root to make things normal again.

[tdockery97]

esteban1uy: It all seems to work for me except that Weather Indicator extension won't stay "on". Can't get the weather indicator on the panel. Any solution?

[Monsta]

Arrrgh. A fresh mint theme (or something like that, I must admit I forgot that already) update came to my system and reverted the Menu extension back. Had to use this neat trick to get rid of the Activities once again. Well, it seems that nothing else has changed, so I could just copy esteban's modified menu extension there once again. Nevermind. The point is that things will break on updates if these extensions won't become a part of MGSE...