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Here are settings and configs of various applications (including specific values) for migrating to any distro having an updated version of GNOME. I’m personally using Arch Linux/Antergos since some years, so everything included here should work there. Before moving over I was used to Ubuntu’s look & feel.

Theme / Ambiance

Over the time I tried a lot of themes & color schemes, previously I was used to Ambiance (which is a really great theme!), but now I moved over to Numix theme, both got a lot of similarities. The fact is that Ambiance is made for unity + outdated gtk, but not for other DE’s as well. I tried a lot of Ambiance-like themes for most common DE’s and I have to admin it either looked very different, there was no further support/updates, or they produced crashes/ were not stable enough. In comparision Numix is available for most DE’s in older and latest versions. If theres a new gtk/gnome-shell version out Numix maybe needs a week to get it fixed, but thats it.

I personally use the Numix-Frost gnome-shell & Numix gtk theme now – excluding iconset. You can find more informations at the project homepage, and a lot of guides howto install the theme using a quick search.

# Apply theme
gset "org.gnome.desktop.interface" "gtk-theme" "Numix"
gset "org.gnome.shell.extensions.user-theme" "name" "'Numix-Frost'"

Wallpaper

You can download Ubuntu wallpaper packs e.g. from the ubuntu-wallpapers Launchpad project. The default wallpaper of each version can also be downloaded standalone from OMG!Ubuntu!

gnome-terminal

Listed are the default font & color settings on Ubuntu. You can use e.g. http://terminal.sexy/ to generate a config for your favourite terminal. This Gist contains a script to add the scheme to your gnome-terminal profile list.

  • font "Monospace 12"
  • background-color "'#300A24'"
  • foreground-color "'#ffffff'"
  • palette "['#2E3436', '#CC0000', '#4B910B', '#C4A000', '#3465A4', '#755079', '#06989A', '#D3D7CF', '#555753', '#EF2929', '#8AE234', '#FCE94F', '#729FCF', '#AD7FA8', '#34E2E2', '#EEEEEC']"
  • bold-color “‘#ffffff’”`
  • bold-color-same-as-fg "true"
  • use-theme-colors "false"
  • use-theme-background "false"

Unity dock

If you are used to the left dock and the way how it works - and you want to try GNOME now - maybe take a look at the Dash to Dock extension.

To get Unity-like dock feeling:

  • Install gnome-tweak-tool
  • Open extensions -> Dash to Dock
  • Enable Panelmode
  • Max icon size: 48px, fixed
  • Show applications icon on top
  • Use hotkeys to activate apps
  • Transparency: ~30%

My personal “New-Desktop-Setup-Script” for Arch Linux includes these lines to apply those settings:

SCHEME="/org/gnome/shell/extensions/dash-to-dock"
dset "$SCHEME" "apply-custom-theme"     false
dset "$SCHEME" "background-opacity"     0.33
dset "$SCHEME" "dock-fixed"             true
dset "$SCHEME" "extend-height"          true
dset "$SCHEME" "hot-keys"               true
dset "$SCHEME" "icon-size-fixed"        true
dset "$SCHEME" "intellihide-mode"       "'FOCUS_APPLICATION_WINDOWS'"
dset "$SCHEME" "opaque-background"      true
dset "$SCHEME" "show-apps-at-top"       true

Used functions

gset() { gsettings set "$1" "$2" "$3" ; }
dset(){ dconf write "$1/$2" "$3" ; }