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Ubuntu 10.04 Appearance Changes vs Ubuntu 9.10

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Re: Ubuntu 10.04 Appearance Changes vs Ubuntu 9.10

#51
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one like the clean look of my XMonad.

I am new to xmonad and loving it so far my only issue is how terrible floating windows are, I would love to be able to use xmonad tiling mode for my constant windows, but if I want to bring up skype or a filebrowser for a few minutes just use a normal gnome type window that has the familiar mouse interactions. * well not my only issue, I would also like to easily hide and restore windows

> * well not my only issue, I would also like to easily hide and restore windows

The usual solution is designating one of your virtual desktops as a `dump' for windows you don't want to have around at the moment. You could also have a look at how the tabbed layout works, and repurpose that.

Re: Ubuntu 10.04 Appearance Changes vs Ubuntu 9.10

#52
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See I find the opposite is true for me. I don't have much experience with OS X but between ubuntu and Windows 7 I _much_ prefer Win7. I just can't stand how much screen space is eaten up by useless padding, menu bars, sidebars and panels, not to mention the overly large fonts. I realize that everything is customizable, but I don't have the patience. Windows 7 also seems faster and more responsive to me but responsive…

Yep, I get excited for all the Ubuntu releases but end up back on Windows a couple weeks later.

You can use virtual machines (e.g. Sun's VirtualBox) to make the transitions easier. You don't even need to reboot then.

Re: Ubuntu 10.04 Appearance Changes vs Ubuntu 9.10

#53
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's hardly excitement from me. My choices are mostly functional; I think skinning culture is kind of silly (e.g., especially so with the hype about Mozilla Personas). There are things that I could do to make things look nice or gimmicky, but I'm definitely happy to do without for functional gains, and I do. Here's the end result of my "theming": http://i42.tinypic.com/2r5b0pi.jpg

Is it easy to exchange themes? I might be bothered to theme if there is an easy way to set the theme on every computer I use. I suppose some productivity enhancements are possible, I just never took the time.

System → Preferences → Appearance to tweak installed themes and create new ones. There's a link there to get more, but there's also http://gnome-look.org. The ones from gnome.org are easier to install, because they send the "Content-Type: application/x-gnome-theme-package" header, while gnome-look.org just does plain ol' gzipped tarballs. (Actually gzip vs. bzip vs. raw tarballs might be up to the uploader, I don't know.) You can also save the theme packages, and drag and drop them in the appearance preferences window.

Also, terminology. I think "theme" refers to a packaged deal, which can include window borders, gtk controls, icons, colors, desktop background, maybe more. So the frustrating thing you might find is that you see a theme you like, but it changes your colors and gtk controls, and uses an incomplete icon set, when really all you wanted was the window borders. If you install it, you can do something like revert back to the default Ubuntu theme, click "Customize", and change the window border to the one installed by the theme. This is is probably easier than trying to customize the new theme itself, especially since if you're used to the Ubuntu theme, you'll probably find that your desired look has more in common with it than the new one you just downloaded.

My enhancements are pretty low key. I mute the colors, scale down the font size to 9 to make more use of screen space, and use the SlicknesS window border, which has a smaller footprint than the Human window border.

Something else that's mildly frustrating is that the window borders' colors have almost (completely?) nothing to do with the color scheme. If you think, "Oh I like this, but I'm going to get rid of the insane colors.", you're probably out of luck.

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