Episode: 2304
Title: HPR2304: Using Gnome 3 for the First Time
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2304/hpr2304.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 01:03:14

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This is HPR episode 2,304 entitled, using home free for the first time.
It is hosted by Shane Shannon and is about 11 minutes long and Karina Cleanflag.
The summary is, Shane just switched his desktop environment from XFC to home free.
Here is this experience, so far.
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Hacker Public Radio listeners, welcome.
My name is Shane Shannon.
I recently stopped using Zubuntu and I switched to using Ubuntu with the GNOME desktop environment.
So I wanted to tell you a bit about my experiences, the things that I liked, and a few puzzling
or awful things.
Maybe you can help me with those things.
This episode might be a bit timely because not too far in the past, canonical announced
that they are dropping the Unity desktop and that they are going to use GNOME on Ubuntu.
Just about the time I heard that announcement, I was getting a bit bored with Zubuntu and
the XFC desktop.
So I decided to take GNOME for a spin and these are my adventures.
I should probably say that I'm using pronunciations from the website, OMG Ubuntu.
A little while ago they published this little graphic that says how things like Zubuntu
and GNOME are pronounced and I'm using those pronunciations.
Maybe there's better pronunciations or different ones that you've heard but just because
of this graphic I've seen, I'm going to be saying Zubuntu, GNOME and things like that.
So I blew away my old installation of Zubuntu and I installed Ubuntu 1704 and then I put
the GNOME desktop environment on top of it.
And the thing that I liked right away was the Superkey search.
So hidden the Windows key, superkey, you can type right away what you want to search
for and I believe it searches through your files and things like that but it also looks
for apps.
So especially at first when you have first installed an operating system, at least for
me I'm trying to install a lot of different things and explore in different applications.
So this was especially useful.
It's brought up an icon for the different apps and then by clicking on that or pressing
enter I guess it would take you to the app store.
I forget what it's called in GNOME but I'll call it the app store.
Something else I really liked is that extensions are easy to install.
Here in GNOME you've got this black bar at the top.
That's where your time is and your Wi-Fi indicator and your volume indicator and things
like that.
And you can install other indicators pretty easily by going to the GNOME website, signing
in and then doing a search and when you're found an extension that you want to install
you just click a button and it'll install it on your machine.
I found that really cool.
I'm going to look here in my extensions and I'll tell you what a few extensions that
I've been using that I really enjoy.
I have to have a clipboard indicator so the first thing I did was I installed clipboard
indicator and it works really well.
It's not too fancy but it's pretty good.
I also installed something called dynamic top bar.
I'll read the description because it's kind of hard to describe apart from the description.
In my previous recording of this episode I spent two minutes trying to describe what this
app does.
I'll just read a dynamic top bar.
Let the top bar become transparent when no window is maximized.
That's a great description.
My desktop I usually leave pretty empty.
I like having a good wallpaper up and I like this feeling in the site of the mostly
empty desktop.
So having the black top bar of GNOME transparent most of the time, it's great.
I really like how that looks.
Just a really clean look.
Another extension I just had to install was the removable drive menu extension.
Once I'm using an external hard drive sometimes and flash drives all the time, it's great
just to have that eject button up there on the top bar for when you want to open or eject
a drive that you're plugged in.
Now I think it's time to talk about some of the puzzles and the frustrations of using
GNOME so far.
I'm only a few weeks in so I may discover solutions to these or maybe you can contact
me and let me know how to deal with some of these things.
Maybe even do a response episode and let me know what you've learned or what you already
know.
Okay, here's the strangest thing about GNOME.
I use an IRC program called Hexchat and I use Audacity and the strange thing is that
there's a weird transparency issue when I'm using these programs on GNOME.
I'm looking at Audacity right now and I've got a wallpaper that's kind of orange and purple.
And if I look at my title bar in Audacity, I can see some transparency just above the
title bar and just below it.
So I can actually see the color of my wallpaper peeking through just above and below where my
title bar says Audacity.
This happens in Hexchat as well.
Super strange.
I don't really want that to happen and it only happens when the application is maximized.
Let me know what you know about that if you have any answers.
Another puzzler is that I've tried to install extensions that promise to be system monitors.
I just want to see a little box up there in the top bar that'll let me know what percentage
of my computer is working at.
For example, when I launch something like Vivaldi Browser, it takes a while.
But in Zubuntu, I'd always just glance up there at the system monitor and tell me that
the computer was working hard but it was starting to do the job.
So I'd know that Vivaldi would eventually open up.
But I've tried to install three or four extensions here in Genome that are system monitors
and none of them have worked.
As soon as you click on the on button that will install it onto your computer, a second
or two later, that on button switches off automatically so I don't know what's going
on there.
For me, system monitor extensions are just not working.
I really like to customize my machine visually so I love mouse themes.
I go to places like gnomelook.org and I pick out mouse themes.
I just want different cursors.
But I follow instructions online to put the mouse theme folder in the certain place and
then open up another file and make sure that it's that mouse theme will work globally.
I follow those instructions carefully but I'm still getting problems of the default mouse
theme.
I forget what it's called here in Genome.
Being present in some windows and on the desktop sometimes.
But in other applications, the mouse theme that I actually installed and I actually want
shows up.
So I have the difficulty of two mouse themes showing up in Genome, even after I've logged
out or restarted.
And because I like customizing so much, there's one other puzzler.
It's not really a puzzler, I can see that it's what the designers of Genome wanted.
But the bar on the side where you can kind of a taskbar where you can pin the applications
that you're going to use all the time, it's not very customizable.
It's not customizable at all.
You can change the transparency of it.
I haven't found a way to change the size of the icons on it.
Things like that.
I like programs like Plank, where you can change the theme of the taskbar, is that the
correct term for it?
Or you can, I'll call it the launch bar, you can change the theme of the launch bar or
the transparency or the size of the icons, things like that.
So it's a little frustrating to me that the sidebar on the left hand side of Genome doesn't
let you change anything.
I imagine that the developers of Genome want things to be super simple, and I'm just
not sure if that's going to work for me in the long time, in the long term I mean.
So we'll see.
To tell you the truth at this point, I am thinking fondly of Zuban2 and the XFC desktop.
I like how customizable things were there.
But who knows, even if I stop using Genome in a few weeks, I'm probably going to
keep it installed on my system, and just use a different desktop environment.
And then as Genome changes in the next few months and years, as Zuban2 is helping develop,
sorry not to be as canonical as helping develop Genome, and other organizations are involved.
Maybe things will change more to my liking.
I'm probably going to stick with it for a few more weeks.
I'll do some more search in and discover new things I assume.
But so far, there's some things I like, and there's some things that just bug me because
the customization isn't working as smoothly as I wanted to.
Let me know what you think, let me know any answers that you have, and do a response
episode if you're up for that.
Thanks so much for listening, I'll talk to you later.
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