gnome

SOMETIMES I PRESS THE CAPS LOCK KEY BY ACCIDENT, USUALLY WHILE PLAYING A VIDEO GAME. I THEN FIND MYSELF UNABLE TO TYPE A PASSWORD OR I AM ACCUSED OF SHOUTING ONLINE. OVER COFFEE, MY FRIEND MARTIN EXPLAINED THAT IT’S POSSIBLE TO DISABLE THE CAPS LOCK KEY COMPLETELY IN LINUX. I’D NEVER CONSIDERED DOING THIS, MISTAKENLY THINKING THE ONLY OPTIONS WERE TO REMAP IT TO SOMETHING ELSE. IT TURNS OUT GNOME TWEAKS HAS AN OPTION. [Read More]

Back in December 2020 I wrote up my personal Must-Have GNOME extensions. It’s been nearly three years, two job changes, and a few Ubuntu upgrades, so I thought I’d take another look. tl;dr: What changed Out I no longer have these installed. Sound Switcher Indicator This used to crash a lot for me, to the point I’d go and look for it in the panel and it was missing. I figured if I don’t realise it’s gone, I probably don’t need it that much. [Read More]

“Hirsute Hippo” is the project code-name for what will become Ubuntu 21.04 when it releases on April 22nd 2021. On April 1st, the Beta of Ubuntu Hirsute will be released, but we’re no fools! This is a great time to do some testing! So, starting on April 1st, we’re doing another Ubuntu Testing Week. As always, everyone is welcome to test Ubuntu at any point in the year. But during the beta is a good time to focus on testing. [Read More]

The GNOME team have announced GNOME 40. Along with this there’s a GNOME OS image to play with. You can grab that from here with the release notes. The release announcement firmly (in bold) suggests “Do not use any other version including the distro version. Only GNOME Boxes 3.38.0 from flathub is known to work.”. Personally I’ve never managed to have much success with GNOME Boxes, so I thought I’d test using something I already have installed, QEMU! [Read More]

I’ve mentioned before that I ‘suffer’ from xkcd 386. I’m trying to improve, and maybe writing this post will help me. If it helps you, that’s awesome too. Let’s work on this together. 🤝 There’s a strong prevalence among some in the Linux community for people correcting others. Specifically correcting pronunciation. I have been guilty of this in the past, but I’m trying to be the change I want to be. [Read More]

This is an early PSA aimed at developers who publish snaps in the Snap Store. They can probably skip this preamble, but for anyone else here’s some backstory in case you’re bored interested. Preamble Snaps are confined software packages for Linux. They were originally designed / intended for IoT use cases so are optimised for size, bundling dependencies, are compressed on disk and auto update. They can also be used to package server software, like NextCloud, and desktop software like Signal Desktop. [Read More]

I tend to run Ubuntu on my computers as the primary operating system. Given I work for Canonical, this isn’t especially surprising. However I have run Ubuntu on pretty much everything since 2005 or so - long before I started working at Canonical (in 2011). Mostly I will upgrade as each new release comes out, only doing a clean install once in a while. I ran GNOME 2 for all the years from 2004 through to Unity being released, then switched to that. [Read More]

One of the neat things about GNOME Shell is that it’s pretty tweakable - to some degree - to customise it to a user’s preferences. I know some people use GNOME Shell stock experience. I don’t. I have previously written about some of my must-have extensions and add-ons. This supplements that with what I do to further tweak my (currently) Ubuntu 20.10 system to my liking. Note: These are the settings I configure on my computer that I use all day every day. [Read More]

I currently run Ubuntu 20.10 on my main desktop PC. GNOME Shell is the default desktop, and while it’s great, one very useful feature is the ability to supplement or alter the default behaviour with extensions and other add-ons. Ubuntu ships with a couple of extensions by default, but I’ve added a few on top, and this blog post details what they are and how to get them, in no particular order… [Read More]

My Ubuntu 16.04 GNOME Setup This is a post for friends who saw my desktop screenshot and anyone else who likes Unity and is looking at alternatives. A big thanks to Stuart Langridge and Joey Sneddon whose linked posts inspired some of this. The recent news that upcoming versions of Ubuntu will use GNOME as the default desktop rather than Unity, made me take another look at the GNOME desktop [Read More]