customization

The terminal becomes more & more like my second home. I mean I use it as much as I use my browser. Okay, roughly as much as I use my browser, because browsers are ubiquitous tools that always demand a lot of screen time from the user. Anyways, the main technical thing I’ve been doing for the past week since last Friday was Desktop customization. Ubuntu, & most Linux distros by extension, are already quite minimalist out of the box, so when you apply a digital minimalist (by this, I mean using technological tools for specific & listed uses that are wholly intentional) approach to Linux, what you get is a very lightweight computer setup. With the help of Extension Manager on GNOME, I was able to remove the Activities panel on the top bar & the Quick settings too. They’re useful I must admit, but I really wanted them gone because I’m trying to rely more on keyboard shortcuts these days. Crt + Alt + T to open the Terminal, Super + L to lock the screen, & my own brand of keyboard shortcuts (the most useful of my custom shortcuts is the one I’ve to launch Firefox: Crt + Alt + F). The only thing on my top bar is the time & date panel which is in the lovely Ubuntu font & can be accessed by Super + M, so I don’t even have to move my pointer anymore across the screen to open that panel up which shows the Calendar & list of notifications. I was hoping to remove the entire top bar, but saw that the time & date panel was just too useful; it displays the time in a very convenient part of the screen: the top.

I used the Just Perfection extension to achieve such affects. I also disabled most of the system extensions on my computer so there isn’t any dock or anything resembling Windows’ taskbar. It’s been a wise choice of screen real estate & I’m happy I made the choice. I also use the Blur My Shell extension to make GNOME look a little prettier. It makes GNOME look a little more like MacOS, because of all that transparency. And of course, I picked a cute Desktop wallpaper because I look at it multiple times a day; the wallpaper has a lot of red on it so it matches with Ubuntu’s red accent color. In a sense, I’ve made my computer harder to use, but that isn’t such a big problem because I do hope to become a power Linux user. That’d be a great boost for my probable future employment outlook.

The most useful default keyboard shortcuts on Ubuntu GNOME I’ve found are: Super (to open up Activities & use search to launch applications), Crt + Alt + T to open the Terminal (it takes about three seconds for the Terminal to launch; I’ve to fix this latency issue), & Crt + Q (to close an open window; for some reason, it doesn’t work on the Terminal which is a drag). I’ve never been fond of using keyboard shortcuts before, but as I’ve become used to utilizing them, I do have to acknowledge their merit. They make the workplace so much smoother & faster & you just feel like a computer pro whenever you press a few keys to do something instead of moving your index finger across the touchpad or dragging your mouse. It makes one want to become a Linux power user.