Sunday, May 12, 2013

Removing Unity Global Menus, Scroll Bars, Dock and returning to GNOME 2-esque Ambiance or Radiance

I'm back from the dead, after a couple years of not posting, and I'm here today to give you my current script to "fix" Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal and 13.04 Raring Ringtail.  This script removes Unity's Global Menus, Overlay Scroll Bars, and Dock, and returns to a more GNOME 2-style look while still supporting the Ambiance or Radiance theme.

Download

This is provided AS-IS, without any guarantees of any particular outcome. Please read "what does it do" so you know what you're getting into before you run this:

http://855nerdfix.com/userfiles/fixunity.sh

What does it do?



  • Adds a new session type called "Discord"
  • Replaces Unity's top panel with GNOME Panel 3.  This is not a reversion to GNOME 2's Panel, but the much better version 3 panel which goes mostly unused from what I see. You will notice one major difference from version 2 - you have to hold in Ctrl+Super in order to right click and edit the panel's composition or arrangement.
  • Replaces Unity's left panel with Docky as a bottom panel.
  • Removes Global Menus.
  • Removes Overlay Scrollbars.
  • Steals ALT+F1 and ALT+F2 back from Unity and gives them to the Applications menu and the Run Application dialog box.
  • Installs Pidgin (because why not?)
  • Configures some sane defaults for Compiz.
  • Installs Applet Indicator Complete plugin on the top panel. This gives the Panel the ability to use Ubuntu's sexy Mac-like indicators and clock area and system menu.
  • Please be aware that this script will turn off the Global Menu and Overlay Scrollbars even for your Unity session type.

How to Use FixUnity

  1. Download the script from the link above.
  2. Set execute permissions on the script.
  3. Run it.
  4. After it completes, log out of your session, and before logging back in, choose "Discord" as your session type.
  5. Log in, and wait while the initial login reconfiguration happens.
  6. Enjoy Ubuntu the way it should have been.
Good luck!

Help Me!

If the script completes and you log into the new session type, and the outcome isn't very similar to the screenshot pictures above, let me know what happened and let's figure out how to fix it.  I am open to suggestions on how to improve this.

Recent Changes

0.82 - Renamed session type from "Docky" to "Discord" to more represent what I'm trying to accomplish. (This tool is still useful even if you remove Docky from auto start-up and run Gnome Panel only!)

0.81 - Fixed some Compiz settings that weren't applying properly due to the migration to dconf since I first wrote the script.

0.8 - First public release for Ubuntu 12.10 or 13.04.