Making Gome 3 Usable ( 11 Tips and a Confession)

After installing the latest version of Gnome 3 if you were shocked by the lack of usability and wondered how hard or impossible it was to configure small things, say, window font size then I have to confess that this is exactly what I also felt when I installed a fresh copy of Gnome 3 flavored Fedora.

Still, I'm a fan of Gnome 3 and after relevant customization I find it more usable than Windows 7 or OS X 10.8.

Here's a list of important changes I make. You may have to change the values of parameters so that they work well on your hardware.

1. Install custom fonts:

mkdir ~/.local/share/fonts

  Dump your favorite fonts in this folder. My favorite are Verdana and Arial.

2. Improve the interface:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor '1.7'

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences titlebar-font 'Arial Narrow Bold 0'

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface font-name 'Arial Narrow 11'

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings close "['<Alt>Q']"

You might have noticed that now I have no way of closing a window with mouse. Only way to do is to press Alt-Q.

3. In mouse and touchpad settings enable "two finger scroll" and "tap to click"

4. Resize Gnome panel

http://useful-linux-tips.blogspot.in/2013/02/resize-gnome-panel.html

5. Remove unwanted entries from Nautilus

http://useful-linux-tips.blogspot.in/2013/02/modify-places-menu-in-nautilus-file.html

6. Remove all favorite apps from gnome panel except firefox, nautilus and one or two other apps that you frequently use.

7. I generally clear my home folder and tell browsers to directly download in my home folder from where I transfer important data (if any) to a different partition which is fully organized.

  rmdir Public/ Documents/ Music/ Pictures/ Videos/ Templates/ Desktop/ Downloads/

8. Disable recent documents:

  rm .local/share/recently-used.xbel; mkdir .local/share/recently-used.xbel

9. Remove all default bookmarks by erasing all contents of

    vi .config/gtk-3.0/bookmarks

   Rather, manually bookmark folders that you frequently visit.

10. Disable auto update from all accounts by command

 gpk-prefs

11. Make fonts smooth if needed:

http://useful-linux-tips.blogspot.in/2013/01/smooth-font-rendering-on-fedora-18.html

That should make it usable enough.