stoerdebegga

My Desktop

aug 26, 2021 · 662 words · 4 minute read

It is been quite a while since I have done a post regarding my desktop and system in general, see here for an example. When I was thinking about writing something up I just noticed that it would be fairly too much to cover in one posting, id est I am going to make several subsequent postings tackling different aspects.

As some of you might know I am running on Fedora with the preinstalled GNOME Desktop Environment which is customized to my needs and likings. I can already hear voices "Why GNOME?", it is slow, has limited customization options, why not this or that or even a simple window manager. To cut it short, you can find objections with each desktop environment or window manager if you want to. GNOME just happened to be the environment that lets me get stuff done, can look aesthetically pleasing and works smooth and snappy even on my ancient Alienware X51 R1.

Visuals

When talking about aesthetically pleasing, the least thing that comes to my mind is the default theme Adwaita. As I am a huge fan of the PaperColor Light VIM theme I was looking for something that will give me a more consistent look as goes well along with my terminal applications.

Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancements. (R.I.C.E.) Parts put on cars to make them look fast, when they have no internal tuning, and are actually slow as hell. Also commonly used to refer to making visual improvements and customizations to one's desktop.

The WhiteSur GNOME Shell and GTK theme that I use is obviously heavily inspired by macOS BigSur. Vince also offers corresponding icons, cursors and wallpapers of which I use none. The go to icon theme for me at the moment is Flatery. Though I am not using the mouse quite often I have installed the Breeze Snow cursor theme (could not find a link with the source). I switch my wallpapers more often than other people their undies, but at the moment I am quite pleased with the wallpaper set that comes along with the Fluent GTK theme by the aforementioned Vince. Last but not least, Gidole is the font for the entire GNOME Shell and GTK applications while Fira Code is being used for terminal sessions.

Extensions

Extensions are the way to teach GNOME Shell new tricks. In the beginning I have made excessive use of extension but lately I stripped them down to a bare minimum.

In order to have full theming support you will require the User Themes extension.

I have never really understood why the GNOME team decided to remove support for icons in the system tray thus AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support is one of the extensions that I am using.

Call me oldschool but I prefer a bottom panel and my clock moved to the right side of the panel instead of the centric placement.

After a brief stint with Sway I started to fancy its tiling capabilities. Luckily there is a pretty extension for that which is called gTile.