From one technical person to another – if you are like me and totally disagree, hate or are just generally annoyed by the unity tool kit that has recently added to the more recent releases to Ubuntu Desktop (I think starting from 11.04), then you will probably either want the option to drop back to the classic Gnome desktop or get rid of unity completely.

Luckily for users that run 11.04 you can actually change your session to use the classic Gnome Desktop, however for the majority of users that have probably upgraded to 11.10 already you will have found out that you are stuck with the unity desktop. And to clear up the whole graphical matter that has been discussed several times – unity is 2D, so if you want to do anything fancy using 3D effects then you no longer can (unless you hack it to force it – this is plausible and works sort of!)

 

Nicely for us old school fans of ubuntu and not the new “indie” kids of ubuntu you can still install the Gnome desktop through the repositories.

You can install the classic Gnome desktop by installing the “gnome-panel” package:

sudo apt-get install gnome-panel

 

Once installed all you need to do is change the session on the log in screen to show “GNOME classic” (found under the gear icon on the login screen). You will now be back in your lovely land of GNOME classic (to a point), with top and bottom configurable panels, access to the very lovely Compiz window manager to make your windows do the silly things they aren’t even required to do and just make life that little bit easier for you. Fair enough it won’t be back to the very very original classic desktop – but using this will allow the developers to work out the problems with unity and make them better. Please note that

 

Obviously that is as simple as it gets, you will notice subtle differences in the GUI from previous installs only because we are now on Gnome 3 and things should really be improving.

 

In terms of ubuntu improving what it does, I would really like to host a sort of forum to get an understanding whether people like the newer editions of ubuntu with the unity tool kit, or if ubuntu is working on more design than programming now a days?

 

Any opinions are valid, and I would really like to hear about them.

 

Thanks