GNOME Shell’s stock experience is fairly vanilla, but with the right ingredients you can give it an entirely different flavour.
GNOME Layout Manager is a new script in development that takes advantage of this malleability. Using it you can quickly transform GNOME Shell to look like:
- Ubuntu Unity
- Windows
- macOS
We’ve written articles before showing you can make Ubuntu look like a Mac or resemble the Windows desktop (using the UKUI desktop).
Admittedly this script doesn’t do anything you can’t do by hand, for yourself. Think of it as a timesaver; it automates the process of downloading GNOME extensions, configuring them, and (for Unity at least) installing and setting a GNOME Shell theme.
It can make GNOME look like Mac OS X:
It can make GNOME look like Ubuntu Unity:
It can make GNOME look like Windows:
Notes
Obviously you’ll see from the screenshots above that the Unity layout has had the most love and attention lavished upon on it, with the script fetching a custom GTK and GNOME Shell theme and a wallpaper to suit.
No such styling is afforded to the Windows and macOS layouts — a missed trick in my opinion — though the former installs the GNOMenu for a more Windows-esque Start Menu experience.
Even so, the script does a decent job of mimicking their overall layout, and saves you having to manually install each required extensions in turn.
Download & Run GNOME Layout Manager Script
This script is considered ‘alpha’ and is under development. You use it at your own risk.
I downloaded and ran the layout script in a vanilla GNOME session running on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. This probably wasn’t the best idea as the version of GNOME in Xenial is pretty old.
The script did appear to stop and stall at times, but it’s just rather silently going through the process of downloading, installing and setting things up.
I will add that if you have a nice custom GNOME Shell desktop set-up please do make a backup of any settings of configurations you’re fond of before running this script.
You can download the latest version of the script from Github:
Download GNOME Layout Manager from Github
Extract the .zip file and move the script inside to your home folder, click the relevant permissions to allow it to run.
Alternatively, run:
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bill-mavromatis/gnome-layout-manager/master/layoutmanager.sh
And give the script the relevant permissions to run:
chmod +x layoutmanager.sh
Next, run the script from the command line and pass it the desktop style you wish to replicate.
For a macOS layout run:
./layoutmanager.sh --mac
For a Ubuntu Unity layout run:
./layoutmanager.sh --unity
For a Windows layout run:
./layoutmanager.sh --windows
There’s (currently) no way to “undo” the changes made or reset to a stock experience. But using GNOME Tweak Tool you can very easily turn extensions on or off and, in more recent versions, disable all extensions in one click.
