GNOME 3.10 Post Install Customization

With the release of Fedora 20 Beta I thought I’d give GNOME a try after having used KDE in Fedora 19. Although I’m still learning my way across the desktop environment, a few things struck with me immediately.

The GNOME design is minimal, to say the least. They have disabled a lot of features by default and some of them really bugged me. On the other hand, there were more default settings (especially keyboard shortcuts) than I found in KDE. Your best friends in GNOME are gsettings, gnome-tweak-tool, and dconf-editor, if you want to customize GNOME Shell. I’m finding out that they may not be enough, though.

Anyways, the things that I changed right away were:

• Show date in the top bar/panel
  gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface clock-show-date true
• Show seconds in the top bar/panel
  gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface clock-show-seconds true
• Show logout option
  gsettings set org.gnome.shell always-show-log-out true
• Open File dialog should show home directory not recent files. The default value is ‘recent’.
  gsettings set org.gtk.Settings.FileChooser startup-mode 'cwd'
  Relevant file is /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/org.gtk.Settings.FileChooser.gschema.xml

You may also want to install gnome-tweak-tool and dconf-editor.

su -c 'yum install gnome-tweak-tool dconf-editor'

These are GUI tools to help you customize the Shell. If you want to stick with CLI then run gsettings list-recursively and explore all the available options.