Posts

Good Bye Ubuntu MATE - Hello Manjaro KDE

Bild
I have customized Ubuntu MATE to look like MacOS for quite a while now. I found a comment on Gnome Look including a lovely screenshot of a panel. This one is looking far better, especially the notification area: So, now I'm working on customizing Manjaro KDE. Made good progress so far - once I'm done I'll provide detailed instructions, just as I did for Ubuntu MATE . Update: Here is the first part of making (Manjaro) KDE look like macOS .

Fixed Global Menu Styles

After long digging and playing with CSS, I finally fixed the font weights and colors in the global application menu. See my updated page Making Ubuntu MATE look like macOS .

Got myself a 27" Apple LED Cinema Display

I have always liked the Apple design and finally someone in my town decided to sell one - quick and easy decision 😀. So I now had the display on my desk, connected via to my laptop via Display Port - great display, almost better sound. But I couldn't control brightness nor use the iSight camera, so I set to work. Check out the results: Using Apple LED Cinema Display in Ubuntu MATE .

ligthtdm webkit greeter

After spending hours (days!) troubleshooting the lightdm webkit greeter which would just show a mouse cursor on a black screen, I decided to start from scratch on my home machine. Re-installed Ubuntu MATE, configured lightdm webkit greeter and got ... the same result. Just by chance I noticed the greeter on my laptop screen, which usually has the lid closed ... d'oh ... This is the hard way to find out that the webkit greeter only uses a single monitor. Found the relevant info searching the net: Need to get the display IDs using xrandr , HDMI-3 in my case Modify /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf : Add display-setup-script=xrandr --output HDMI-3 --primary to the [Seat:*] section. Done!

Found some time

Finally found some time to work on the page. Installed virtual machine and configuring and downloading ... configuring and downloading ... Somewhat sad to learn that things got much easier. I may need to "downgrade" the configuration on my everyday PC...

Restarting from Scratch

About a your ago, looking for a Linux distribution which can be easily customized to look like macOS, I found Ubuntu MATE which seems to be the only Ubuntu distribution left supporting the Mac-style global menu. After much time spent customizing I thought it was time to retrace my steps using a fresh Ubuntu MATE 18.10 installation in a virtual machine and share my experience. Just need to start now... Check out  Making Ubuntu MATE look like macOS .