Tux Training

How to best utilize screen real estate in Gnome

December 20, 2008, 2:40 pm

Gnome does a pretty bad job at utilizing screen real estate. Desktop environments in Linux use up far too much screen real estate for just about everything. This problem is not exclusive to Ubuntu.. 8px font in Windows is hard to read, but an 8pt font in Linux is perfect, if not a little large for alot of things (icon text in nautilus, window manager text, panel bar text, etc..) But in Gnome icons are too large. Buttons and fonts are too large. The panels are too thick. The toolbar buttons in Nautilus are far too big. And apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Maybe it’s something Mark Shuttleworth should definitely pay attention to as he’s calling to be mailed screenshots of user’s desktops to judge how to best beautify Linux and wishes to outdo Apple in the looks department in the next year or two. While this posting is not about the beautification of the desktop, it is about efficiency and usability.

ozzilee and ropers over at reddit did a bit more of a detailed, but quick and dirty, analysis.

Comparing the Ubuntu Desktop

To OSX

Ubuntu Color Overlay on OS X

OS X Color Overlay on Ubuntu

From the conversation: (for full discussion click here)

ropers said: My tab bar is always visible and the OS X screenshot showed Safari with the tab bar off/hidden.

Also, I think we could measure and note pixels this time. I have 1009×571 pixels in my browser window there. The OS X screenshot appears to have 1009×603. That’s 32 pixels less in height on Ubuntu. Where did they go?

Seeing that web browsing is fairly typical use, here are the details (all units in pixels):
Mac OS X    Ubuntu
----------------------------------
      22     25 ( +3) top menu bar
      22*    24 ( +2) window bar
       0     25 (+25) window menu bar
      32*    40 ( +8) address bar
      21     33 (+12) bookmarks bar
     603    571 (-32) web page display area
      16     25 ( +9) status bar
      52     25 (-27) dock

*probably; there's no clear distinction
It’s immediately apparent that Windows in OS X do not have an own menu bar; these menus are integrated into the top menu bar. This saves OS X 25px right off the bat. OS X’ jazzy dock however eats up that advantage plus another 2 pixels, putting Ubuntu and OS X again on fairly even footing. So let’s look at the comparison with the window menu bar and dock removed:
Mac OS X    Ubuntu
----------------------------------
      22     25 ( +3) top menu bar
      22     24 ( +2) window bar
      32     40 ( +8) address bar
      21     33 (+12) bookmarks bar
     605*   571 (-34) web page display area
      16     25 ( +9) status bar

*I added the two pixels OS X' dock would otherwise have occupied here.
The picture becomes clear:

The differences of the top menu and window bars are negligible. Three bars eat up Ubuntu’s screen real estate at the rate of nearly 10 pixels each: the address bar, the bookmarks bar, and the status bar. Now the size of those bars is largely related to the size of the GNOME’s native elements/chrome. Is Ubuntu/GNOME making good use of screen real estate? It’s a valid question.

Browser content area (when not showing the bookmarks bar): 1008×625

Comparison:

Values for Vista and OS X’ window/address bar are only approximate
Mac OS X  diff  Ubuntu  diff  Vista    ------------------------------------------------------
      22  ( +3)   25   (-25)    0  top menu bar
      22  ( +2)   24   ( -7)   17  window bar
       0  (+25)   25   ( -7)   18  window menu bar
      32  ( +8)   40   ( -6)   34  address bar
      21  (+12)   33      ?     ?  bookmarks bar
      22  ( +5)   27   ( -1)   26  tab bar
     581  (-32)  544   (+81)  625  web page display area
      16  ( +9)   25   ( -6)   19  status bar
      52  (-27)   25   ( +2)   27  dock
Windows Vista has no top menu bar, and is more efficient across the board (best use of screen real estate). It shows. Even taking into account that the Vista screenshot was w/o bookmarks bar and subtracting a reasonable amout, Windows still wins out by a 50+ pixel margin, half of it because it uses no top menu bar, and half of it because its bars are all smaller. I’m sure there’s a lesson to be learned there. Maybe someone wants to submit this page as a bug to Ubuntu/GNOME/Linux developers?

So what to do about it?

Well until Gnome, Ubuntu, Fedora or anyone else can fix the problem, what can be done about it now? Well, a lot actually.

X11

Make sure your screen is at maximum resolution. This will vary by monitor and video card capabilities. You may want to look in the following places if GUI tools aren’t working great for you:
1. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/Resolution
2. http://tuxtraining.com/2008/03/13/understanding-xorgconf

Gtk Theme

There are several themes that are quite compact.

Clearlooks Compact Example

You can install these themes by going to System –> Preferences –> Appearance Preferences –> Clicking Install and select that tarball that you downloaded from Gnome-Look.org
Then in the Theme tab, high light the matching theme you are using (Clearlooks, Human, a Murrine theme if that’s what you chose) and hit Customize. A new window will open and you’ll want to select the Controls tab and select the GTK control theme you just installed.

controlspref

If you have problems getting the controls to take, try using gtk-chtheme to change your theme instead. (You’ll have to install it from your distro’s repositories).

Remove All Button Icons

To disable those icons, Open the gtkrc of your theme.

If your theme is Human, sudo gedit /usr/share/themes/Human/gtk-2.0/gtkrc2. Copy and paste this option at the top of the document. If you installed one of the compact themes mentioned above it’ll be in ~/.themes/.

gtk-button-images = 0

Refresh your theme, so it recognize the changes. For that open the theme selector, select another theme and select the previous theme. This will get rid of the X and check marks in your Ok and Cancel buttons.

Fonts

As mentioned, fonts in Gnome are far too large. This is a simple change.

Go back to System –> Preferences –> Appearance Preferences –> the Font tab
Drop all your fonts to a size 7 or 8. This will shrink Window Manager title bars, the fonts in documents, on the desktop, etc. I found have that Microsoft’s Tahoma and Apple’s Lucida Grande work the best at this size.

fonts

File Manager

In Nautilus (default Gnome File Manager) go to Edit –> Preferences –> Views tab. Change the Default Zoom level to 75%, place a check by “Use Compact Layout” (normally i just do compact without changing the zoom).
1. You may want to select for the file manager to “View new folders using: Compact View”
Change the toolbar size by going to System –> Appearance Preferences –> Interface tab. Change the drop down for Toolbar button labels to “Text beside items” or “Icons only”

After that’s done Nautilus should look similar as below:

nautilus

Maybe use another file manager (pcmanfm –nice, small footprint, tabbed, but lacks solid gnome integration and problems mounting/unmounting drives sometimes, or thunar – the default xfce file manager).

Panel Bars

Some distros come with one panel bar only in Gnome, the rest generally have 2. I have condenced everything I need into one panel bar at the bottom.
Right click each of them and go to properties, change the pixel size as you see fit.

Click for larger

Firefox:

Now there’s lots and lots of stuff we can do with Firefox. Changes we’ve already made should have shrank the window manager bar at the top, and our application fonts should be smaller already. But there’s more.

Right click your buttons and go to customize, and select “use small icons”
While in the customize mode, drag your buttons, url bar, and search bar to the Menu bar and get rid of the Navigation bar. ( Don’t worry about it taking up too much space on one bar, we’re getting to that next)
Use the TinyMenu extension to condense all of your menu’s into one pull down menu.
Use a minimal theme such as LittleFox or some others found here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir…t:32?sort=name
Use the Tree Style Tab Plugin. This will move your tabs to a collaspable column on the ride hand side. You will only see your tabs when you need them.
Go to Edit –> Preferences –> Content –> Change the font and font size. This can be a pain sometimes to find a good one as it can mess up the rendering of some sites. This can also slow down Firefox as well, be warned. I didn’t mess with this function.

When all is said it done, you should have something like this:

Pidgin

In the Pidgin main window go to the Buddies menu –> Show and then uncheck everything there.

Gedit

Go to the View menu and deselect the Sidebar and Status bar

Gnome Terminal

Go to Edit –> Profile Preferences. On the General tab, make sure you are using the system fixed width font. I would also uncheck “Allow bold text”.
Go to the View menu and uncheck Show Menu bar (you can always re-enable view Right Click menu if needed.