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What is GNOME Shell?
GNOME Shell is the graphical shell of the GNOME desktop environment starting with version 3. This tour presents GNOME Shell's main features and this cheat sheet more advanced ones, such as keybindings, drag and drop capabilities, and special utilities. GNOME Shell is greatly extensible too. A few extensions are in Trisquel's repository and this site hosts many more.
Installation of the full GNOME desktop environment on Trisquel 8
The package "gnome" provides the full GNOME desktop environment. You probably do not want it on top of a Regular/Mini/Sugar edition of Trisquel 8 because that would mean two programs for most tasks: the GNOME program and the program you got when you installed Trisquel. Executing 'sudo apt install gnome' on a NetInstall makes sense.
Installation of GNOME Shell (and a little more) on Trisquel 8
The package "gnome-shell" only provides the graphical shell. That is not much. With only "gnome-shell" installed, there is no way to:
- graphically access your files (and have icons on your desktop, if you wish);
- easily tweak the environment (to enable/disable icons on the desktop, to change the theme, etc.);
- right-click on a selection of file(s) to compress/uncompress it;
- right-click on a folder to open a terminal in it;
- right-click on a file to easily encrypt or digitally sign it.
Here are the respective packages providing those additional functionalities:
- "nautilus"
- "gnome-tweak-tool"
- "file-roller"
- "gnome-terminal"
- "seahorse-nautilus"
Together, they occupy about 10 MB of disk space.
At the graphical login screen, clicking on the icon at the right of your user name allows to select the GNOME session.
Icons and buttons of inconsistent sizes
As of April 21st, Trisquel 8's icon theme does not suit GTK+ 3 interfaces. For example, the icon to close a window of GNOME's file manager (Nautilus) is a huge cross. The "Appearance" tab of GNOME Tweak Tool allows to easily select another theme for "Icons". If you like Trisquel's, choose "Gnome-brave", which is very similar.
