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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. This site hosts all the extensions that you can install/remove in one click in Abrowser with this add-on. Forty popular extensions are in Trisquel's repository too. "gnome-shell-extension" prefixes the names of the packages. For instance, "gnome-shell-extension-desktop-icons", for showing the contents of ~/Desktop on the desktop, can be installed through APT.
Installation of a full GNOME desktop environment
The package "gnome" provides the full GNOME desktop environment. You probably do not want it on top of a Regular/Mini/KDE/Sugar edition of Trisquel. Indeed, 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' or 'sudo apt install gnome-core' (for a more reduced set of applications, excluding GNOME Maps, GNOME Music, GNOME To Do, GNOME Tweaks, GNOME Weather, etc.) on a NetInstall makes sense. The Trisquel project has also made its own selection of packages providing a full-featured GNOME-based desktop, including some software not in GNOME (Back In Time, Brasero, Electrum, Liferea, Pidgin, Synaptic Package Manager, Update Notifier, etc.). To install it on a NetInstall (no Trisquel GNOME ISO exists), execute:
$ sudo apt install trisquel-gnome trisquel-gnome-recommended
In doubt of which of the above meta-packages better suits you, apt's show command may help. It lists, among other pieces of information, the packages any of the meta-packages installs. For instance, for trisquel-gnome, execute:
$ apt show trisquel-gnome
Installation of GNOME Shell (and a little more)
The package "gnome-shell" only provides the graphical shell. Installing it on top of a Regular/Mini/KDE/Sugar edition of Trisquel makes sense. Nevertheless, with only "gnome-shell" installed, there is no way to:
- graphically access your files;
- easily tweak the environment (to disable the animations, change the theme, the buttons and the behaviors of the clicks on the title bars, the fonts, etc.);
- right-click on a folder to open a terminal in it;
- right-click on a selection of files to encrypt or digitally sign them.
Here are the respective packages providing those additional functionalities:
- "nautilus"
- "gnome-tweaks"
- "nautilus-extension-gnome-terminal"
- "seahorse-nautilus"
With their specific dependencies, they occupy fewer than 24 MB of disk space.
At Trisquel's default login screen (until Trisquel 10), clicking on the icon at the right of your user name allows to select the GNOME session. With GDM, there is menu in the top-right corner.
