Customising Ubuntu Desktop 24.04

This blog post aims to serve as a guide to anyone who is setting up Ubuntu Desktop 24.04. It will be split into sections incase you’re only interested in specific parts of the setup process, and follow up posts will cover setting up development tools.

Improvements to Ubuntu’s UI

While the default Ubuntu user interface is usable, I have grown up with Windows and Windows parallel user interfaces with the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. I don’t like installing lots of plugins (like dash to dock on gnome extensions, which I do recommend if you’re more used to Windows or Cinnamon style layouts). Instead I’ve opted to simply edit the preferences within Ubuntu Desktop to set the dock at the bottom of the screen.

Setting the dock to the bottom of the screen

This can be achieved by going to the settings and locating “Ubuntu Desktop” from the list on the left hand side. Then changing the “Position on Screen” to “bottom” and altering the icon size as desired.

Window tiling improvements

One additional enhancement that is worth while is “Tiling Shell” by domferr, which is available as a gnome extension.

Install gnome browser connector to browse and install gnome packages:

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-extension-manager gnome-browser-connector

This can then be found in the system menu by searching for shell

From the tool, search for Tiling Shell by domferr and install it.Disable Ubuntu snapping from the shell extension manager, and enable tiling. a new menu appears top left on the task bar to select the window layout. Hot keys can be defined in the extension manager.This also allows you to view and configure any options for the tiling manager, but by default the keybindings are super (windows key) + arrow keys. A new icon will appear at the top of the desktop, indicating windows in a tiled pattern. This lets you control what tiling option is currently enabled, as well as creating additional ones.

Tiling shell is a really neat little extension. Historically I’ve used gTile, also a gnome shell extension, but have found it a bit harder to setup – it is more flexible though.

Web Browsers and Plugins

Ubuntu Desktop 24.04 ships with Firefox as it’s default web browser. Firefox is one of the only open source browsers that is not based on the Chromium engine, used by Chromium, Chrome, Brave, etc. While it’s title position as the most used web browser is long lost to history, it is still highly recommended and there’s no reason to install another browser, unless you’re a web developer and need some additional browsers for testing. The only thing worth doing is installing some plugins.

Blocking adverts has become a default, given how obtrusive they have become. Firefox supports uBlock Origin and it is available from it’s own extensions site. To find it, open Firefox and enter “about:addons” in the address bar. This will take you to the extensions screen where you can “Find more add-ons” and search for it.

There are other plugins for firefox which may be worth browsing through to see if you like the look of them. A password manager like BitWarden or LastPass may be useful, as may Privacy Badger or Facebook Container – both used to help maintain privacy.

 

Quality of Life Additional Software

Cleaning up old snaps

Annoyingly, Ubuntu’s snap ecosystem does not automatically remove old snaps when new versions are installed. While it’s not clear if there have been improvements in Ubuntu 24.04, certainly 22.04 needed a dedicated script to help clean up these old snaps. It seems reasonable to include the script on Ubuntu 24.04 just in case:

#!/bin/bash
# Removes old revisions of snaps
# CLOSE ALL SNAPS BEFORE RUNNING THIS
set -eu
snap list --all | awk '/disabled/{print $1, $3}' |
    while read snapname revision; do
        snap remove "$snapname" --revision="$revision"
    done

This can then be executed as part of general system updates:

sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade -y; sudo ~/clean_snaps.sh

 

Aliases

Lots of people use aliases in their shell to streamline commonly used commands or sets of commands, however I like to re-enforce my use of standard commands so I can be relatively systems agnostic. If I pick up work doing support on someone elses Linux system I am not fighting my own muscle memory using aliases that don’t exist. Should you wish to setup your own aliases, this can be done using the ~/.bash_aliases file.

Firewall

One final note on the base machine setup is that by default Ubuntu 24.04 (infact any Ubuntu version) does not start the system firewall by default. Usually it’s better to enable it, even if your machine does not have any ports open by default. This can be done simply with the following command:

sudo ufw enable