Linux Mint is one the best Linux distributions for beginners . Especially Windows users that want to switch to Linux , will find its flagship Cinnamon desktop environment very familiar.

Cinnamon gives a traditional desktop experience and many users like it as it is. It doesn’t mean you have to content with what it provides. Cinnamon provides several ways for customizing the desktop.

Reading about MATE and KDE customization guides, many readers requested similar tutorial for Linux Mint Cinnamon as well. Hence, I created this basic guide on tweaking the looks and feel of Cinnamon desktop.

7 Different Ways for Customizing Cinnamon Desktop

For this tutorial, I’m using Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE 4). You can use this on any Linux distribution that is running Cinnamon. If you are unsure, here’s how to check which desktop environment you are using.

When it comes to changing the cinnamon desktop appearance, I find it very easy to do so as it is just 2 clicks away. Click on the menu icon and then on settings as shown below.

All the appearance settings are placed on the top of the window. Everything on “System Settings” window looks neat and tidy.

1. Effects

The effects options are simple, self-explanatory and straightforward. You can turn on and off the effects for different elements of the desktop or change the window transitioning by changing the effects style. If you want to change the speed of the effects, you can do it through the customise tab.

2. Font Selection

In this section, you can differentiate the fonts you use throughout the system in size and type, and through the font settings you can fine-tune the appearance.

3. Themes and icons

A reason that I used to be a Linux Mint user for a few years, is that you don’t need to go all over the place to change what you want. Window manager, icon and panel customization all in one place!

You can change your panel to a dark or light colour and the window borders to suit your changes. The default Cinnamon appearance settings look the best in my eyes, and I even applied the exact same when I was testing the Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix but in orange colour.

4. Cinnamon Applets

Cinnamon applets are all the elements included at your bottom panel like the calendar or the keyboard layout switcher. At the manage tab, you can add/remove the already installed applets.

You should definitely explore the applets you can download, the weather and CPU temperature Indicator applets were my choices from the extras.

5. Cinnamon Desklets

Cinnamon Desklets are applications that can be placed directly to your desktop. Like all the other customization option, Desklets can be accessed from the settings menu and the wide variety of choices can attract anyone’s interest. Google calendar is a handy app to keep track of your schedule directly on your desktop.

6. Desktop wallpaper

To change the desktop background on Cinnamon desktop, simply right click on the desktop and choose “Change Desktop Background. It will open an easy to use window, where on the left side the available background system folders are listed and on the ride pane there is a preview of the images within each folder.

You can add your own folders by clicking the plus (+) symbol by navigating to its path. At the Settings tab you can choose if you background will be static or slideshow and how the background is being positioned on the screen.

7. Customize what’s on your desktop screen

The background is not the only desktop element that you can change. You can find more options if you right click on the desktop and click on “Customise”.

You can change the icon size, change the placement from vertical to horizontal and the spacing among them on both axis. If you don’t like what you did, click in reset grid spacing to go back to the default.

Additionally, if you click on “Desktop Settings”, more options will be revealed. You can disable the icons on the desktop, place them on the primary or secondary monitor, or even both. As you can see, you can select some of the icons to appear on your desktop.

Conclusion

Cinnamon desktop is one of the best to choose, especially if you are switching from windows to Linux , but also for someone who is looking to a simple yet elegant desktop.

Cinnamon desktop is very stable and never crashed on my hands, and it is one of the main reasons why it served me for so long on a variety of Linux distributions.

I didn’t go in much details but gave you enough pointers to explore the settings on your own. Your feed to improve Cinnamon cuztomization is welcome.

KDE Plasma desktop is unarguably the pinnacle of customization, as you can change almost anything you want. You can go to the extent of making it act as a tiling window manager .

KDE Plasma can confuse a beginner by the degree of customization it offers. As options tend to pile on top of options, the user starts getting lost.

To address that issue, I’ll show you the key points of KDE Plasma customization that you should be aware of. This is some

Customizing KDE Plasma

I have used KDE Neon in this tutorial, but you may follow it with any distribution that uses KDE Plasma desktop.

1. Plasma Widgets

Desktop widgets can add convenience to the user experience, as you can immediately access important items on the desktop.

Students and professionals nowadays are working with computers more than ever before, a useful widget can be sticky notes.

Right-click on the desktop and select “Add Widgets”.

Choose the widget you like, and simply drag and drop it to the desktop.

2. Desktop wallpaper

This one is too obvious. Changing the wallpaper to change the looks of your desktop.

At the wallpaper tab you can change more than just the wallpaper. From the “Layout” pulldown menu, you can select if your desktop will have icons or not.

The “Folder View” layout is named from the traditional desktop folder in your home directory, where you can access your desktop files. Thus, the “Folder View” option will retain the icons on the desktop.

If you select the “Desktop” layout, it will leave your desktop icon free and plain. However, you will still be able to access the desktop folder at the home directory.

In Wallpaper Type , you can select if you want a wallpaper or not, to be still or to change and finally in Positioning , how it looks on your screen.

3. Mouse Actions

Each mouse button can be configured to one of the following actions:

• Switch Desktop
• Paste
• Switch Window
• Standard Menu
• Application Launcher
• Switch Activity

The right-click is set to Standard Menu , which is the menu when you right-click on the desktop. The contents of the menu can be changed by clicking on the settings icon next to it.

4. Location of your desktop content

This option is only available if you select the “Folder View” in the wallpaper tab. By default, the content shown on your desktop is what you have at the desktop folder at the home directory. The location tab gives you the option to change the content on your desktop, by selecting a different folder.

5. Desktop Icons

Here you can select how the icons will be arranged (horizontally or vertically), right or left, the sorting criteria and their size. If this is not enough, you have additional aesthetic features to explore.

6. Desktop Filters

Let’s be honest with ourselves! I believe every user ends up with a cluttered desktop at some point. If your desktop becomes messy and can’t find a file, you can apply a filter either by name or type and find what you need. Although, it’s better to make a good file housekeeping a habit!

7. Application Dashboard

If you like the GNOME 3 application launcher, you may try the KDE application dashboard. All you have to do is to right click on the menu icon > Show Alternatives.

Click on “Application Dashboard”.

8. Window Manager Theme

Like you saw in Xfce customization tutorial , you can change the window manager theme independently in KDE as well. This way you can choose a different theme for the panel and a different theme for the window manager. If the preinstalled themes are not enough, you can download more.

Inspired from MX Linux Xfce edition though, I couldn’t resist to my favourite “Arc Dark”.

Navigate to Settings > Application Style > Window decorations > Theme

9. Global theme

As mentioned above, the look and feel of the KDE plasma panel can be configured from the Settings > Global theme tab. There isn’t a good number of themes preinstalled, but you can download a theme to suit your taste. The default Breeze Dark is an eye candy, though.

10. System Icons

The system icon style can have significant impact on how the desktop looks. Whichever is your choice, you should choose the dark icon version if your global theme is dark. The only difference lies on the icon text contrast, which is inverted to the panel colour to make it readable. You can easy access the icon tab at the system settings.

11. System fonts

System fonts are not at the spotlight of customization, but if you spend half of your day in front of a screen can be one factor of the eye strain. Users with dyslexia will appreciate the OpenDyslexic font. My personal choice is the Ubuntu font, which not only I find aesthetically pleasing but also a good font to spend my day in front of a screen.

You can, of course, install more fonts on your Linux system by downloading them for external sources.

Conclusion

KDE Plasma is one of the most flexible and customizable desktops available to the Linux community. Whether you are a tinkerer or not, KDE Plasma is a constantly evolving desktop environment with amazing modern features. The best part is that it can also manage on moderate system configurations.

Now I tried to make this guide beginner-friendly. Of course, there can be more advanced customization like that window switching ani mation . If you are aware of some, why not share it with us in the comment section?

When you log into Ubuntu, you’ll see the dock on the left side with some application icons on it. This dock (also known as launcher or sometimes as panel) allows you to quickly launch your frequently used programs.

I rely heavily on the dock and I am going to share a few tips about using the dock effectively and customize its looks and position.

You’ll learn the following in this tutorial:

• Basic usage of the dock: adding more applications and using shortcuts for launching applications.
• Customize the looks of the dock: Change the icon size, icon positions.
• Change the position: for single screen and multi-monitor setup
• Hide mounted disk from the dock
• Auto-hide or disable the dock
• Possibility of additional dock customization with dconf-editor
• Replace dock with other docking applications

I’ll use the terms dock, panel and launcher in the tutorial. All of them refer to the same thing.

Using the Ubuntu dock: Absolute basic that you must know

If you are new to Ubuntu, you should know a few things about using the dock. You’ll eventually discover these dock features, I’ll just speed up the discovery process for you.

Add new applications to the dock (or remove them)

The steps are simple. Search for the application from the menu and run it.

The running application appears in the dock, below all other icons. Right click on it and select the “Add to Favorites” option. This will lock the icon to the dock.

Removing an app icon from the doc is even easier. You don’t even need to run the application. Simply right click on it and select “Remove From Favorites”.

Reorder icon position

By default, new application icons are added after all the other icons on the launcher. You don’t have to live with it as it is.

To change the order of the icons, you just need to drag and drop to the other position of your choice. No need to “lock it” or any additional effort. It stays on that location until you make some changes again.

Reorder Icons On Ubuntu Docks

Right click to get additional options for some apps

Left-clicking on an icon launches the application or bring it to focus if the application is already running.

Right-clicking the icon gives you additional options. Different applications will have different options.

For browsers, you can open a new private window or preview all the running windows.

For file manager, you can go to all the bookmarked directories or preview opened windows.

You can, of course, quit the application. Most applications will quit while some applications like Telegram will be minimized to the system tray.

Use keyboard shortcut to launch applications quickly [Not many people know about this one]

The dock allows you to launch an application in a single mouse click. But if you are like me, you can save that mouse click with a keyboard shortcut.

Using the Super/Window key and a number key will launch the application on that position.

If the application is already running, it is brought to focus, i.e. it appears in front of all the other running application windows.

Since it is position-based, you should make sure that you don’t reorder the icons all the time. Personally, I keep Firefox at position 1, file manager at 2 and the alternate browser at 3 and so on until number 9. This way, I quickly launch the file manager with Super+2.

I find it easier specially because I have a three screen setup and moving the mouse to the launcher on the first screen is a bit too much of trouble. You can enable or disable the dock on additional screen. I’ll show that to you later in this tutorial.

Change the position of the dock

By default, the dock is located on the left side of your screen. Some people like the launcher at the bottom, in a more traditional way.

Ubuntu allows you to change the position of the dock. You can move it to the bottom or to the right side or on the top. I am not sure many people actually put the dock on the top or the right side, so moving the dock to the top is not an option here.

To change the dock position, go to Settings->Appearance. You should see some options under Dock section. You need to change the “Position on screen” settings here.

Position of dock on a multiple monitor setup

If you have multiple screens attached to your system, you can choose whether to display the dock on all screens or one of chosen screens.

Ubuntu Dock Settings Multimonitor

Personally, I display the dock on my laptop screen only which is my main screen. This gives me maximum space on the additional two screens.

Change the appearance of the dock

Let’s see some more dock customization options in Ubuntu.

Imagine you added too many applications to the dock or have too many applications open. It will fill up the space and you’ll have to scroll to the top and bottom to go to the applications at end points.

What you can do here is to change the icon size and the dock will now accommodate more icons. Don’t make it too small, though.

To do that, go to Settings-> Appearance and change it by moving the slider under Icon size. The default icons size is 48 pixels.

Hide mounted disks from the launcher

If you plug in a USB disk or SD Card, it is mounted to the system, and an icon appear in the launcher immediately. This is helpful because you can right click on it and select safely remove drive option.

If you somehow find it troublesome, you can turn this feature off. Don’t worry, you can still access the mounted drives from the file manager.

Open a terminal and use the following command:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.dash-to-dock show-mounts false

The changes take into effect immediately. You won’t be bothered with mounted disk being displayed in the launcher.

If you want the default behavior back, use this command:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.dash-to-dock show-mounts true

Change the behavior of dock

Let’s customize the default behavior of the dock and make it more suitable to your needs.

Enable minimize on click

If you click on the icon of a running application, its window will be brought to focus. That’s fine. However, if you click on it, nothing happens. By default, clicking on the same icon won’t minimize the application.

Well, this is the behavior in modern desktop, but I don’t like it. I prefer that the application is minimized when I click on its icon for the second time.

If you are like me, you may want to enable click to minimize option in Ubuntu :

To do that, open a terminal and enter the following command:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.dash-to-dock click-action 'minimize'

Auto-hide Ubuntu dock and get more screen space

If you want to utilize the maximum screen space, you can enable auto-hide option for the dock in Ubuntu.

This will hide the dock, and you’ll get the entire screen. The dock is still accessible, though. Move your cursor to the location of the dock where it used to be, and it will appear again. When the dock reappears, it is overlaid on the running application window. And that’s a good thing otherwise too many elements would start moving on the screen.

The auto-hide option is available in Settings-> Appearance and under Dock section. Just toggle it.

If you don’t like this behavior, you can enable it again the same way.

Disable Ubuntu dock

Auto-hide option is good enough for many people, but some users simply don’t like the dock. If you are one of those users, you also have the option to disable the Ubuntu dock entirely.

Starting with Ubuntu 20.04, you have the Extensions application available at your disposal to manage GNOME Extensions .

With this Extensions application, you can easily disable or re-enable the dock.

Advanced dock customization with dconf-editor [Not recommended]

The dconf editor gives you additional options to customize the dock in Ubuntu. Install it from the software center and then navigate to org > gnome > shell > extensions > dash-to-dock. You’ll find plenty of options here. I cannot even list them all here.

Replace the dock in Ubuntu

There are several third-party dock applications available for Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. You can install a dock of your choice and use it.

For example, you can install Plank dock from the software center and use it in similar fashion to Ubuntu dock.

Disabling Ubuntu Dock would be a better idea in this case. It won’t be wise to use multiple docks at the same time.

Conclusion

This tutorial is about customizing the default dock or launcher provided in Ubuntu’s GNOME implementation. Some suggestions should work on the dock in vanilla GNOME as work well.

I have shown you most of the common Ubuntu dock customization. You don’t need to go and blindly follow all of them. Read and think which one suits your need and then act upon it.

Was it too trivial or did you learn something new? Would you like to see more such tutorials? I welcome your suggestions and feedback on dock customization.