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Comment by manvsmachine | Hacker News Reader

The first thing I usually do is change the look, ubuntu's default UI is too basic for my tastes. Here's a shot of my desktop: http://www.flickr.com/photos/manvsmachine/2319405794/

a good place to start for appearance is http://www.gnome-look.org

as far as apps go, here's what I have running: VLC (multi-format media player), songbird, deluge (GNOME BitTorrent client), Eclipse, GnomeBaker, Avant Window Navigator (OS X-like dock), Blender (3D authoring software), Inkscape(vector imaging), Picasa, some others... of course, all the plugins, apache, languages / libraries for whatever you plan on running...

There are a lot of different ways you can go with it; it would help if you gave an idea of what functionality you 're looking for. Is this for strictly dev, or do you do image / graphics work, etc? The Ubuntu forums are a good place to start.

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Nice tips! I just configured my UI to the following: http://picasaweb.google.com/dskhatri/Screenshots/photo#51756...

I used:

- avant window navigator (https://launchpad.net/awn)

- Murrina Eternal Blue theme from http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Murrina-Eternal_b... (uses murrine engine)

- Humanoid-OSX Black window border (http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Humanoid-OSX-Blac...)

- Emacs theming: Clarity and Beauty (https://gna.org/projects/color-theme)

- Conky system monitor (yet to create my own config file)

Nice! Also loved the car pics you have put up there! Anyway, What do you do for messengers? I use yahoo messenger extensively for work(I work remotely) and I need the voice chat feature and it just doesn't work on ubuntu, I hate that :(.

I use pidgin as my main messenger, also have skype but don't use it much... The yahoo support for it is decent, not really sure about voice though

edit: Try gyachi for better yahoo chat support. Haven't used it myself, but it seems to be pretty popular on the forum.

That's a great list, right now I' trying Avant Window Navigator, I'll just add Exaile! for music, Geany and Bluefish editors for coding and of course The Gimp.

Can you post a link to the theme you use ? If you customized it, do you mind sharing it ?

Icons: http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/black-white?conte...

Window Theme: http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Humanoid+-+OSX+-+...

I think I got the background from DeviantArt, not positive though. And I just messed with the window color settings until the menus were a grey / titanium color.

edit: make sure you install the compizconfig-settings-manager package. That gives you the ability to set your own compiz settings for animations, transparencies, etc.

thanks, nice desktop! Avant window navigator is pretty cool.

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