What kind of cool things can I do with Unity?

[PatrickMoore]

I used to love the ability to theme gnome and make my desktop my own. and wanted insight as to what I can do to personalize my Ubuntu experience. I used ubuntu up to about a year and a half ago and have yet to use Unity and I am compelled to see what I can get out of it

[fontis]

With Unity itself? Pretty much nothing other than maybe changing iconsize on the launcher lol.

In fact it's a lot like the level of customization you get to do with Windows 7 for instance and the standard shell and launcher.
You can change your system icons, your "window theme" and your background... and that's about it. None of the funky stuff from before works, and the experience will always remain the same.

[Erik1984]

By default not so much but you can install tools like MyUnity or UbuntuTweak and Compiz Config Settings Manager. That way you can still achieve the old effects like wobbly windows. Outside that Unity is quite cool in it's default setup if you ask me

[forrestcupp]

There's not as much theming and customizing to be done in Unity. You can change your wallpaper.

You can also use it to run Firefox and LibreOffice.

[vasa1]

There's not as much theming and customizing to be done in Unity. You can change your wallpaper.

You can also use it to run Firefox and LibreOffice.

Awesome stuff! Where did you get this information from?

To repeat:
You can change your wallpaper
You can run Firefox
You can run LibreOffice

Really!

[Glencore]

Can it run Chrome?

Like the other guy said there are more options these days (myunity). Hopefully more in the future

[PatrickMoore]

With Unity itself? Pretty much nothing other than maybe changing iconsize on the launcher lol.

In fact it's a lot like the level of customization you get to do with Windows 7 for instance and the standard shell and launcher.
You can change your system icons, your "window theme" and your background... and that's about it. None of the funky stuff from before works, and the experience will always remain the same.

I can see where this will enhance the stability of my system. I mean it looks nice, but am always game for some playing around. I'll try my unity and keep my eyes open for a Mate version in the next few releases.
To clarify I don't dislike Unity but I miss the aesthetics of Mate as I liked the look and feel

[synaptix]

Have you tried XFCE?

[whatthefunk]

You can get Unity off your system, install KDE and go nuts! KDE really can not be beat for customization features.
My current KDE setup, dual monitors:



Exactly how I want it, not how Canonical wants me to want it.

[vexorian]

But then you would be using KDE instead of Unity. Which is not great if you think unity is better. (sorry, your screenshot looks like windows 7 :/ )

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Anyway, I am this close of reaching boiling point and forking unity but thank god I am very lazy.

The unity launcher does not have many options, but you can change its color to stop using the wallpaper stuff. You can also make it completely transparent and auto hidden. The GTK theme and icons can be changed too. You can also add new lenses and stuff like that.

In fact, I am quite sure that unity's images can be edited (At least I am sure that in case of unity-2d you can change the images and the layout using CSS). The problem is that there is no real theme support, so you would be replacing the current theme.

Then if the images really exist somewhere in the hard drive, then we can make a theme manager. A very messy one at that that replaces images and makes backups. But a theme manager at last.