Separate Unity settings from Gnome ones.

[lucacerone]

Dear all,
I've recently upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04.
Although I find easier at the moment to work using
a Gnome session, I'd like to get used to Unity as well.
What I find a bit annoying at the moment is that Unity
seems to use some of the settings from Gnome.
For example all the gnome launchers have been added to the Unity
sidebar. Also the desktop launchers are shared between the two environments.
If I add a launcher on the desktop in a Gnome session it will be visible
in a Unity session.
I think the two environments have their own strength and weakness,
so I'd like to keep them as separated as possible and customize
each of them in the best way for that environment, without having to
worry if and how a modification in Unity would affect my Gnome session.

Said that what I'd like to be able to do now is clean my Unity session,
restoring it as it comes with a fresh Ubuntu installation,
without losing all the desktop launcher and settings of my gnome session.
Can I do such a thing? Can you please help me, or put me on the right direction?

Thanks a lot in advance,
Cheers, -Luca

[coffeecat]

Can I do such a thing?

No. Unity is simply a compiz plugin running on top of gnome. The gnome panels are replaced by the Unity panel in a Unity session, but apart from that the desktop is the same in both Unity and classic gnome.

You may find the two links in my sig useful. Also, there's some useful Unity tutorials and howtos here:

http://ubuntu4beginners.blogspot.com/

[lucacerone]

thanks Coffeecat.
I'll go through your guides and check if I can improve the usability
of both the sessions.
In my opinion it would be good to keep the settings
of the two session manager separated (is there any place
I can suggest this?).
If you use both KDE and Gnome on your system you can mess with one
session without affecting the other, and I think it is very convenient.

Thanks a lot in any case,
Luca

[coffeecat]

In my opinion it would be good to keep the settings
of the two session manager separated (is there any place
I can suggest this?).
If you use both KDE and Gnome on your system you can mess with one
session without affecting the other, and I think it is very convenient.


I think you missed what I said. Unity is gnome. There's a limit on what can be separated between Unity and the classic desktop. Gnome versus KDE is quite a different matter because they have different hidden configuration files.

Good luck with tweaking Unity though.

[lucacerone]

I've understood that Unity is on top of gnome.
But I don't think it would be that hard to keep
two sets of files rather than reading the default
gnome ones (but I'm just a user, not a developer.. so I might
underestimate the work that needs to be done
to have them separated).

In any case thanks again for the help :)