Complete Linux Mint Tutorial: Customizing The Desktop

ready to make your mint desktop look cool and flashy like a flaming new hot rod well this video is all for you we're about to spice things up and teach you how to customize your Linux Mint desktop to look amazing [Music] free your mind so this is the part that everyone loves most dearly about Linux it's one of the greatest benefits that's been around since its inception since the desktop was a wee lad growing up and exploring his own world this is going to be dedicated to the customization of Linux Mint and this is going to be everything from the icons to the toolbar to the placement of the toolbar to the desktop itself the appearances we're going to go through all of that right now so let's begin with the simplest one we've covered this a bit in the opening videos the first couple of videos but we're going to right click on the desktop and go to change desktop background and that's just going to be a quick shortcut to open up the backgrounds window so from there this is pretty standard that most people are familiar with if you want to choose from a set of a collection of wallpapers from previous releases of Linux Mint you can select these in the left hand column here and then if you want to change the wallpaper you simply left-click any of the pictures in this area and it's going to change it by default so I'm gonna stick with Machu Picchu because that just looks cool I love this look and I love the trees and the green and the woods and it's fantastic so I'm gonna go with that okay so one of the things that I personally like to do and I'm going to give you a couple of my personal favorite things but you can do this however you want this is just showing you again some of the cool things that are possible for me I actually put the panel at the top I am NOT a panel at the bottom guy ever since this feature was available in the earliest releases of Ubuntu I have loved having the panel at the top that's just me so how I do that is I right-click on the panel down here and I go to modify panel and it gives me a couple of options and the easiest thing to do is to click on move panel and you'll see three options appear I can on the left the top and the right and you see the text here select new position of the panel or you could press the Escape key to cancel I'm going to hover my mouse up to the top and you'll see the color slightly shift from a lighter red to a darker shade of red and then you can left-click it to confirm your choice and now the panel is on the top there you go and that looks very dashing and sleek up there another thing I like to do personally is I'd like to have the option to auto hide the panel because when I'm using it I like to have my window space available to me I like to be able to work with my main windows full screen without needing to hit a key to go full screen I don't need to see these pant these icons regularly I don't need to see the clock most of these things I don't need to do unless I'm actually switching windows which I personally rectify by just hovering my mouse up to the top and then this top panel appears and I can switch my windows from there now it doesn't have to be this way again I'm just showing you what's available so you can right-click and go to panel settings and you're gonna see a couple of options appear for the panel in this case panel ability is the first one which gives you a chance to all to hide it so if you want to always show it or if you want to auto hide or intelligently hide which means that it will stay visible up until you move a window towards it or in its place so now if I movement this panel window up into the space where the panel is you notice you're going to notice how it automatically hides itself so if I maximize this window it's going to make the panel disappear and I can now hover my mouse over it like that and that's how I would make the panel appear simply by hovering my mouse over it to the top edge of the screen here so I'm going to switch it back to always show panel just so I can keep it the default if you want to change the height of the panel ever if you want smaller or bigger icons you can change that here in the panel height you can left-click and scroll to the left and to the right and you'll notice how it's automatically resizing the panel up at the top it's give me anything all the way down there's smallest 22 as large as 60 pixels so it can get pretty big and that's it's again this is all depends on your preference not their standard is 40 and that for now I'm just gonna leave that the way it is so you can play with all of these options and just dial it in to find out exactly how you like the panel to look this is one of the things I really love about Linux Mint and eventually what drew me away from boon 2 which is the Linux distribution the version that this is based off of I chose to use this as my daily machine my daily operating system because I liked the customization features that were available for the panel out of the box that you just didn't have in the gnome desktop which is the one that opens who uses now for its desktop version you can customize it still but frankly I like the fact that these are all right here they're ready to go as soon as you install your machine that you have plenty of options and they all work and they were designed to work with Linux Mint there's no issues or compatibility issues so that's one of the reasons I love this operating system and I love teaching people about it is because this is really designed with the user in mind it's designed to be familiar but also to be flexible again out of the box so let's continue on with our customization adventure we're going to open up the men's menu and just type in the word theme and you're going to see the themes option up here you can left click that or hit the enter key whichever you prefer and that's going to open up the themes window so you're going to see again this is very easy to use very user friendly but the first one at the top here is going to be the window borders so left clicking these buttons here are going to show you a list of options for what they can look like so you can go with the more traditional version of mint this was the one of the original looks of it which was mint X which you would find in previous releases of linux mint and then mint y is the name of their newest style the the contemporary the modern style that you see that's installed by default or if you prefer the dark theme again out of the box you have a dark theme that's available for your window borders and the dark theme is available all across the board so you can have a purely dark theme which is actually what I personally use on my machine so like the icons for example there are lots of icons to choose from lots of lots of color schemes specifically so if you wanted to change it to say gnomes default icons you could do that and you see now the desktop icons and the quick launch icons have changed and so has every option here in the application menu so nothing has changed about the program simply the icons have been changed to that particular set you can do the same by changing them to mint X red and as you'll see they've changed up here and the same thing here or you can you can play around with these and you can really find what you prefer there are two main things I want to point out here Mint y is the default icon set for your computer and then there's mint white dark there's also mint X up here and mint X dark so one of the things I had to learn is that if you're using a dark colored Window System or dark-colored theme for your desktop you're going to want to select one of these dark icons because some of these icons are actually designed to contrast against a darker or black background and that's going to help you sometimes if you're looking for something maybe there's a button up here and then maybe the icon is a darker color because it's meant to contrast against this white background here of this window well that's not going to work if you have a dark background it's going to be hard to see and distinguish so they made this particular icon set anything with the word dark in it which is going to work better in a dark theme so the fun part that you'll get to see here is the controls left clicking on the controls opens up again another large array of different colors that you can choose from I'll go to the one that I use by default which is mint wide dark right here and not left-click it and now you'll see we have this nice dark look where all of the buttons and the icons they pop out at you and the empty space isn't necessarily something that drags your attention anymore the text is lightly colored and now it's very easy to see what's being selected and what's being chosen but you can change this to anything you want you can you know mint white teal and you'll see there's a teal color for the the selected items and hey if you just want the conventional gray appearance you know you can do that too Linux Mint is all about choices for now I'm going to go with the dark look just for the rest of this tutorial the mouse pointer not too many options just dmz white and black if you prefer to have a black cursor I can which I do you can change it to that and then lastly there's this desktop option right here and that's mainly for the look of the panel itself so you can change this and you'll notice that let's say if you want it to be the the original cinnamon colors and you'll see the panel up here changes so now if you go to the the clock and it shows the calendar you see now there's a gray border a light gray border and then it's kind of transparent back here and then the selected window has more of a gradient or you know it's a different look like this and that's what these are these are different looks mainly for the cinnamon desktop here the same is with the application menu you'll see it's changed quite a bit it has this this border around it here like just the the subtle color characteristics have changed and again is just all for the purpose of style there's nothing functionally different about this it's just the way if there's a better way that you want your computer to look some people like the light colored panel so you can go click on Mint X here and you'll notice that things have a much brighter color scheme now keep in mind this is this is only changing the panel the menu anything to do with the cinnamon elements which are the elements for the cinnamon desktop you can see this hasn't changed the window border or the window controls or the icons on this desktop area only pertains to up here so just for the sake of demonstration I'll leave that the way it is and if that wasn't enough I I feel like a car salesman or a TV salesman and feel like saying weights but there's more yeah there there is there is more so even check this out if you want to add or remove even user created themes there are a list of online themes that you can download that have just been created by everyday users to even add more to the customization effect of Linux Mint so if you like something let's say there isn't an option here you say I you know these are cool I like these they're kind of stylish but I'm really looking for something different and you look into the add/remove tab over here and let's say let's say for example you just want this one here granite one a dark gradient theme well you can click on the download button right here and left click that and that will download and install it and you'll see the progress bar down at the bottom there once it's complete it's not going to apply the theme you're going to have to go back into the themes and click on desktop over here so now you'll see there's a new option that's appeared granite one graphite one I'm sorry graphite one I need to learn how to read so left clicking that and now you have this user created theme so a lot of graphite okay that makes way more sense now I'm graphite granite cheese so that's how you can use the add/remove tab to look for new themes and install those to be used for in case you just want something completely different completely you you know make linux mint you make it something that you would want to use you enjoy using everyday because that's the benefit you have these options let's say you want it to look more like Ubuntu you can download the ubuntu touch theme and then once that's done you can change that and we can see what that looks like and there you go you have a nice more transparent panel so now it almost looks more like what contemporary Ubuntu looks like with the gnome theme and it's its design that's actually kind of nice okay so I'm gonna leave it this way here again for the sake of demonstration now we're gonna go ahead and close this the only other things I really want to cover for the customization part of this video is more of tweaking the panel up here so whether you have the panel here or on the left side or the right side or on the bottom these things I'm about to show you are pretty Universal for the panel so you are able to oh by the way if you do want to just go into the themes without having to use the application menu you can right click on the panel up here at the top and just go to themes and it's going to open up that same themes window that we were just in a moment ago there you go so right clicking on the panel you're going to see a panel edit mode now this normally throws people off at first and this is why I'm gonna cover it because they don't know what what this is and what this is all about this is a toggle switch here and when you left-click this you're go and see that it's enabled and you're gonna see a couple different areas appear in different colors there's this red area here on the left there's a green area here in the center and there's a blue area here in the right and this is a general placement guidelines for the different elements of Linux Mint now you can customize these and put these wherever you want when panel edit mode is enabled you're able to move the elements of the panel to a different place so let's say for whatever reason if you wanted to left click and drag the menu and you want it to put it here in the center well now the menu is going to be here so when you press the window key or the super key this is where the menus going to open up if you want to move it over to the right you can left-click and drag it over to the right here and you can put it in between any of these icons here and there you go now the menus on the right okay so I'm gonna move that back to its default spot over here but you can see you can do the same thing with any of these simply by left clicking and dragging so you can drag them into the center area here or the left or the right as you can see if I try to drag it into a gray area here it's going to show a black X where my mouse is and that's just saying this option isn't available now another big benefit to this is that you do have custom applets or apps that are available for the panel that you can download and put on they're put on to the panel itself so first I'm going to actually turn off panel edit mode and you're gonna want to disable that you'll know that panel edit mode is off when those three colors red green and blue disappear and you're back to the normal appearance of linux mint so right-clicking and selecting add applets to panel will open up the applets window now again applets are different apps or features that you can put onto the panel in order to give yourself extra features up there so one of the things I like to do when I'm customizing my setup whenever my works machines workspace switcher is something I find really handy because I use a lot of applications open at once and I like to organize them on different screens and that's just me again this is a customization benefit that works for myself and for many other users maybe you might find it great maybe you might not find it great but at least you'll get the chance to try it and figure it try it out for yourself and figure out whether this is something that works for you so to use this applet you simply click the plus button at the bottom and that's going to add it to the panel so you're going to see now at the top right there is this new area that's appeared and this is going to show different workspaces like what we covered in the first video where if I left click this it now goes to the second workspace so let's say if I am if I open up a files window and I'm working on some files and let's say I'm editing a new text file and I've got this project going on over here so now I'm editing this text file but then I you can see my windows are actually showing in this workspace here this is showing what my desktop workspace looks like so if I move this down to the bottom you're going to see that move down to the bottom over here and that kind of helps me remember what I'm working on them in which workspace it's kind of a way for me to personally multitask my machine so if I left click on workspace number one it goes back to the outlets window and this is the first workspace so now let's say I want to move this to a different location well I right-click the panel I go into panel edit mode and turn it on and now I can left-click this and drag it and I can move this I can move it to the center here if I wanted to or I personally once I have everything set up I actually move it right to the right of the Mint menu and then I right-click and I turn off panel edit mode and now I have this feature right here and then I normally right click on this here and I remove the current workspace because I only typically work with two and now it just gives me some extra space and features to work with while I'm using my computer so you can play around with these yourself so you'll find that some of these are already on here checkmark will show that it's already on your panel so in this case the sound applet is what this is right here so this icon here is this is the exact same thing as this same with the show desktop the show desktop is right up here if I had a flash drive installed on this or it plugged into it you would see a removable drives applet appear in the system tray in the top right here so again these are here for you to explore to play around with to find some use for if you find there's something over here that you like you say wow you know I can use this regularly well good news you can put it up here and now it's just a part of your everyday desktop experience for you to enjoy and to use and if that if that wasn't enough but wait there's more you can actually go to the download tab and if it says this that you're your cash is out of date would you like to update it now you can click on yes and you can see just like with the themes before is that many users have created different applets that you can install so there's even more features that you can install to your panel and to use so let's say I wanted to make notes let's say I like this sticky notes applet that's somebody programmed so I can take this left click it and click on install here it's going to download and install it these are small bits of coats they download and install very quickly the check mark will tell me it's installed it's ready to go and I can go over to the manage tab here and click on sticky notes at the top and click on the plus icon to add it to the panel and there we go you can now see a new icon up here and if I left click that it allows me to make some new notes new notes and it's showing up on the desktop mind people linux mint is awesome and there you have it so again these are just things you can play with and figure out how to customize to your comfort and to your performance and to suit your lifestyle needs that's exactly what makes Linux Mint such an amazing free and open-source desktop to use so that about wraps it up for our customization part in this seven part video series really appreciate you watching feel free to click the like button if you found this useful or meaningful in any way I would really appreciate it also if you want to see new content delivered regularly please subscribe we've got a really strong user base and I'd love to have you added to that so that together we can grow and learn more in the world of free software and there's a lot of exciting stuff up ahead so feel free to proceed to the final video that's one of the best ones that's where I'm going to cover the most useful apps that are installed on Linux Mint by default so that you can learn about the most useful apps and Linux Mint and how to make the most of this operating system in the open source software so thanks so much for watching and feel free to go to the next video and we will see you there

Channel: Linux TV

Views: 75,092

Rating: 4.8837352 out of 5

Keywords: linux, mint, tutorial, beginners, beginner, how, to, use, complete, guide, install, apps, software, free, applications, packages, pc, laptop, desktop, cinnamon, easy, lesson, learn, video, help, support, series, manager, remove, manage, launch, run, 19, windows, alternative, free your mind, open-source, open, source, system, settings, system settings, update, update manager, upgrade, package, custom, customize, tweak, look, appearance, panel, 19.1, 19.2, 19.3

Id: DZrRNdFUKcM

Length: 24min 59sec (1499 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 25 2019