Make Ubuntu Look Like Mac OS X
Dayna Delabarre
Generally, it's safe in the sense that it's unlikely to introduce malware to your system. But that's not a guarantee -- there are instructions there to install random software from github. We don't know what are in those files.
Generally, it's NOT safe in the sense that it won't break your system. It probably won't break your system today. But eventually it might. Gnome changes a lot from release to release, and there is no guarantee that your changes will keep working or will remain compatible.
Also, while it may look great, it won't truly behave like MacOS. It will behave like Linux wearing a MacOS costume. MacOS applications won't work. HFS+ files will have permission problems. MacOS settings and behaviors simply won't be there at all. A user familiar with MacOS might get frustrated --even confused-- by those little differences unless you prepare them in advance.
I don't have time at the moment to watch the full video, but if all you're generally doing is altering the appearance of GNOME, you shouldn't have too much to worry about. With Timeshift, you're generally also protected from goofing and losing your desktop environment, so it should be just fine.
It's important to remember that flexibility is part of the GNOME standards and general culture (as it is for other desktop environments like KDE Plasma and XFCE). Not everyone works well in the same environment, after all. So altering things like the menu layout is no more dangerous than, say, changing your desktop wallpaper.
The only thing I've seen that is worth commenting on is the "git clone" part. Github is a private website, and it is not a part of your distro in itself; anybody can upload anything to such services. So, when you get to the part about executing shell files ("*.sh"), you want to make absolutely certain that you trust where these files are coming from. Personally I would shy away from that, but it's perfectly plausible that it's innocuous.
Unless we looked at the actual contents of the shell files, it's very difficult to say how safe this is. Politely, if you're very new to Ubuntu, I might suggest playing with the settings yourself and seeing if you can find something that works well for you, before handing control over to an unknown script writer. Even if it's well meaning, there's always the possibility that a dependency mismatch, or other subtle change, is going to prevent things from working out; with the UI tools you don't usually need to worry about that.
To make Ubuntu 12.04 look like Windows Vista would take a bunch of time and effort, and you might break your system doing all those changes. As an alternative you can install Kubuntu that is the KDE (Desktop Environment) specifically modified for Ubuntu, it looks a little like Windows.
But the recommended way to do that is downloading the Kubuntu ISO. it's like downloading Ubuntu, but instead of using the Unity shell interface it will comes with KDE installed by default. To download the ISO file access Kubuntu.org to get more information about it.
Although my laptop is more than capable of running Windows 11 that is never going to happen. While Windows 11 is no doubt an awesome operating system with stunning visuals and very impressive under the hood improvements I stopped dual-booting many years ago. That was after discovering that the only time I was booting into Windows was to install updates.
I would strongly recommend method three. Despite it being known as KDE Neon. This is actually Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and it comes without tweaks that could trip you if you try to follow the guide provided in the video above.
Linux and Windows are founded on very different philosophies. You cannot for example expect to install Windows software onto Ubuntu just because they now look the same. However, these days most stuff happens in the cloud. If you are a company that works a lot using browsers you can have this Windows 11 like setup for your employees without having to fork out money for Windows and no one would be the wiser until they started poking around.
As a man with a keen eye for aesthetic details, I do like the concept of trying to make operating systems mimic their rivals, provided this can be done with elegance, style, quality and attention to detail. A great example would be the Macbuntu transformation pack. Including but not limited to.
Now, Windows 10. Say what you will about it, it ain't ugly. It's actually a reasonably pretty distro, although the whole flatness deal is a bit overplayed. But since Linux can be made to look like anything, I set about testing, in Ubuntu, Kubuntu and even Linux Mint, to see whether this is something worth your time and decorative skills in the first place. Will this work? An open question. After me.
My first obstacle was finding the right package. There are several options available, some outdated, others incompatible, but in the end, I settled on Windows 10 Light and Dark Theme by B00merang, available on GitHub. This appears to be the most mature and most actively developed transformation pack. Best yet, according to small print, it should run on all sorts of desktops environments and whatnot.
I started with Ubuntu Artful. There's an installation script that should help you get the desired results. Let it run, make the correct choices, observe the end result. Alas, it wasn't as trivial as it sounds.
You cannot apply custom shell themes to Gnome without installing an extensions that allows custom shell themes. Fail. Also, the Ubuntu dock is quite pervasive, so you will need to remove it first before you can have a bottom-panel only arrangement with an alternative dock. I've outlined this in my Aardvark pimping article.
In the end, I had the theming in place. Did it look like Windows 10, though? Well, not really. Even with the dock at the bottom of the screen, Gnome just does not have what it takes to look like Windows. No system menu, to start with. And the styling is just all wrong.
Next, the Plasma edition of the Ubuntu family. Alas, this did not work at all. Like at all. The installation script, despite what it says on GitHub, was unable to identify the Plasma environment. I did have the icons available, but no desktop theme. So this was in fact a dud. Oversold. Ah, well.
My attempt was with Mint Cinnamon next - as it is GTK-based and also comes with a very Windows layout, so this one might work out to be the best fit for the exercise. Only this didn't work out quite as I planned either. The overall visual effect was not very good, with some jarring glitches. I decided not to spend any great amount of time testing.
The Cinnamon defaults are already Windowsy in a way, but then, when I applied the theme, the icons were not vertically centered in the bottom panel, and I had to resize it to get a more balanced look. Likewise, the update icon in the system area is just too huge, and the menu looks nothing like Windows 10.
I tried the three available flavors - Light, Dark and Metro, and while the last does offer the best overall look & feel, there are still a lot of inconsistencies compared to what the distro offers natively, and also what you get in Windows 10. The transformation never quite yields results that are satisfactory enough for prolonged use. So.
This article is not intended to disparage the transformation project. On the contrary, this is the only set of themes and icons that actually did work! Alas, the final cut is far from complete. There are way too many visual issues and bugs to warrant keeping around, and far from the expected result, which would be Windows 10. Shame, because if there's at least one thing that Microsoft does well, it's the visual layer.
Oddly, or perhaps not, Plasma is the closest to the intended idea in its native form, and the pack doesn't really work there. Cinnamon is up there too, but it has a more archaic approach to the theme, and Ubuntu is way too different. It's not surprising that Macbuntu seems like a much better, more natural fit. And in a way, we've come a full circle without accomplishing anything. Well, not quite. It shows that nailing down the look & feel is tricky, Linux distros and other operating systems have their essential je ne sais quoi, and they are best left alone. All that said, tight said Fred, I'd like to see this transformation project, and any other similar endeavor succeed. Always good to have some color and spice on your desktop. Take care.
Now to do that first, you need to install KDE Plasma desktop environment. In case you use a distribution which comes with it, like Kubuntu, you can skip this step, otherwise you'll need to install this.
I didn't want to install a full-on set up, and even the standard seemed a bit extra to me, so what I chose, was to install kde-plasma-desktop and then install few more packages which I thought were necessary on top of it.
When installing these, at the time of kde-plasma configuration it will ask you to choose a display manager. For me the choices were gdm3 which is what gnome used, or sddm which kde plasma uses. For plasma to work properly, you need to choose sddm here. I went back to Gnome , still running sddm, and it seemed to work fine, but if needed you can revert back by using
After installation, you should restart the system, and at the login screen, there will either be an option to choose your desktop manager, or by default it will boot in kde-plasma. For me it by defualt booted into kde-plasma.
In case you decide to change your desktop as per this, let me know how kde-plasma feels to you in comments. If you already have a setup that looks and feels cool, please post its pictures in the comments too, I would really like to see them :)
Is there a way to change/replace the default Ubuntu terminal with Git-bash(look and behavior) of Window? Basically, the terminal should display all the necessary information related with current branch/repo, just like it does in Window.
If you opted to use GNOME Shell back in Step 1 install the excellent Dash to Dock extension from the GNOME extensions site. This dock can be adjusted, tweaked and tune to look exactly like its macOS counterpart.
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