Fans of the classic GNOME Desktop can rejoice that it hasn’t been completely removed from Ubuntu 13.04. You can still enable the classic GNOME Desktop by installing gnome session fallback. Some folks out there are still not sold on the new Ubuntu Unity. They still love the classic desktop even if it’s over 20 years old. For others, that’s all they know. It’s easy to access applications, easy to setup and not too difficult to get around. All of these give these users the reasons to stay with the classic desktop.
This brief guide is going to show you how to enable it in Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail.
GNOME is a desktop environment that runs on top of Unix-like operating system. It original goal was to make a desktop environment made of entirely free and open source software. It was the default desktop environment for most Unix-like operating system, including Ubuntu.
Ubuntu has since changed to Unity and may not be the end of the story. Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu is also thinking of replacing Unity with something else.
To get started with enabling GNOME Classic, press Ctrl – Alt – T on your keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, run the commands below to install gnome session fallback, a fallback to GNOME Desktop.
sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback
After installing the package, log out of your current desktop. On the logon screen, select the Ubuntu logo as shown below
Next, choose ‘GNOME Fallback’
Login and you should be greeted with your favorite desktop environment.
That’s it!
If you don’t want to install the fallback mode, you can install Classic Menu Indicator. It allows you to add GNOME Classic Menu to the top panel in Ubuntu. Read about it below.
Enjoy!
