Make Arch look like Ubuntu

Ok, I love the look of Ubuntu, but I love Pacman too, and AUR, and the fast and smooth bloat-free experience in Arch Linux. To make Arch Linux as polished as Ubuntu, I have come up with some minor tweaks and customizations, and I would love to share them with you.

Ubuntu looks… polished

To start with, we need to install GNOME, if it’s not already installed, and you are using some other Desktop Environment like XFCE. So, we will install the gnome group which includes the base GNOME desktop and a subset of well-integrated applications.

sudo pacman -Syyu && sudo pacman -S gnome

Many configuration options such as changing the GTK theme or the window manager theme can’t be found in GNOME settings, for that we need GNOME Tweaks. We will install gnome-tweaks by running the below command.

sudo pacman -S gnome-tweaks

We can now either use our current DM to start the GNOME environment by selecting GNOME Xorg when logging in, or we can use GDM, which provides us the screen locking support in GNOME. To enable GDM, we can use the system management library of GNOME -systemctl.

sudo systemctl enable gdm

If you are using other DM, remove them by-

sudo systemctl disable the_name_of_the_dm

And reboot. Log in as you do.

Then, we will disable the left hot corner, which opens the dashboard if the mouse touches the top-left corner of a monitor screen.

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-hot-corners false

We can download Ubuntu 20.10 wallpapers from a site named Source Digit (https://sourcedigit.com/26241-download-ubuntu-20-10-wallpaper/) and you can set those wallpapers from settings or from the command line like this-

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri 'file:///path/to/my/picture.jpg'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.screensaver picture-uri 'file:///path/to/my/picture.jpg'

We now need to install some themes and icon packs and fonts. For that, we need to install an AUR helper, such as paru. You can use something like YAY as well. But I prefer PARU. This is an AUR helper written in Rust and has the same design as YAY. To install paru, head over to their GitHub page https://github.com/Morganamilo/paru, clone the project, go to the paru folder, and build it using the makepkg script.

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/paru.git
cd paru
makepkg -si

We will now install Human and Hicolor icon theme using Paru, both of which are nice and well polished icon themes for the GNOME desktop.

paru -S humanity-icon-theme yaru-icon-theme hicolor-icon-theme

We will then install gnome-shell-extensions package, which will provide us a set of extensions maintained as part of the GNOME project-

paru -S gnome-shell-extensions

And will enable User Theme Extension by going to GNOME tweaks tool --> extension tab.

There are some packages of Yaru GTK theme of Ubuntu in the AUR, but most of them don’t work, and we will use a fork of the Yaru theme named Yaru Colors (https://github.com/Jannomag/Yaru-Colors). We will clone the project, go to the folder and will run the installation script to install it.

git clone “https://github.com/Jannomag/Yaru-Colors.git”
cd Yaru-Colors
./install.sh

And to change the dock-indicators, we will go to src/ folder and run dock-indicators.sh script.

cd src/
./dock-indicators.sh

We now need to change the font to match the font of Ubuntu. We can download the Ubuntu fonts from a lot of sources, but here we will use Google fonts (https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Ubuntu). Tap ‘select the style’ like that-

And now tap ‘Download all’ button in the most right corner-

Go to the download folder, and extract the files on your desktop. Move those extracted fonts to the ~/.fonts folder. Go to GNOME Tweaks Tools and set the fonts to Ubuntu.
Now we need to install Dash to Dock extension and enable it. We will use the dash to dock from AUR by running-

paru -S gnome-shell-extension-dash-to-dock

Go to GNOME-tweaks again and enable the extension. We are almost finished.

Now, Log out and log in again. TA! DA!!!!

You have the Arch Linux with Ubuntu Look.