Get Back Normal Title Bars For Some Gnome Apps in Ubuntu 14.04

Last updated: September 2, 2014

Gtk3 Apps

In Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 14.10, some Gnome applications use client-side decorations which don’t work properly in the default Unity Desktop.

The applications with client-side decorations look broken in Unity and they are unresizable. Here are some examples:

Gnome Clock in Ubuntu 14.04

The Latest gthumb 3.3.2 (gthumb from Ubuntu repositories is old and does not use CSD)

gtk3-nocsd, a hack by one of the LXDE founders, is a small module used to disable the client side decoration of gtk+ 3. It works on most, but not all CSD applications.

After disabled client side decoration, above applications will look like:

Gnome Clock with CSD disabled (Picture was taken in Gnome-Shell)

gthumb with CSD disabled

How to Install & Use gtk3-nocsd

This module has been made into Webupd8 PPA, available for Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04.

Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, paste the commands below and run one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install gtk3-nocsd

To disable client side decoration, for gnome clock as example:

First run command to edit the application shortcut file, .desktop file under /usr/share/applications or .local/share/applications.

gksudo gedit /usr/share/applications/gnome-clocks.desktop

When the file opens, add env LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/gtk3-nocsd/gtk3-nocsd.so to the value of Exec as a parameter, so it looks like:

Save the file and done. Note that gtk3-nocsd does not work for gnome-tweak-tool, gnome-music, etc.

via: webupd8

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