The fastest and most efficient way to navigate your Ubuntu/GNOME desktop is to learn the keyboard shortcuts that are available at your fingertips. With minimum effort, you can run applications, switch between windows or workspaces, take screenshots, and do other essential tasks. So if you want to increase your productivity, you have to know the all-important keys.

Gnome Shell is the new core user interface for Gnome 3 which provides switching windows and applications but you've probably already heard of it by now so I'll skip the introduction.

Gnome Shell consists of two big parts: the panel and overlay. The panel part is pretty much obvious - system tray, user name, and clock stuff and the activities button which activates the overlay -, and about the "overlay", well, take a look at this screenshot:

You probably know this: you power on your machine, and immediately after you've logged in you manually start your two or three favourite applications. Why not have the system start these applications for you automatically? This short guide shows how to accomplish this under GNOME.

GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) is a desktop environment created for the operating system

The two extensions are the Taskbar (by zpydr), which displays icons of running applications on the top panel, showing thumbnails of those applications on hover, and Workspaces to Dock (by passingthru67), which transforms the workspaces of the overview mode into an intellihide dock.

GNOME Do (Do) is an intelligent launcher tool that makes performing common tasks on your computer simple and efficient. “GNOME Do” not only allows you to search for items in your desktop environment (e.g. applications, contacts, bookmarks, files, music), it also allows you to specify actions to perform on search results (e.g. run, open, email, chat, play).

The GNOME desktop environment is the default for Debian etch, and is one that I use every day. One thing that I always have a hard time remembering is how to setup global keyboard shortcuts, so this quick guide will document the process.

The Danish language makes use of two letters [åÅ] and [øØ] which are not on my Icelandic keyboard. Having to switch permanently between keyboard layouts all the time with key combinations (Windows way of doing things) such as alt+shift is tiresome! It turns out that there’s a very easy way to switch between layout in GNOME.