613. Debian Jessie: Turn off update pop-ups in gnome, and switching to lxterminal, nemo and ksnapshot

I originally installed the OS on my desktop back 2010 (Lenny) and haven't treated it very nicely (mixed releases, repos and have in general been installing, uninstalling and replacing packages with my own compiled ones -- and have fiddled with a few too many things) so when I was beginning to have issues on my desktop when compiling ECCE -- issues that weren't present on any other systems that were freshly installed -- I decided to start over again and install debian anew. I went straight for Debian Jessie, although I had many reasons to stay with Wheezy, such as systemd and, more importantly, the fact that Sun GridEngine is completely missing in Debian Jessie! See here.

Luckily the debian wheezy package works quite well on jessie -- but that's pure luck. I'm currently on the fence between hoping that SGE continues to work well until the SID version trickles down to backports (IF it does),  or whether to learn how to set up SLURM instead.

Either way, here are a few things that annoyed me in Jessie (more specifically they annoyed me in GNOME) and that had to be fixed:

* Turn off update notifications
I hate being bugged by notifications about updating/upgrading my system. I'm not running windows -- it's unbecoming of a linux desktop to behave like that.

To fix it, go to Settings, Personal/Notifications and untick Package Updater

(simple -- you just need to know it's there)

* Nautilus doesn't do extra pane anymore. Bye bye nautilus.
Instead, install nemo, which is the rigthful heir to nautilus. It pulls in a lot of dependencies, but it's worth it.

To make nemo default do

me@beryllium:$ xdg-mime query default inode/directory
org.gnome.Nautilus.desktop
me@beryllium:$ xdg-mime default nemo.desktop inode/directory application/x-gnome-saved-search
me@beryllium:$ xdg-mime query default inode/directory
nemo.desktop

* Gnome-terminal doesn't do transparency anymore. Bye bye gnome-terminal.
Instead, install lx-terminal. To set it as default in both the OS and gnome, in the terminal do

gsettings set org.cinnamon.desktop.default-applications.terminal exec lxterminal

sudo update-alternatives --config x-terminal-emulator

* Adding firefox and thunderbird to default applications
I also felt compelled to install firefox and add it to the list over available applications in gnome so I could set it as the default browser Edit /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/x-www-browser so that it reads

 auto
/usr/bin/x-www-browser
x-www-browser.1.gz
/usr/share/man/man1/x-www-browser.1.gz

/usr/bin/chromium
40

/usr/bin/firefox-bin
70

/usr/bin/iceweasel
70
/usr/share/man/man1/iceweasel.1.gz

I also followed this post: http://verahill.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/530-briefly-adding-new-entry-to-default.html
For thunderbird, I only followed the latter post.

* To disable screen saver completely:

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power active false 

* I've got no idea how to elegantly exorcise bijiben-shell-search-provider, which keeps making my CPU usage spike. It's not nice.

* Note that dragging windows no longer works with Alt+left click -- instead use the windows key (Super key). Why this old standard behaviour got nuked I don't understand.

* I installed ksnapshot and set it as the default for prtn scrn instead of the crippled gnome-screenshot. Yes, it pulls in a lot of dependencies, but it's worth it.

Looking at the list above I'm slowly realising that it's probably time to say goodby to gnome for good. It's not going to a place where I want to follow it.

Pity.

There are a few things that I like about gnome 3. Well, there's a single thing that I like that got introduced: quickly searching for programs in the Activities Overview. Turns out that the applications menu wasn't that necessary after all.

The removal of features from nautilus, screenshot, terminal etc annoys me a lot though. Same goes for the removal of the minimize button.

Finally, I only find gnome useable once I've installed the gnome extensions by frippery. Stock gnome is useless to me.