Vanilla GNOME on Ubuntu

In my previous post about the operating systems I use, I wrote:

And although it uses the Gnome desktop, it has some custom modifications I would like to deactivate (since I started using Fedora Silverblue, I got to love the stock Gnome desktop).

I didn’t know (and I honestly didn’t searched for solutions before), but it’s possible to use Vanilla GNOME with Wayland on Ubuntu. It’s just a matter of one command:

sudo apt install gnome-session

The gnome-session package also adds the full Adwaita theme and the default fonts. After it’s installed, you can pick “GNOME” (or “GNOME with Xorg”) on the login screen and there you go…

If you also want to replace the purple / orange login screen with GNOME’s default grey / blue, you can choose the CSS file with:

sudo update-alternatives --config gdm3.css

Now I can enjoy Ubuntu with Vanilla GNOME!

Nice side effect: Because partial scaling is better support with Wayland, I can now also use scaling instead of choosing a different screen density for my HiDPI display.

(Thank you, Chris! And also thank you, UbuntuUsers Wiki!)

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