Navigating the GNOME Shell

- If you're accustomed to Mac OS X or Windows, the GNOME desktop environment, or GNOME Shell, could look a little daunting. Let's take a quick look. A great place to start is the login screen. Here at the top there's an icon for Accessibility options. If you need to turn on High Contrast, Large Text or any of the other options, this is where you do it. Next to that is the Status menu where you can see the status of your network connection, change the audio volume and choose to shut down or Restart the system, if you need to. I'll Cancel that for now.

Here in the middle of the screen is a list of users on the system. We'll get into adding other users later, but for now I'll click on my name. This little gear icon down here lets me choose which desktop environment I'm logging into. And again, we'll get into that later in the course. For now, I'll type my password and press Sign In. And now I'm looking at the GNOME Shell. Here across the top of the screen there's a bar with a section labeled Activities, which I'll get into in a little bit. And a date and time display, which if you click on it, gives you a calendar.

And over here's the Status menu that we saw earlier, but now it gives you a few more options. Clicking it brings up a menu with some details and controls and buttons to open the system tools, lock the screen and, of course, shut down and restart the computer. I can also get to the settings by right-clicking on this desktop area, and I can go right to Change the Background as well, but I'll leave it alone for now. Now, I'll click on the Activities button in the upper left of the screen to open overview mode. On the left side of the overview is an area called the dash, where you can put icons for applications you use frequently.

At the bottom there's a button to Show Applications. This will show you the applications installed on your system. At the bottom of the screen there's a notifications area where notifications about the system will appear, if there are any. Clicking it opens up a bar with icons for applications that have notifications to share with you. You can choose to act on them or dismiss them. I don't have any right now, but you might see some text down there at the bottom. Also, notice the lozenge button that lets you toggle between frequently used applications and all applications. On the right, you'll see an indicator of which page of applications you're currently on.

You can scroll with the mouse or use the arrow keys to navigate. You'll notice some of the applications are inside folders. Click to open and close the folder or you can press enter to enter the folder and escape to leave it. If I right-click on an application, I can find out more information about it or add it to my Favorites or I can drag it to the dash. Personally, I don't think the Terminal belongs buried in a folder, so I'll drag it over here to my dash. And I can see at the bottom of the screen, in the notifications area, there's a notification that I added the Terminal.

And, of course, to open an application, just click it. My application opens up in the Shell and I can dock it to the left or the right of the screen, if I like, just by dragging until I see this snap indicator. Dragging an app to the top of the screen makes it full screen. If I switch back to the Overview mode, I can take an application and drag it to another workspace over here in the Workspaces list. I can use that list to switch between the workspaces. When an application's open, it has a menu up here at the top.

Application-level functions and options will be here, usually including Preferences, Help and About. Some applications will have their own title bar, too. Files doesn't, for example, but the Terminal app does.