Unity Keyboard Shortcuts for Ubuntu 12.04

Unity keyboard shortcuts can increase your productivity if you learn to use it to your benefit. I know some of you are from the menu based design of KDE and Gnome2 so you may find it irritating at first.

But if you give it a try out of curiosity then surely you’re going to find it easy to use and in fact it will speed up your work.

Keyboard shortcuts are not just for power users, even the “point and click” users can benefit from their use. If you want to give it a try on your ubuntu 12.04 setup then, click on Windows key or super key on keyboard for a second and you’ll see all the keyboard shortcuts.

Check the following image for the keyboard shortcuts.

HUD in Ubuntu is quite an improvement, you’ll be able to do a lot of good things with it. Just try these shortcuts one per day and you’ll see a lot of changes in your usage. You may feel that typing the application names is quite hard at first, which is natural. Once you get used to the Linux then surely remembering Linux commands and the application names in HUD takes few seconds and in some cases you just have to type a letter or two.

How to Check if Your Computer Supports Unity3D

Unity3D is going to be the next desktop on all the LTS versions after 12.04, which is likely to be in next 3 years.

By that time many of the today’s desktops and laptops will have enough modern hardware to support the current unity3D graphics capabilities. Recently canonical showed the new changes in the unity3d desktop’s graphical features.

The features that were demonstrated by the gnome and unity are definitely the next step towards modern desktop. It only leaves you with one question, whether your computer supports unity3D or not.

Type the following command in terminal and see the results.

/usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p

This command will print the unity support test result on your terminal. If any of the test result says no then you have to upgrade your hardware.

As of version 12.04 of Ubuntu, you get OpenGL version 3.0 which may not be supported by old pentium 4 hardware or earlier computers. In such case, you have to upgrade the hardware in future because unity 2D will not be supported in 3 years from now.

These are again my views towards upcoming changes with unity desktop. If you want to get the current updates regarding the desktop then surely you should check the ubuntu weekly newsletter and planet updates.

Wallch - Wallpaper Changer for Unity Ubuntu

If you're looking for wallpaper changer for unity and gnome shell. I suggest checking Wallch. It can be integrated with the dash. You get to choose the folders, test wallpapers and exclude any specific wallpaper from the display.

There is also Live earth wallpaper that shows the day and night cycle on your desktop. I didn't found them resource heavy but make sure you have some enough RAM while using this program just in case if you set wallpaper changer on short interval.

Personally I found that 30 minutes to 1hour time is good for changing wallpaper. Feel free to let me know if there are some good wallpaper changer per workspace. That would be cool program to install.

Configure Unity Desktop Using MyUnity

I came across some of the unity users who hated the way unity was made less configurable. I mean gnome3 is also less configurable but Ubuntu didn't helped with unity by ignoring this option.


Myunity is a program that lets you configure various parts of unity desktop. You can download the myunity for your version of ubuntu using "Software Center".

Along with Myunity, you can also use compiz config and gnome tweak tool for other configurations not found in myunity.