Fedora 29 Gnome Terminal vs Ubuntu 18.04 Gnome Terminal

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1

One thing that has bugged me as I have switched between Fedora and Ubuntu is how both of them offer the Gnome DE, but the default Terminal has a few differences that annoy me in particular. Specifically, its all about the tabs of Terminal. On Fedora 29, there is an Add Tab button always displayed and you can rename tabs by double clicking on the tab’s current name. In Ubuntu 18.04, the new tab button only appears after you open a second tab and there is no way to rename a tab.

Now, for better or worse, Ubuntu works better (of the two) in my home/work environment due to some OpenSSL issues I was having with work. So I have taken to using Terminator to get closer to my preferred Terminal experience. But I’m left wondering, why are the Gnome Terminals different between distros? Who customized either to add or remove features I like? And given the customization that either or both distros did, where is the correct place to file a feature request (Ubuntu or Gnome)?

2

I think you could get all the settings and compare them with diff like this:

gsettings list-recursively | grep Terminal > ubuntu.txt
gsettings list-recursively | grep Terminal > fedora.txt
diff ubuntu.txt fedora.txt
3

Terminator is my terminal of choice. Gotta love the options. I have mine set to always open two windows, horizontally split.

It’s the only terminal I have used for years.

4

The only things that showed up in the Fedora readout that were not present in Ubuntu that seem relevant are:

org.gnome.Terminal.Legacy.Settings unified-menu false
org.gnome.Terminal.Legacy.Keybindings set-terminal-title 'disabled'

I looked up the unified-menu option and as best as I can tell, it just shows/hides the menu bar. The set-teminal-title is just in the Keybindings section. In Ubuntu, that Keybinding is not offered in the GUI with the other Keybindings.

5

Terminator is fine for my preferences, but I would honestly prefer to have the Fedora build of Gnome Terminal in Ubuntu. It just irritates that “but why?!?” part of my brain that the same Terminal from the same upstream project is different in 2 distros.

6

tmux? Using it for tabs is a breeze.

7

Well, that goes back to my personal preferences problem. I try really hard to stick with the default applications packed in the OS (Linux or otherwise) since I am used to working in closed or restricted environments where pulling in third party applications to replace a default isn’t usually an option. So I guess I’m more interested in learning “why are they like this?”.

8

In that case, screen is installed by default on pretty much everything, though it is a little more cantankerous than tmux (hence, tmux’s reason for existing.) You can configure it to be a bit nicer, but that depends on if you want to spend time on it.

9

@Fergatron5000 ok, you owe me one now :grinning: (jk)

Here you can follow the “rename tab” feature request - yes, they removed it

And this is your tab bar always on setting:
gsettings set org.gnome.Terminal.Legacy.Settings tab-policy always

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10

Might look at both tmux and screen at some point, but for what it’s worth, it seems that screen is not included by default on Ubuntu 18.04.

11

THATS what I have been looking for! Well, its not necessarily the answer I was hoping for, it does satisfy the question that was rattling around in my brain. Its intriguing (to me) that Fedora opted to either: use an older build of terminal or package a modified version of the terminal.

Here is a number 1 for your collection.

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12

Forget both of them, install Guake…

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13

I would suggest an upgrade even back then Fedora 29 was out of date, probably version 31 was latest and 30 supporters, now it is version 32 latest version 31 supported and version 33 will be out soon, beta version in a month.

This maybe of topic with the current posts, but using an out of date OS is never a good idea apps may break and security is compromised.

Regards, Alex