appearance went crazy
 

Hello, I am a newby with Ubuntu. As I was starting to get to know it, I read some debating between using Unity and Gnome. Finally my friend convinced me to switch to Gnome, as he has more experience with it than I have, and we were particularly interested in showing the menus of the programs nicely classified.
However, as I finished the installation the appearance went crazy, or is it the layout of the windows...?, let me explain.

*First, the windows' frames don't have the upper left bottoms to close, minimize and maximize.
*Second, the color for the appearance of the windows doesn't take the whole frame, but instead stays in the most basic gray.
*Third, when I manage to minimize and maximize (without the aid of the bottoms), the windows leave track of their movement, so there are a lot of windows in the screen.
*And last, this keeping track of the movement in the windows looks particularly awful when I try to move around the different workspaces.

I am ready to blame my friend once I see him, but also I would try to fix this issue if I can. So thank you for your help.
Diego

Is it GNOME 2 or 3?

You could try Unity, but in my opinion it's not very good (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...th-unity-3867/). I think that you would be much better off trying KDE or Xfce.

You can install KDE by installing the "kde-full" package, and Xfce by installing the "xfce4" package.

I also don't like Unity, but, for trouble-shooting purposes:

Do things work properly under Unity? If so, it means the Gnome is broken somehow. So, did you install Gnome from the repos or is this the "Ubuntu Classic" version of Gnome?

If you installed Gnome from the repos, the install appears to be broke, I would suggest uninstalling it and using "Ubuntu Classic."

If it's "Ubuntu Classic," it's clear something is broke, but I can't guess what without more data, and I don't even know what questions to ask to get it. You could start Synaptic Package Manager and check whether it reports any broken packages (bottom line in the window frame).

Me, I use Fluxbox.

I don't know about ubuntu itself, but my distro is built on ubuntu (it has it's differences) and when I got it, Compiz was turned on and up to the max for visuals(my other distro which uses gnome had this too, but it was always off). My video card is pure crap and couldn't handle it, so I had laggy windows that left their imprint (just the outline with no content) after I moved them, I couldn't see any of the buttons (Minimize,restore,close), and none of the window 'themes' worked. I found Compiz in the settings and turned it to minimal and have been fine since ... I don't know if this is related to your problem or not, I could be 100% wrong, But thought I'd throw it out there cause it sounds close at least.


Gnome is nice as far as eye candy goes. I have it on both of my distros, and the gnome-screenlets are pretty cool. but it does use more resources to maintain that look. If you want to use a manager that is light on resources and pretty basic, without compromising the ease of a GUI, Like frank said 'I use fluxbox'. I myself just got it yesterday, and it is not as graphicly appealing -not as far as I can configure it anyways- but it gets the job done, and it's gets in done easily. you can download it from their website, or do 'sudo apt-get install fluxbox' ... Hope at least a shred of this proves to be useful, Best of luck!

Thank you for your replies. As it turned out, I had made some mistake on the installation, so I had to do the whole thing over again. This time I tried installing the previous version of Ubuntu, so I didn't have those problems. And I also downloaded the KDE, to try it out. So far so good.