I’ve recently been fiddling about and trying to fake an OSX-style GUI appearance in Linux Ubuntu MATE (15.04). This is partly because I prefer the OSX GUI (let’s be honest) and partly because most of my colleagues are also Mac users mainly (bioinformaticians…) and students in particular fear change! The Mac-style appearance seems to calm people down. A bit.

The specific OS I’m going for is 10.9 Mavericks, because it’s my current favourite and nice and clear. There are two main things to set up: the OS itself and the appearance. Let’s take them in turn.

1. The OS

I’ve picked Ubuntu (why on Earth wouldn’t you?!) and specifically the MATE distribution. This has a lot of nice features that make it fairly Mac-y, and in particular the windowing and package management seem smoother to me than the vanilla Ubuntu Unity system. Get it here: https://ubuntu-mate.org/vivid/.* The installation is pretty painless on Mac, PC or an existing Linux system. If in doubt you can use a USB as the boot volume without affecting existing files; with a large enough partition (the core OS is about 1GB) you can save settings – including the customisation we’re about to apply!

*We’re installing the 15.04 version, not the newest release, as 15.04 is an LTS (long-term stable) Ubuntu distribution. This means it’s supported officially for a good few years yet. [Edit: Arkash (see below) kindly pointed out that 14.04 is the most recent LTS, not 15.04. My only real reason for using 15.04 therefore is ‘I quite like it and most of the bugs have gone'(!)]

2. The appearance

The MATE windowing system is very slick, but the green-ness is a bit, well, icky. We’re going to download a few appearance mods (themes, in Ubuntu parlance) which will improve things a bit. You’ll need to download these to your boot/install USB:

• Ultra-flat Yosemite Light by @Mfy
• The ever-popular Solarized by Ethan Schooner – we’ll need the Ubuntu MATE Terminal version by @oz123, here.
• OSX-MATE by Rohith Madavan

Boot the OS

Now that we’ve got everything we need, let’s boot up the OS. Insert the USB stick into your Mac-envious victim of choice, power it up and enter the BIOS menu (F12 in most cases) before the existing OS loads. Select the USB drive as the boot volume and continue.

Once the Ubuntu MATE session loads, you’ll have the option of trialling the OS from the live USB, or permanently installing it to a hard drive. For this computer I won’t be installing to a hard drive (long story) but using the USB, so customising that. Pick either option, but beware that customisations to the live USB OS will be lost should you later choose to install to a hard drive.

When you’re logged in, it’s time to smarten this baby up! First we’ll play with the dock a bit. From the top menu bar, select “System > Preferences > MATE Tweak” to open the windowing management tool. In the ‘Interface’ menu, change Panel Layouts to ‘Eleven’ and Icon Size to ‘Small’. In the ‘Windows’ menu, we’ll change Buttons Layout to ‘Contemporary (Left)’. Close the MATE Tweak window to save. This is already looking more Mac-y, with a dock area at the bottom of the screen, although the colours and icons are off.

Now we’ll apply some theme magic to fix that. Select “System > Preferences > Look and Feel > Appearance”. Now we can customise the appearance. Firstly, we’ll load both the ‘Ultra-Flat Yosemite Light’ and ‘OSX-MATE’ themes, so they’re available to our hybrid theme. Click the ‘Install..’ icon at the bottom of the theme selector, you’ll be able to select and install the Ultra-Flat Yosemite Light theme we downloaded above. It should unpack from the .zip archive and appear in the themes panel. Installing the OXS-MATE theme is slightly trickier:

• Unzip (as sudo) the OSX-MATE theme to /usr/share/themes
• Rename it from OSX-MATE-master to OSX-MATE if you downloaded it from git as a whole repository (again, you’ll need to sudo)
• Restart the appearances panel and it should now appear in the themes panel.

We’ll create a new custom theme with the best bits from both themes, so click ‘Custom’ theme, then ‘Customise..’ to make a new one. Before you go any further, save it under a new name! Now we’ll apply changes to this theme. There are five customisations we can apply: Controls, Colours, Window Border, Icons and Pointer:

• Controls: Ultra-Flat Yosemite Light
• Colours: There are eight colours to set here. Click each colour box then in the ‘Colour name’ field, enter:
  • Windows (foreground): #F0EAE7 / (background): #0F0F0E
  • Input boxes (fg): #FFFFFF / (bg): #0F0F0E
  • Selected items (fg): #003BFF / (bg): #F9F9F9
  • Tooltips: (fg): #2D2D2D / (bg): #DEDEDE
• Window border: OSX-MATE
• Icons: Fog
• Pointer: DMZ (Black)

Save the theme again, and we’re done! Exit Appearance Preferences.

Finally we’ll install Solarized as the default terminal (command-line interface) theme, because I like it. In the MATE Terminal, Unzip the solarized-mate-terminal archive, as sudo. Enter the directory and simply run (as sudo) the install script using bash:

$ sudo unzip solarized-mate-terminal

$ cd solarized-mate-terminal 

$ bash solarized-mate.sh

Close and restart the terminal. Hey presto! You should now be able to see the light/dark Solarized themes available, under ‘Edit > Profiles’. You’ll want to set one as the default when opening a new terminal.

Finally…

Later, I also installed Topmenu, a launchpad applet that gives an OSX-style top-anchored application menu to some linux programs. It’s a bit cranky and fiddly though, so you might want to give it a miss. But if you have time on your hands and really need that Cupertino flash, be my guest. I hope you’ve had a relatively easy install for the rest of this post, and if you’ve got any improvements, please let me know!

Happy Tweaking…