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Jan 17, 2019  Whether you want to revert to an app’s previous icon, or want to have some fun with customizing a variety of your apps, read on for how to change Mac app icons. Changing Mac app icons is a.

Do you want to make Ubuntu look like Mac OS X? If so, we’re going to show you how to do it, step-by-step.

The whole point of using Linux is that you can do things like this

It doesn’t matter whether you have a bad case of Apple envy, or you simply appreciate the design aesthetic of Apple’s OS; there’s nothing wrong with aping the appearance of a rival operating system.

After all, the whole point of using Linux is that you are free to do things like this — and hey: you certainly can’t make macOS look like Ubuntu!

How To Make Ubuntu Look like a Mac

A stack of mac GTK themes, icon sets, fonts and cursors are available for Linux, just a quick Google away.

The ones included below are the ones we use/think give you the best Mac-like look on your Linux box, But don’t be afraid to explore DeviantArt, GitHub and other avenues if our choices don’t quite match with your tastes.

1. Pick the Right Desktop Environment

GNOME Shell

To achieve the most Mac-like look on Linux you need to use the most appropriate desktop environment and that is GNOME Shell.

This is not a slight against other desktop environments (DEs) as Unity, Budgie, MATE and Cinnamon can all be moulded to resemble Cupertino’s computing OS too.

But GNOME Shell is the most customisable desktop environment. This is a key ask in a task like this. GNOME Shell lets you theme and re-arrange everything you need to with the least amount hackery or fuss.

If you’re using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or later you already have everything you need to get started, so skip ahead.

But if you don’t have GNOME Shell installed on Ubuntu you will need to install it first.

This is easy. Just click the button below and follow in the on-screen prompts (select ‘lightdm’ as the display manager when asked):

You’re also going to need to the GNOME Tweaks tool in a few steps time, so install that now too:

Once both installations are complete you need to logout and select the ‘GNOME Shell’ session from the Unity Greeter:

A word on using Unity

One thing GNOME Shell can’t offer, that the Unity desktop can, is global menu support.

Now, I don’t consider this to be a negative as more and more applications use use Client Side Decorations, making the need for a global menu redundant.

But if having an omnipresent set of app menus stripped across the top of the screen is part of the Mac experience you don’t wish to lose, stick with Unity.

2. Install a Mac GTK Theme

The single easiest way to make Ubuntu look like a Mac is to install a Mac GTK theme.

Our top recommendation is the ‘macOS Mojave’ theme by Vinceluice. This is a near-enough pixel-perfect clone of Apple’s OS skin, and is available in light and dark versions. It’s one of the best designed Mac GTK themes out there (it also has a matching GNOME Shell theme).

The ‘macOS Mojave’ theme requires GNOME 3.20 or later, so you’ll need to be running Ubuntu 16.10 or later to use it.

If you’re running the older Ubuntu 16.04 LTS release you can use the competent ‘macOS Sierra’ clone created by the B00merang project:

Tip: How To Install GTK Themes

Once you download your chosen macOS theme from the link(s) above, you will need to install it.

To install themes in Ubuntu first extract the contents of the archive you downloaded, then move the folder inside to the ~/.themes folder in your Home directory.

If you do not see this folder press Ctrl + H to reveal hidden folders. Next, find the .themes folder or create it if it doesn’t exist. Move the extract folder mentioned above to this folder.

Finally, to change theme, open GNOME Tweak Tool > Appearance and select your chosen theme (and the GNOME Shell theme, if you also downloaded one).

3. Install a Mac Icon Set

Next grab some a Mac Icon set for Linux. A quick Google will throw up a bunch of results. Most, sadly, aren’t complete enough to function as a full icon set, so you’ll also want to use (and in some cases manually specify) a fall back icon theme like Faba, or Papirus.

To avoid all of that hassle you may wish to use the fabulous ‘La Capitaine‘ icon pack.

What’s great about La Capitaine is that it’s a proper Linux icon set, with custom macOS inspired icons for many Linux apps and not just a direct port of mac icons to Linux. It’s also totally open-source, and is available to download from Github.

How to Install Icon Themes

Once you’ve downloaded your chosen theme from the link(s) above you need to install it. To do this first extract the contents of the archive you download, then move the folder inside to the ~/.icons folder in your Home directory.

If you don’t see this folder press Ctrl + H to view hidden folders. Next, find the .icons folder or create it if it doesn’t exist. Move the extract folder mentioned above to this folder.

Finally, to apply, open GNOME Tweak Tool > Appearance and select your chosen theme.

4. Change the System Font

If you’ve used Mac OS X / macOS at some point in the past few years you’ll know it has clean, crisp system typography.

‘Lucida Grande’ is the familiar Mac system font, though Apple uses a system font called ‘San Franciso’ in recent releases of macOS.

A quick Google should turn up plenty more information (and links to download San Francisco font) but be aware that neither font is not licensed for distribution — so we can’t link you to it, sorry!

Thankfully there’s an open-source alternative to ‘Lucida Grande’ called Garuda. It’s even pre-installed out of the box on Ubuntu, so you don’t need to go on a font safari to find it.

Head to GNOME Tweak Tool > Fonts and set the ‘Windows Titles’ and ‘Interface’ fonts to Garuda Regular (or any other font you wish).

If you use Unity you can use Unity Tweak Tool to change the font on Ubuntu.

5. Add a Desktop Dock

Ask people what a Mac desktop looks like and chances are they will mention its ubiqutious desktop dock. This is a combined application launcher and window switcher.

If you opted to use GNOME Shell back in Step 1 install the excellent Dash to Dock extension from the GNOME extensions site. This dock can be adjusted, tweaked and tune to look exactly like its macOS counterpart.

Dash to Dock doesn’t look very mac-ish by default so you will want to dive in to the GNOME Tweak Tool > Extensions > Dash to Dock > Appearance to change the colour to white, and lower the opacity.

Plank Dock

If you chose to stick with the Unity desktop you can set the Unity Launcher to hide (System Settings > Desktop > Behaviour) and install Plank, a desktop dock, to handle app launching and window switching:

Plank can be configured with all sorts of themes too, making it easy to replicate the Mac OS X experience. Gnosemite is a faithful mac Plank theme worth a look.

That’s it; we’ve achieved our aim to make Ubuntu look like a Mac — now it’s your turn.

We’d love to see a screenshot of your mac-inspired creation so do feel free to share one in the comments.

It’s almost become a tradition; one that we wish we didn’t have to put up with. It seems with each new version of the Mac operating system, there are some features that just don’t seem to work the way they used to. The tradition lives on with macOS High Sierra, so we’re gathering a list of what High Sierra broke and how to fix it (when you can).

Drive Encryption Can Change Formatting
Encrypting an entire drive to add a level of security has been an easy task in the Mac OS ever since FileVault 2 was released as part of OS X Lion. Full disk encryption has been a boon for Mac users who worry about their personal data being easily accessible on their Macs or external drives. This is especially true for portable Mac users, who need to worry about their Macs being lost or stolen.

macOS High Sierra continues to support full disk encryption, but Mike Bombich, who created Carbon Copy Cloner, has verified a bug in High Sierra that will cause an external drive to have its format changed from HFS+ to APFS when the drive is encrypted in High Sierra.

Enabling encryption on a drive should not alter the underlying drive format. If the drive was HFS+ (Hierarchical File System) before you chose to encrypt it, it should remain an HFS+ drive afterwards. The same is true for APFS (Apple File System) formatted drives; choosing the encryption option shouldn’t change the APFS format of the drive.

Related:A Note On High Sierra Compatibility with Third Party SSDs

Under certain conditions, encrypting a drive will modify the format to APFS without the user being aware of the changes.

The specific conditions are:

• Must be an external drive
• Must not have a Mac operating system installed on the drive

If these two conditions are met, and you select the option to encrypt the drive, by right-clicking the drive icon and selecting Encrypt from the popup menu, the drive will be converted to APFS format and then encrypted.

Even though the drive has been converted to APFS and encrypted, it will continue to work just fine with your Mac running macOS High Sierra. The problem comes about should you ever connect the drive to a Mac running an earlier version of the Mac operating system, or if you boot your Mac to an earlier version of the OS. In either case, the external drive won’t be recognizable by the older operating system.

Change App Icon Mac Os High Sierra 10 13 6

Our recommendation is not to encrypt your external drive, unless converting to APFS is acceptable to you, and you have no plans to use the drive with earlier versions of the Mac operating system.

Being Logged Out Randomly
If you find yourself occasionally being logged out of your Mac after you upgraded to macOS High Sierra, you can stop worrying; your Mac isn’t possessed. Instead, the upgrade process may have enabled two security options that you may not have been using before.

To correct the phantom logouts, launch System Preferences, either by clicking on its Dock icon, or by selecting System Preferences from the Apple menu.

In the System Preferences window, select the Security & Privacy preference pane.

From the Security & Privacy preference pane, click the Lock icon and enter your administrator credentials. Once the padlock is unlocked, click on the Advanced button.

Mac Os High Sierra 10.13.6

Either remove the checkmark from “Log out after xx minutes of inactivity” or set the time frame to a longer period to meet your needs. Click the OK button when done.

The second security issue that may be causing the problem is also located in the Security & Privacy preference pane. Select the General tab.

The item: “Require password xx minutes after sleep or screen saver begins” may also be checked. You can remove the checkmark, or modify the amount of time that needs to pass before the screen saver kicks in to better fit your needs. My own preference is to leave this security feature in place, and just adjust the time as needed.

While you’re at it, you may want to jump over to the Desktop & Screen Saver preference pane to adjust the time for when the screen saver starts up.

Mac Os X Sierra

Select the Screen Saver tab, then use the Start after: dropdown menu to select how much inactive time needs to elapse before the screen saver starts

High Sierra Battery Life is Poor
Another issue that seems to be common is portable Mac battery life being adversely affected after an upgrade to High Sierra. So far, it seems that macOS High Sierra isn’t the culprit; instead, there are a few apps that may need to be updated to make better use of the battery.

Launch Activity Monitor, located at /Applications/ Utilities.

In the Activity Monitor window, select the Energy tab.

In the resulting display, look for apps that are marked as preventing sleep, or are listed as having a high energy impact. Contact the app developer to see if there are updates available for the app to make it perform better with macOS High Sierra.

Unable to Wake From Sleep
I’m not sure what it is about sleep, but the Mac seems to always have issues with sleep after a system upgrade. There have been reports of Macs not being able to wake from sleep after upgrading to High Sierra.

Unrelated, but with the same solution, is a flickering of the display, especially when the Safari browser is open.

You can fix both issues by resetting the NVRAM and then resetting the SMC.

You can find detailed instructions on how to perform these resets in the article:

How to Reset NVRAM, PRAM, SMC on your Mac.

Office 2011 Crashes
If you’re using Office 2011 for the Mac with macOS High Sierra, you’re not having any issues, you’re having occasional crashes, or Office simply refuses to launch at all.

That about covers most of the possibilities. The problem is Microsoft decided not to support Office 11 under macOS High Sierra, meaning they haven’t tested the apps nor are they going to offer any updates to correct any issues. Essentially, Office 2011 is on its own. If it works for you, wonderful, but if you have any issues, it may be time to consider a replacement.

Of course, software apps do get old, and Office 11 has been around for a long time, in software years. If you have a specific need for Microsoft Office, the Office 2016 for Mac version works fine and is fully supported under macOS High Sierra.

If you just need a Word or Excel work-alike that you can use to share files with others, there are a few options available. If you have a suggestion that you know works with High Sierra, please leave a note in the Comments, below.

Mail Stops Notifying You of New Mail

Have you noticed that Mail is no longer alerting you of new incoming messages via the Notifications center? If you’re used to seeing a banner pop up in the top right corner of your Mac’s display with a brief description of a new piece of mail whenever new mail arrives, you may have noticed the banners stopped once you installed High Sierra.

This bug doesn’t seem to affect everyone, but it happens often enough that Apple should be able to fix the issue in a subsequent update of High Sierra.

But you don’t need to wait for Apple; you can fix the issue yourself by opening System Preferences and selecting Notifications.

Highlight Mail in the Notifications window sidebar, and then select None as the Mail alert style. Wait a moment, then set the notifications style back to Banners or Alerts, whichever you prefer.

Close the Notifications preference pane.

Launch Mail if it isn’t already running. Mail notifications should now work correctly.

Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator Issues
Adobe Photoshop has a minor issue with High Sierra that prevents the Photoshop window from expanding to full screen whenever the Dock is shown.

Adobe has created a Photoshop plug-in file that can rectify the problem. You’ll find instructions on how to download and install the plug-in at the Adobe Help website.

Adobe Illustrator is experiencing some issues with High Sierra; specifically, the licensing system seems to be broken when the startup drive uses the APFS file system. The result is Illustrator may not launch, or there will be an error message about license problems.

Adobe recommends not upgrading to High Sierra, or not converting to the APFS file system at this time.

There’s an additional issue with Illustrator on macOS High Sierra that results in the wrong color settings being applied; specifically, Emulate Adobe Illustrator 6 becomes the default color setting and is applied to any document you open or new document you create.

The workaround is to manually change the color settings before working with any document.

Select Edit, Color Settings, and then choose the desired settings for the document.

Click OK.

Open the document you wish to work on.

You’ll need to repeat these steps each time you launch Illustrator, or before you open a document that uses a different color space.

Other High Sierra Problems and Fixes
macOS High Sierra is still relatively new, and I suspect there will be quite a few additional issues that will crop up. If you encounter any problems with using High Sierra, please feel free to share with our readers by leaving a comment.

If you’re having High Sierra install issues, you can leave a comment in the Rocket Yard guide: Common Problems During and After macOS High Sierra Installation.

[Update] Stay tuned for issues that you might encounter when running macOS Mojave.

Change App Icon Mac Os High Sierra Update

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