What I Wish I'd Figured Out Sooner

You may find that your out of the box installation of Unity Desktop has the following glitch: Connect a second screen Fullscreen a window on one of those screens Do something on the other screen e.g. focusing or maximising a window The exact actions that cause an issue aren't very consistent. Solution: Install CompizConfig Utility → Workarounds Set "Force full screen redraws (buffer swap) on repaint" to true.

I found that the date and time displayed by Unity Desktop can be customised. In dconf-editor (or in the terminal) com.indicator.datetime contains many options about date formatting. Set time-format to custom . This allows custom-time-format to be used for formatting. Set custom-time-format to a format string. When I discovered this was possible, it was difficult to find out the exact properties the format string could have. Not all of the placeholders are intuitive: `%w %d/%b/%Y %R`. It's easier to work it out with context from snippets online but I wanted a complete list of the options I had available. It turns out the C function called strftime is used, which means the syntax can easily be looked up on the internet or in the manpages. This reminded me of PHP's date format function , but it's different and not just the lack of percent signs.