1. Tweak Unity.

Click the button below to install Unity Tweak Tool:

Or use the following command in a terminal to install it:

sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool

If you use GNOME Shell, install GNOME Tweak Tool instead.

2. Privacy settings.

• delete recent history
• blacklist applications or folders / partitions from showing up in Dash

sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:diesch/testing
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install indicator-privacy

3. Solution for popular missing features: weather and calendar indicators.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install my-weather-indicator

Install Google Calendar Indicator using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install calendar-indicator

For more indicators, check out our AppIndicator tag.

4. Improve battery life, other important tweaks

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linrunner/tlp
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tlp tlp-rdw
sudo tlp start

More about TLP.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia

[   28.507128] [ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: [XORG] (EE) No devices detected.
[   28.507158] [ERROR]Aborting because fallback start is disabled.

lspci | grep NVIDIA

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF116M [GeForce GT 555M/635M] (rev a1)

The BusID is the number in bold, “01:00.0″ in my case.

b) Now we’ll have to add the BusID to /etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nvidia and for this, we’ll open the file as root with a text editor (I’ll use Gedit in the command below):

gksu gksu gedit /etc/bumblebee/xorg.conf.nvidia

And in this file, in the “Device” section, add the following:

    BusID "PCI:YOUR_BUS_ID"

    BusID "PCI:01:00:0"

optirun APP_OR_GAME

Where “APP_OR_GAME” is the game or application executable.

To test the performance with Bumblebee, use:

optirun glxspheres

If it still doesn’t work, try restarting your system and make sure you’ve correctly configured Bumblebee to use the installed Nvidia drivers (you can use Bumblebee Configurator GUI for this).

More about Bumblebee, using the Primus backend, etc.

5. Fix Google Chrome, Skype.

• libudev0 for 32bit
• libudev0 for 64bit

Then, Google Chrome Stable or Beta should install in Ubuntu 13.04.

sudo sed -i 's/^Exec=skype.*/Exec=bash -c "export LD_PRELOAD=\/usr\/lib\/i386-linux-gnu\/mesa\/libGL\.so\.1 \&\& skype %U"/' /usr/share/applications/skype.desktop

sudo sed -i 's/^Exec=bash.*/Exec=skype %U/' /usr/share/applications/skype.desktop

6. Migrate / upgrade PPAs (advanced users)

To install Y PPA Manager, use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/y-ppa-manager
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install y-ppa-manager

7. Install codecs, Java.

Or install it using the following command:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

Or by using the following command:

sudo apt-get install libavformat-extra-53 libavcodec-extra-53

Or by using the following command:

sudo apt-get install icedtea-7-plugin openjdk-7-jre

Or by using the following command:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer

Web Upd8 – Ubuntu / Linux blog