If you’ve ever played around with customising Ubuntu (or any GNOME Shell-based Linux distribution) you’ll have encountered GNOME Tweaks, an official app giving you GUI access to options, settings, and controls not otherwise exposed in the UI.

In recent years, GNOME’s developers have begun migrating settings out of GNOME Tweaks and into the desktop proper — a move which refutes that oft-opined claim that GNOME only removes options, never adds them.

But we (as users) can’t expect GNOME to cover and cater to every whim, want and wish. It pulls engineers and developers away from working on arguably more important things that have bigger impact – anyone can build apps, tools, and extensions to fill the gaps.

Which is precisely what Refine, a new GTK4/libadwaita tool for GNOME does.

Refine is not a fork of GNOME Tweaks, and provides GUI access to a raft of advanced and experimental settings which the latter does not.

In its first release, which went live on Flathub earlier this week, Refine supports:

Screenshot
  • Appearance choices
    • Cursor theme
    • Icon theme
    • Light style (for shell theme)
    • Main UI font
    • Terminal (monospace) font
  • Mouse & Touch settings
    • Middle-click paste
Screenshot
  • Shell & Compositor options
    • Center new windows
    • Attach modal windows to parent
    • Enable variable refresh rate options in Display
    • Enable fractional scaling options in Display
    • Xwayland native scaling
  • Sound configuration
    • Volume stepping increment

Those are just the current options Refine provides in its first release. Further features are likely to be added in future updates, making more experimental, advanced, and otherwise hidden settings more accessible to users who install the app.

Of the ones present, Ubuntu users won’t find that the light theme option does anything (the distro uses its own GNOME Shell theme, Yaru), and a toggle to enable fractional scaling options is already patched into Settings.

Other options could prove useful — nothing that couldn’t already be tweaked through other methods, like the command-line. But having such options grouped together in a single app, where they’re easy to find, enable, and ‘undo’ (if needed) is a big boon.

On a personal note, the volume stepper adjustment has proven timely for me!

My sister gave me her old Harmon Kardon Soundsticks II when I visited for Christmas. Despite the fact they’re about as old as this blog, the sound quality from them remains phenomenal – they’re powerful speakers with greater volume output than my USB-C pair.

Using Refine, I decreased the volume step value to 2. Now each press of my keyboard’s sound keys moves in smaller increments, giving more precise control over volume.

Install Refine

I wanted to pass on word of this promising new tool so anyone looking for greater control over GNOME Shell in Ubuntu (and beyond) can try it out or at least keep it in mind for the future — a potential souped-up spiritual successor to the venerable GNOME Tweaks?

Time will tell.

Update 1:
After this article was published, the developer of Refine released an update to prevent the app from working on Ubuntu, saying: “I prefer not to support Ubuntu. This app is intended for GNOME, not for bizarre custom iterations of GNOME.”

Update 2:
Refine now displays a warning on ‘unsupported environments’ rather than refuse to run. This warning can be disabled (see the comments section) so Ubuntu users can access options (which may not work, or work as expected).

Refine is free, open-source software designed for GNOME desktops. Source code is on Gitlab, and official builds are available to install from Flathub.

• Get Refine on Flathub