How do I disable showing the "Activities overview" forever?

Solution 1:

You may use a GNOME shell extension called Hide Activities Button. This extension hides the Activities button from the top bar.

Note that you'll still be able access the Activities overview by pressing the Super key (usually the key with Windows logo).

Similar extension: Hide Activities Button (same name, different extension)

Solution 2:

The activities overview is core to Gnome Shell, so can as such not be disabled. You can, however, configure Gnome Shell to make access to the overview much less immediate.

1) Replace or hide the Activities button

Replace the Activities button by a traditional menu: Install "Applications Menu" or "Arc Menu" to see your Activities button replaced by a button that opens a classical menu.

Hide the Activities button: Install the extension "Hide Activities" to hide the button. In that case, you will want to install an alternative launcher program, for example ULauncher, Albert or Rofi.

2) Disable the Super key and other shortcut keys

Issue following commands to disable 1) the Super key 2) the Super+S, 3) the Alt+F1 key and the 4) Super+A shortcut keys, which open either the Activities or the Applications overview.

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter overlay-key ''
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings panel-main-menu "[]"
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.keybindings toggle-overview "['']"
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.keybindings toggle-application-view "['']"

3) Disable hot corner

Not needed on stock Ubuntu, because it is already disabled by default. If you need to disable it, you can do so using Gnome Tweaks or with the command

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-hot-corners false

This will largely place the overview out of your view.

Installing the extensions:

All mentioned extensions are available in the official Ubuntu software sources. You can install them from Snap Center or with the terminal command sudo apt install <packagename>. After installing them, you need to enable them on a per user basis, using Gnome Tweaks, or, on more recent Ubuntu versions, the "Extensions" tool. The latter is available through the package gnome-shell-extension-prefs, the former in gnome-tweaks.

"Applications Menu" can be installed through the package gnome-shell-extensions. This package also contains all other officially supported Gnome Shell extensions.

"Arc Menu" can be installed through the package gnome-shell-extension-arc-menu.

"Hide Activities" is available through the package gnome-shell-extension-hide-activities

Undo the settings

To undo the settings, you can reset to default by issuing similar commands, where you replace set by reset and omit the last argument.