About 10 minutes ago I set up my basic Terminal app to be semi-transparent and was really happy with the result. Now, some updates ran and the whole "Background" tab is gone from Terminal settings. Was this option removed? If yes, why? Why would anyone do that?
I'm running gnome-terminal 3.10.2 from the Gnome3 ppa.
Standard versions of Ubuntu use gnome-terminal 3.6.2. The background tab was removed in version 3.7. The ppa, as you saw, provides version 3.10.
You have a couple choices:
Follow the instructions at How can I make the terminal transparent? to emulate the feature in 3.10 (quoted below):
Since version 3.7 this option has been removed from the Preferences dialogue. You can however still get the same effect by setting the _NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY X property, for example with the Devil's Pie or Devil's Pie II tools. E.g., set up Devil's Pie to start automatically with the session, and create the file ~/.devilspie/gnome-terminal.ds with these contents:
(if
(matches (window_name) "gnome-terminal-window-*")
(opacity 90)
)
You can also use this shell script that however only works for existing terminal windows and not automatically for newly created ones.
