>To turn off the ever-present, overwhelming, tooltips that are shown just about any time you put the mouse over anything in Ubuntu when using the Gnome desktop, here are the steps to take:

1) Go to the main menu bar and right-click Applications –> Edit Menus… note that this is a right-click, not a “normal” click.

2) In the left side of the window (labeled Menus:), click on System Tools.

3) In the right side of the window, click on Configuration Editor to enable it. Once enabled, there will be a checkbox next to it. If there is already a checkbox next to it when you get here, then you do not need to click on it.

4) Click Close to close this window.

5) Go back to the main menu bar and click Applications –> System Tools –> Configuration Editor.

6) In the left side of the configuration editor, navigate to apps > panel > global.

7) Once global is selected go to the right side and click on tooltips_enabled to remove the checkbox next to this.

8) With the checkbox now gone, go to File –> Close to close the configuration editor.

Once this is done, you should no longer have tooltips on your Ubuntu Gnome desktop.