What are /r/Ubuntu's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Looks good. But I'm still hoping for the global menu, preferably along with the current option for displaying locally integrated menus in the window's titlebar for unmaximized windows.

There is too much going on here to know what you find wrong.

• Hate the redundant chromium controls? (This is what stood out to me). Make it use the system title bar. It's the last preference under "Personal Stuff". If chromium is drawing it's own window controls, you can't fault it for not looking or behaving like everything else.
• Hate left-side window controls? gnome-tweak-tool is the easiest way to change that (or gconf-editor can do it, or dconf-editor in newer versions, or the associated command-line tools for each).
• Hate the unity dock always being visible? You can change that. compizconfig-settings-manager is the way to go, but I believe 12.04 will have an option in the appearance preferences.
• Hate the global menu bar? You can disable that by either setting the APPMENU_DISPLAY_BOTH environment variable (allowing for a choice of global, both, local), or removing the packages that provide that functionality

VPN's, one of those times when "Best" and "Free" can't be used in the same sentence. A good trustworthy vpn is one of those services you have to pay for.

I have been using Private Internet Access for several years. Reliable and not overly expensive.

it's only $39.95 per year.

/u/WantsANexus7 has made a nice little icon that looks much better than the default that you can get here.

This is what it looks like.

To be clear, all I did was package up some scripts someone else wrote, and bundled it in a snap with qemu-virgil. Other people did most of the work. https://snapcraft.io/sosumi is the place to get the snap.

No. Anyone with issues in any version of Ubuntu are encouraged to report bugs on Launchpad and GNOME upstream.

While we've given the subreddit a couple of days to be excited about the new release, we are once again enforcing rule 2: complaining about issues on reddit is a waste of time. Writing good bug reports upstream gets issues resolved.

The Application depends on whether you are a programmer/normal user/student/..... The applications I found worth installing are as follows

• VLC player
• Adobe Air
• Picasa
• Wine
• Smplayer - Its a good one, but if you have VLC its enough.
• lxsplit - For splitting and merging files
• Adobe Reader.
• xchm - Chm files reader
• rtorrent/Azureus/Deluge - torrent Client
• 7zip/unrar free - For Amazing compression
• Inkscape/GNU Paint - Good graphics apps
• Supertux/Supertuxkart - Games to spend your time
• xchat irc - IRC GUI client
• Audacious - Winamp like music client
• AptOnCD - Gives iso backup of installed applications so that you could use it later
• Samba - To share files over the network with windows users.
• Virtualbox - For your virtualization needs
• vinagre - VNC client for the GNOME Desktop
• cntlm - Proxy to communicate with ISA servers with NTLM authentication

Programmer

• Eclipse - IDE
• Scilab/GNU Octave - Matlab Like Software
• Geany - Programming IDE
• QT Designer

Researcher

• Mendeley Desktop - To arrange files, references...
• Texmaker - Latex GUI

But now it seems the applications availbale in GNU/Linux are much more than that in Windows. You could get lots of application if you are using Ubuntu from either Software Center or Ubuntu PPA. How to install from PPA is described in the PPA Link Here. Now it seems that installing application in Ubuntu is much easier if you have an internet connection.

Haha, I'm very glad to see you are using a program I've created - Variety, and are enjoying a photo I've taken (https://www.flickr.com/photos/peter-levi/7527957910/in/dateposted-public/) :) Cheers!

If you're looking to spend £20 on it, you can pick up a Kingston SSD: Kingston Technology SA400S37/120G SSD A400 120 GB Solid State Drive (2.5 Inch SATA 3)

Boot time will dramatically reduce.

Mirroring open source projects has always been volunteer driven. There is bound to be a shitty host from time to time.

Best bet is to report this to https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mirror-admins

iTunes represents a style of software philosophy not commonly seen on Linux for two main reasons: choice, and feasibility. In iTunes the entire package of CD-Ripping, music store, music playback, library management, syncing with remote devices, podcasts, tag editor & information fetcher etc. are all bundled into one. As a result of this people are forced to choose a single monolithic software stack or nothing.

Instead, linux advocates modularity, the capability for different software packages to swapped in and out as part of a larger work environment. This allows greater choice amongst users for what exactly they use, and it makes development easier, as any given project can focus on a smaller task. Because of this you are less likely to find a single program managing the entirety of your music collection.

The main benefit of iTunes is that using a smooth flow of different interworking programs is pretty painful in windows and OS X, but with customization you can make your entire system as easy to use as iTunes!

While it's not exactly what you requested, or even that similar I will describe my current setup, it may be informative.

I primarily use Decibel Audio Player for playback, as I like it's modal interface and simple design. For CD-Ripping I use Sound-Juicer For my library management I use the filesystem and normal file search (my tree is Music/Album Name - Album Artist/00 Track.mp3

>I'm genuinely curious as to how they fit all that stuff on there

Compression and SquashFS.

> if they have to pick and choose which parts (drivers and such) to fit on to a CD, which is why some things work in one version but don't in the next.

No, they don't skimp on drivers for obvious reasons. You're experiencing run-of-the-mill regressions. The constraints of the CD do influence application and library choices, however.

> Would moving up to a DVD be better?

Maybe. The stated plan is eventually to ditch the LiveCD concept altogether and push loopmounted devices (eg Wubi) and LiveUSBs as the primary methods of installation. However, they'll probably only bump up install size by 100MB~ with the format change, as Mark Shuttleworth says limiting disk size is good discipline against bloat.

Im magical! Actually a combination of some really great python bindings for the reddit API here: https://github.com/mellort/reddit_api and using the Unity lenses API, producing the final result, here: https://launchpad.net/reddit-lens

Not any more. Tunnel Bear got bought by McAfee and ~~Linux~~ Linus decided they couldn't endorse Tunnel Bear any more given McAfee's track record with privacy. Now they endorse Private Internet Access.

Nightmare, even with tools like PowerTOP or TLP it's still not powerful as MacOS or MS Windows. It's not only Ubuntu BTW, Linux in general is bad when it becomes to battery life. I hope they do something about it in the next few years..because most people who use Linux systems they also use it on a Laptop/Notebook.

Not poo-pooing the concept, by any measure; but I just bought this machine from Newegg and will be putting a Ubuntu spin (Bodhi) on it:

DELL OptiPlex GX620 Desktop PC Pentium 4 3.2GHz 2 GB 80GB HDD Windows 7 Home Premium

$63.99 + FREE shipping

Canonical's target user group is not the same as Valve's.

SteamOS is firmly targeted at users that will benefit from Vulkan in the near term. It's in Canonical's best interest to keep the older, more proven, drivers in multiverse in order to provide the most stable experience for their paying (mostly business/government) customers.

Newer stuff is always available to enthusiasts by adding their graphics-drivers ppa (https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa). The separation is good, because it ensures "average" users don't accidentally install beta drivers. The Vulkan ppa you linked is a temporary out-of-cycle workaround aimed solely at bleeding-edge devs/testers and will be obsolete as soon as Vukan makes it into the next nVidia release.

The reviewer says they upgraded to 16.10 and haven't had problems, personally I've had many and an going to wipe and reinstall 16.04 in the hope it fixes them.

1. Mediocre at best WiFi range, worse than my droid x and 2013 MacBook pro.
2. Bluetooth dies on sleep frequently. Thinks devices are connected but they do not work.
3. Wifi fails on sleep occasionally, will sometimes still connect to saved networks but is unable to list them.
4. Display link USB hub does not work at all, can't even power a keyboard despite claimed "Linux support"

I'm going to wipe/reinstall 16.04 next weekend so I'll update this post after I do.

Update: After wiping and installing 16.04 from scratch I am having better luck. My WiFi is behaving more normally, it's not as good as my phone but it's not failed on sleep/resume so far. For bluetooth the real solution here worked on 16.10 and I found it on Friday before going back to 16.04 it is blueman. So far so good. Next step is try to out Dell's display link hub

While I applaud the idea, I can't say I'm very happy with how it looks here.

1. The "Next" button is too hard to find. Please remember the "Don't make me think" principle. People will not notice this button immediately and so be confused.

2. The first screen is not very nice looking. The idea of familiarizing new users with the desktop is great! But I just feel like it could and should be done much better, with different screens showing different parts, with animations, instead of jamming everything into one screenshot, maybe? I don't exactly know, I'm not a designer. At the very least make the image bigger and move it a bit down so there will be less whitespace bellow.

3. Asking new users to consider whether or not they want to set up something for some technical reason after the installation seems like a big no-no for me. Either move it to the installation or turn it on by default or don't ask and let those who need it find it would be my suggestion.

4. In general it's just not that aesthetically appealing. I know I've seen some much nicer looking welcome screens before, but I can't find them on DDG right now. Ubuntu Gnome I think had a quite nice one.

I'm sorry for this. I'm just saying it because I know how important the first impression is, especially for the kind of non-technical users that don't hang out on r/ubuntu, and I really want Ubuntu to succeed in this market!

Edit: They listened to me already? :P Check the first screenshot in this OMG Ubuntu blogpost.

Another way to address this is to use the LibreOffice PPA : https://launchpad.net/~libreoffice/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

Which does have 5.4.3!

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa

sudo apt-get update

Run a Syncthing server. It's easy to setup (copy bin to /opt and write a systemd unit file) and is quite useful -> syncing over the internet works by default without any special configuration.

I really don't get why people don't talk more about Syncthing.

The majority of packages are identical to Debian's. There are a great number of Ubuntu-specific packages containing Ubuntu-specific software (i.e. Ubuntu Software Center, Unity, etc.), meta-packages like ubuntu-desktop (which requires all the packages the desktop CD would install), and probably some with defaults for GNOME and such.

Ubuntu maintains its own kernel and a default configuration, as every distro does.

The RC system uses a mixture of System V (legacy) and upstart (which is their own project, inspired by Apple's start-up scripts), but I don't think the scripts themselves deviate from Debian.

There isn't one single resource that tells you how Ubuntu's packages differ from upstream, but if you download the source packages and look in debian/patches, you'll see.

And there's nothing that Ubuntu does that no other distro does.

What I think makes Ubuntu Ubuntu is the community, and the amount of money Canonical throws at it. As far as I can tell most open source projects don't have any kind of code of conduct, which requires a certain level of civility from its contributors - and the culture is very welcoming. And of course having lots of money thrown at it means there's a lot of potential for innovation.

Download the .deb file from here and double click to install:

https://zoom.us/download

While choosing the downloads, select Ubuntu 14+ because you probably have ubuntu 18/19/20. Then choose 64/32 bit version according to your operating system. If you don’t know how to check the bits, roughly speaking, computers with around 4 GB or more of RAM use 64 bits

Difficult to tell.

The best thing, is to monitor net traffic and from which programs the traffic comes from. Even better, is to put the home server (if you do not need it to be facing the internet) on a private network, only accessible by the machines that need access.

If it needs to face the internet, make sure only services needed are started, only open necessary ports on the firewall etc. Never install 3rd party software you do not know.

Also make sure you run software like The Rootkit Hunter and OSSEC

Note that Lubuntu has changed desktop environments from LXDE to LXQt.

So the release notes warn that they do not support upgrading from 18.04 or below. A fresh install will be required.

The privacy policy where that came from.

I assume that it is out of date as there is no Dash (unless you install Unity after installation). It is certainly not relevant to flavours.

The OP also dishonestly (I shall be blunt about that - reported) omitted the beginning and end of the first paragraph, which reads:

> When you enter a search term into the dash Ubuntu will search your Ubuntu computer and will record the search terms locally. Depending on whether you have opted in or out (see the “Online Search” section below), we may also send your keystrokes as a search term to productsearch.ubuntu.com and selected third parties so that we may complement your search results with online search results from such third parties including: Facebook, Twitter, BBC and Amazon. Canonical and these selected third parties will collect your search terms and use them to provide you with search results while using Ubuntu.

And the OP cherrypicked the second paragraph from a bulleted list, for some reason.

So this is the old well-chewed bone about "Canonical spying" which was closed in 16.04 (with the Dash search outside the local machine being switched off by default) and is now irrelevant with 18.04.

Ecosystem is a bit of a catch 22 here. Needs more users to attract more applications, but it needs more applications to attract more users. For me it has everything I need though (jumping between Fedora and Ubuntu).

Particularly interested in the ubuntu phone and the environment it can bring.

I never had any faith in Deja Dup when, during my testing, it wouldn't find backed up files that I could see were there with duplicity.

I am a big fan of Back In Time: https://github.com/bit-team/backintime

It is regularly updated and worked as it should in my testing. As the site mentions, the documentation was a bit poor, but they are working on that, and the interface is pretty straight-forward anyway. There is a ppa for Ubuntu.

Here's to hoping Darling grows up someday soon, I would love to be able to get Photoshop Mac on Linux and other pro tools like Affinity someday.

https://www.darlinghq.org/

You want Variety. Peter Levi has even presented it here in /r/Ubuntu. See the article.

They do, but audio CDs were designed to be played back in real time and so were given error correction that could fail and keep playing without skipping, as long as enough data was present, by filling-in the errored data. CD drives read audio CDs using the same lossy error-correction, unlike with a data CD. These fill-ins usually occur several times in a playthrough or rip. Proper rippers read areas several times, compare checksums, and take the sample whose checksum appears multiple times. 2 or 3 by default, though this can be set arbitrarily high.

http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/support/faq/

You can use GPG (open source version of PGP) for the purpose: https://www.gnupg.org/. I cannot remember if it's installed by default though.

To encrypt a file you simply do (after generating your key): gpg --encrypt --recipient foo.tgz

To decrypt it afterwards you do: gpg --output foo.tgz --decrypt foo.tgz.gpg

I do believe that several file managers has built-in support for GPG in case you don't want to use the command line.

Reboot the machine and call the grub menu

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/07/key-to-show-grub-menu-ubuntu

Choose advanced options; then you'll see all the available kernels in blocks of two (normal and recovery); choose the second new kernel to see if the machine can boot and operate in normal manner. If so issue:

>sudo apt clean
>
>sudo apt update
>
>sudo apt-distupgrade
>
>reboot

I did, yesterday. wanted to see what all the fuss was about, haven't used gnome shell since trying it out when gnome3 was first released. it's a pretty smooth switch. Things that make the transition easier:

• if you use multiple monitors and workspaces, gnome's default behaviour is kind of ridiculous. go to tweak tools, workspaces section, and turn off "workspaces only on primary display"
• dash to dock extension. The easiest way to install extensions seems to be installing the browser adapter from this PPA, the one in the repos didn't work for me.
• global dark theme is pretty nice. don't try to use the ubuntu theme in gnome shell, they don't seem to play well together.
• i miss the HUD and global menus. haven't found a solution yet.

It looks like the program 'gnome-disk-utility' also called 'disks' on my Debian installation. It is a program that can be used to format or encrypt disk partitions, or display what disks and partitions exist on the system. As others noted, it may be that this program is set to auto-start after booting. Where or how that happens would depend on what OS/desktop is installed and how it is configured.

Here is link to info about the program (or my best guess as to the program).

If you run Apache, SSH, FTP, or other server services, I highly recommend fail2ban.

"sudo apt-get install fail2ban", then read the wiki pages about configuration.

It is installed by default in Kubuntu. I think GSConnect is still a little too new to be a default but if I recall correctly, I saw that there were plans to integrate it into Ubuntu. It was originally proposed for 18.10.

They did a similar one for Artful Aardvark but the best pictures by far were the ones for 8.04 Hardy Heron and 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. You missed the other ones because they were dull.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/09/a-look-back-at-every-ubuntu-default-wallpaper

As far as I can tell, it's a rebranding of desktop Ubuntu that will use snaps, apparently Mir, and share a code base with the phones and tablets. It's in development now. I think that's why Canonical stopped working on Ubuntu Touch a month ago, to focus on getting its successor ready.

https://launchpad.net/canonical-devices-system-image/+milestone/p2

http://people.canonical.com/~lzemczak/landing-team/ubuntu-personal/

If you look through the bug reports, some of the bugs are from Ubuntu Touch, like the " File Manager crashes when Network is selected" issue.

I don't know when this will be ready, it may be months, but I am so hyped for it.

EDIT: I should note that I've heard a few people talk about Ubuntu Personal, so I don't think it's a secret or anything. That's why I first looked it up, because I heard about it on some Linux or tech podcast.

16.04 is the LTS release. If you want more stable and less buggy than that, you'll have to go with Debian Stable. It will feel familiar because Ubuntu is built with Debian packages.

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Your comment has been removed because it is contrary to the Ubuntu Code of Conduct.

If you're looking for something graphical, have a look at rEFInd - it has a few themes as well, but not as many as Burg

So.. I don't really want to start a debate, everyone is entitled to an opinion, but maybe I can ease your mind on a couple of points:

LXD is developed by core LXC developers, who have been working at Canonical for a long time, and actually just extends LXC to be used like a hypervisor - essentially it allows you to drop LXC into the place of KVM (or some other virtualisation technology) in something that requires a network accessible API (key example: OpenStack). See here for more

Bzr actually pre-dates git, and Canonical has a wealth of tooling around it. Some Canonical projects now use git. We're certainly not anti-git.

Juju? It's not a configuration management tool per se, indeed you can use other configuration management solutions within Juju charms, but that isn't quite the point. A quote from the juju website:

> Juju is an application and service modelling tool that enables you > to quickly model, configure, deploy and manage applications in > the cloud with only a few commands. Use it to deploy hundreds of > pre-configured services, OpenStack or your own code to any public > or private cloud.

... again, Juju has existed for several years now, and occupied a space that no other tool did when it was created.

There is no best Linux distro.

>I'm new to Linux

>I thought of installing Kali Linux

Don't. Install a desktop distro, any of them will work for your needs.

First of all, they are not developing a new browser. The whole "browser" part, the thing that shows webpages, is just Chromium (the open source core of Google Chrome).

What they have made is a nice interface around Chromium that blends in very well with Unity8. They will make it so it converges seamless from phone to tablet to desktop. They cannot use default Chromium or Firefox because that interface will look horrible on unity8/Ubuntu Touch. Developing their own Chromium wrapper also enables them to make adjustments (like hiding 'we have an android app' banners) and make it fly on the phone.

Since Unity8 is highly dependent on webapps, the browser is actually considered a part of the OS. The browser has to be perfect and integrated extremely well into the OS. That's why they aren't using default Chromium or Firefox...

Second: The browser is not ready for desktop usage yet. They are working hard on this, they are working hard on making all applications scale seamless from phone to tablet to desktop... It will take some time to get the UX right, but the result will be awesome!

Ubuntu is already self-hosting its code and repositories, so obviously relying on an external website as Github would be a major technological backwards step. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to do such a thing.

Now, i think the question is more about git (the underlying software) than Github (the website).

In that aspect, i agree that git (the underlying software) support for https://launchpad.net/ would be great since more people seem to be familiar with it.

Looks good. But I'm still hoping for an extension that adds to GNOME shell an option to use a global menu, preferably along with an option for displaying locally integrated menus (LIM) in the titlebar of unmaximized windows, like what can currently be done in Unity.

Perhaps as a welcome gift to incoming Unity users, GNOME will provide means for allowing users to customize GNOME shell (using extensions, for example) to reflect more Unity design elements. To accomplish this, GNOME shell would probably need a few patches to its code. But if Unity design elements could be added with extensions only, and without need for patches to GNOME shell, all the better.

You can just do sudo apt install pcsx2 can't you?

Unstable repo: https://launchpad.net/~pcsx2-team/+archive/ubuntu/pcsx2-daily

Alternatively, Lutris includes a PCSX2 runner along with other emulators.

More like, "one of the most overhyped article titles you've seen".

Sorry, there is nothing revolutionary here. This is just a new mobile skin on top of the old familiar terminal (and the demand for a mobile/touch UI on a Linux terminal emulator is debatable).

There is a lot of room for innovation in terminal emulators, which are essentially a 40+ year old technology that has seen little change in that time. Examples of projects that are actually making novel contributions:

• Terminology
• Final Term

These guys are actually thinking about what else a terminal can do – intelligently interpreting the content of the terminal, making common actions easier and faster, support displaying things other than text. I think these ideas are pretty exciting and I can't wait to see where they're headed.

• read: http://www.webupd8.org/2014/04/10-things-to-do-after-installing-ubuntu.html

• Redshift - Great if you use your computer at night

• Guake - drop down terminal, very convenient

• Unity-Mail - gmail notifier panel applet

Another ProtonMail user here. I've found it after doing lots of research. The developers are scientists working on the LHC, and their servers are in Switzerland, which means they are safe from evil government laws that would otherwise require them to give your data to them. Check out their blog.

Also, they'll release ProtonVPN in 10 days.

Bug filed to no longer feature the Maps app in the Software app.

I expect the Maps app to be fixed--it just may take several weeks. It's a lot simpler to just apply whatever fix is needed at that point than to try to remove it from a stable Ubuntu release then re-add it later.

To the OP: good job finding this bug! You're welcome to file bugs like this yourself in the future.

It is in discussion for a while at /r/ubuntu, css should take the orange main color since its the color for ubuntu/community while aubergine is for Canonical.

some subreddit already got an updated css :

• /r/ubuntuAppdev
• /r/ubuntuFr

Work in progress here : https://launchpad.net/redditstyle (need updates)

Just FYI, this is slightly out-of-date. Since 11.10, there is a /run directory that replaces the old /var/run. Fedora 15 has it too and I presume other distros will make the transition as well.

Some info/background

You should take a look at Activity Log Manager. I have never tested it and the article referse to 11.04, but since it is Zeitgeist managing the dash items in 11.10 as well you shouldn't have issues.

I would research the barebones Intel nuc on Amazon. It doesn't come with RAM or a HDD/SSD do you can purchase your own. This is on Amazon right now (US link)

Intel Next Unit of Computing Kit, Black/Grey BOXDCCP847DYE https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B7I8HZ4/ref=cm_sw_r_awd_VDCIvbHCARTXX

EDIT:

Went to amazon.co.uk and found that the intel nuc is more than £250 ~(£299).

I would suggest this instead: (amazon UK link) http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gigabyte-Brix-BXBT-2807-Ultra-Compact/dp/B00L2C3VAQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1435097491&sr=8-1&keywords=gigabyte+brix

I'm not a pro, but this could potentially help.

Make a bootable Ubuntu disc on CD/USB, boot on it and use GParted to make a new /boot partition. Make it Fat32, 512 MB big, label it /boot and put a 'boot' flag on it.

Then you make a bootable Boot Repair Disk and use the automatic boot repair function to reinstall the Grub bootloader.

Here is a link to what Shuttleworth's team has said about UEFI. FSF is blowing this out of proportion I think. At least Canonical and Fedora are trying to find workarounds to UEFI because it is unfortunately the next step in BIOS technology.

I appreciate both of their efforts instead of just sitting around and bitching about it like Stallman is. I don't think RMS understands that a lot of future computer buyers won't have a choice of opting out of UEFI and using a traditional BIOS.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/shuttleworth-on-ubuntu-linux-fedora-and-the-uefi-problem/11270

I'm typing this on a 1215n that has optimus (switchable) GPU. That blows but aside from that I think it's a great "power" netbook for the money.

Next I want this badboy and extra points if I get it with a) no Windows tax (money back/off) and b) full GPU driver support.

Good example was recently someone made a complaint about the new Firefox on Ubuntu being Snap based and how slow it was.

Well it was just the first release by Mozilla of the Firefox Snap.

Last week they released a SNAP update that contained alot of bug & performance fixes and ... it works much better now.

$ sudo snap refresh

should update you to that updated Firefox Snap.

https://snapcraft.io/firefox

If only, in addition to displaying a global menu for maximized windows, KDE Plasma also offered an option for displaying locally integrated menus (LIM) in the titlebar of unmaximized windows, like what can be done in Unity 7, then, after adding something like Plotinus (or similar) to approximate the HUD, the replication of Unity would be complete!

• Title and menu bars: With GNOME 3 applications you have two bars: Panel + title bar (which is equal to the main toolbar and saves lots of space). Example is gedit or Nautilus. Other applications have a separate title bar, because they are not adapted to GNOME. If you don't like the current theme (which also sets the height for the title bar), you can easily change it with the GNOME Tweak Tool.

• Workspace switching: CTRL + ALT + Arrow keys

• Window positioning: SUPER + Arrow keys

Just because you don't want to learn a new desktop environment/GUI concept, doesn't mean that it is bad. I'm using GNOME Shell since 3.0 and I have really grown to love the way it's doing things. I have tried different desktops like KDE, but I always felt that their way of doing things was complicated and inefficient.

As you can see this is simply personal preference (e. g. I hate traditional panel based desktops and one of the reason is that they don't work well with multi-monitor laptops) and if you don't like something, there are always alternatives available.

You can try restore the data with testdisk. For EDX you can try loading Ubuntu into a VirtualBox machine. But first and foremost, if you care about your data, please do a backup. Daily, weekly, monthly, whatever suits you, but do it. Now.

This is great work, I love useful scripts like this!

You might be interested in duply, which is a similar project designed to make backups to remote servers as simply as possible.

It is essentially a bunch of scripts for duplicity so you don't need to make long, complicated command lines. Duplicity itself supports a number of backends, including S3, Backblaze, google drive and others, as well as generic (s)ftp and rsync protocols.

There's also options for encryption, too.

So I personally use it to back up all my computers on other servers, but it at least stays encrypted, in case the data is something I shouldn't trust a service to keep private.

check out gwork office its pretty new but it works well.

https://launchpad.net/~tombeckmann/+archive/ppa/

here is the install command sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tombeckmann/ppa; sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install gwoffice

The other suggestions have been good I think. I just wanted to point something out.

If you're using 11.04, beware of zeitgeist. It will log your porn viewing habits (and make your porn appear in the dash search, I believe).

I haven't tried this, but supposedly this method will prevent that from happening.

What's most interesting is the official Multiple Monitors UX Specification document, which goes into great detail about this.

> The idea that Microsoft is trying to "extinguish" Linux is just absolutely insane that it makes me think everyone who believes it is crazy.

What's crazy is to ignore that they're constantly suing a new Android/Linux company every other week (http://www.geekwire.com/2015/microsoft-sues-kyocera-in-new-android-patent-infringement-dispute/) while using extortionist tactics (http://techrights.org/2016/03/20/patent-lawsuits-blowback/) and pretending they've become some benevolent partner to Linux.

Open source and Linux have grown in popularity not in despite of Microsoft's actions, but because of their actions. If you think that actually makes Microsoft happy, then that is the insane thing.

Why? Why make it so hard on yoruself? Just use Ventoy. You can build a Ventoy USB from anywhere... and then just drop whatever ISOs onto the data partition. You don't need a Windows PC, you don't need the Media Creation Tool, you don't need to fight with making bootable USB sticks, etc. https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

There won't be an 19.04 LTS. Long Term Support versions of Ubuntu are released every two years, so the next LTS will be 20.04, to be released in April 2020. You can install 19.04, which has an 8-month support window or 18.04 LTS, which will be supported for several more years.

​

https://www.ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

I could be mistaken... but I don't believe Chromium 12.04 is a thing. You may mean Ubuntu 12.04, in which case I've never had the displeasure of it not prompting for a password. If you have nothing important on the system yet, just go for a simple reinstall. Also if it is a chromebook with an ssd inside, there are some extra steps you may want to take to improve overall performance and the lifetime of the drive.

If you want to extend the lifetime of the ssd on the system(disregard if there is no solid state hard drive) here are some helpful links I've used. If you're not too comfortable with Linux, please be sure to read carefully. For this link, do NOT add the nodiratime as noatime already takes care of it: http://www.howtogeek.com/62761/how-to-tweak-your-ssd-in-ubuntu-for-better-performance/

This thread is where I found the first link and it might be helpful. The post which contains the first link I've given you has other helpful links as well: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1960003

Best of luck!

EDIT: If you have any important or precious files on the system already, boot into the live cd/usb and copy the files to another drive or area off of the system drive.

EDIT #2: Just an opinion/thought- chromebooks generally have no more than a 16GB ssd or so... so if you're not fond of the Chrome OS, you might want to consider getting a normal laptop. Even just casual web browsing/emailing type folks will fill up 16GB.

The people who maintain the Ubuntu 'repository' or 'archive' are called 'archive admins' which has been the case (nearly) forever (i.e. since before 2006 when this group was created in launchpad).

https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-archive

"This team is responsible for administrative and maintenance tasks for the Ubuntu package archive, including processing of new packages, handling requests for package syncs from external repositories, migration of packages between components, and other administrative matters."

I'm using KeePassX on Linux AND Windows and I keep my passwords on a dropbox account. Why does everyone think KeePassX doesn't work on Windows? What am I missing here? KeePassX Downloads

Snaps are really insane and more trouble than it's worth.

If you're maintaining an app you want a RELIABLE and easy to work with packaging systems.

I've been working on Polar for the least few months:

https://getpolarized.io/

and we support debs and snaps and AppImage.

I think we're just going to go with debs. the snaps continually break and have VERY confusing issues dealing with sandboxing and containers.

It's just not worth it.

Once you get comfortable and want to start adding cool stuff, two great sites to look at are OMG! Ubuntu and WebUpd8. They usually have cool stuff like how to get Global Menu support for Firefox, updates on new software, cool Unity widgets, etc., as well as easy-to-follow guides.

If there are two commands you should get familiar with, they are sudo apt-get install and sudo apt-get update

If there's an application you want/need, it can usually be found in the Ubuntu Software Center or through googling it, if it's not already available in the repositories.

Speaking of which, if you want Java and Flash to work correctly, you should enable the Canonical Partners repository.

Remember, /r/Ubuntu is here for you if you get lost/frustrated.

6th paragraph from the top:

> GNOME 2.32 has some GNOME 3.0 features though that I didn’t like. For example, some GNOME compatible applications have, instead of a permanently displayed right-hand slider for moving up and down a page, they have a slider that only appears when your mouse hovers over a windows right-side interface. I find this more annoying than useful.

This is a Ubuntu feature, not a GNOME feature. If you don't like it, just do: (source)

sudo apt-get remove overlay-scrollbar liboverlay-scrollbar-0.1-0

If good Linux support is your number one priority for a VPN, neither NordVPN nor Tunnelbear are the best options. And it's not like they're deemed to be the best options from a privacy POV either.

Private Internet Access has a great GUI VPN client for Linux, but shares some the privacy concerns of the two aforementioned VPNs (note: I don't think regular users should worry about this for NordVPN or PIA, but if you're a privacy nut that might put you off, however in the case of Tunnelbear, I personally wouldn't trust it since it's been acquired by McAfee). Mullvad also offers a GUI client and is deemed to be one of the best from a privacy or technical POV.

If you prefer CLI or (semi-)manually adding config files to the network manager, you can still do that with either PIA or Mullvad, but IMO GUI clients are an added perk that show actual commitment to satisfying the Linux userbase. I will note that I have previously contacted NordVPN about this and they said such a client was in the works, but until one has been shipped they'll be trailing PIA or Mullvad as far as Linux support goes.

google git prompt you will get to know more.. The one I use is given on Git's website: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Appendix-A%3A-Git-in-Other-Environments-Git-in-Bash

& the symbol is an unicode icon which I copied from fontawesome.

Uh, a week and a half is not "quite old". Just use v4.11-rc8.

Linux 4.11 was released on Sunday and Monday was a holiday in many countries. You could have given them more than one day before you start complaining!

The Ubuntu Kernel team was busy doing other updates yesterday (Tuesday).

Caffeine - Keeps the screen from going to sleep if you're watching a Youtube video or something. (available from official repos)

QDirStat - Fork of the now-dead KDirStat, which was the original program that WinDirStat was based on.. for visually seeing where all your hard drive space is being used up. (PPA here)

Tracktion 7 is an older version which is now free. It came out in 2016; Waveform 9 (newest version) came out in March.

I didn't check, but I'm fairly positive it's not open source.

https://www.tracktion.com/products/waveform

You'll see a comparison. Says Ubuntu 16.04 is supported, but perhaps it will install on 18.04.

Most of what I use isn't in the official repos, so it's more a lot of wget and manually downloading things. But I always install:

Python 3.7 from source DBeaver CE Google Chrome Keybase Newset GoLang from source

On my servers, though, it's easy. Just apt-get to install curl, then mail-in-a-box.

> The most valid concern is probably that of administrators that want to be able to hold certain packages from update.

You can defer updates - this is an existing configuration option.

What you can't do (unless you manually download a snap and sideload it) is configure snapd to never update a snap.

[Edited to add]

> I've been burned before by apt packages updating with regressions.

Reverting apt regressions is difficult. With snaps, it's just snap revert. It's just a symlink swap since snapd keeps old versions around for a while, so it's very quick.

Here's what trips me up when I get on a RHEL box, I'm sure the reverse is true (I'm leaving out the things other people are recommending like learning apt):

1. /etc/sysconfig in RHEL vs. not having it.
2. In Debian/Ubuntu a bunch of services have an /etc/default entry to toggle what the default behavior of a service is -- for many services turning them on is an explicit step instead of it turning on when you install the package.
3. "apache" in Debian/Ubuntu vs. "httpd" in RHEL always tripped me up. The method for managing multiple sites is different. I used to hate the Debian way now I prefer to do it that way, sites-enabled, sites-available, etc. Though I don't know if this is still the case.
4. Many things that you think "Why is this like this?" usually have a reason, Ubuntu inherits many of the behaviors from Debian so as you learn it it becomes useful to learn Debian Policy: https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/

I switched from Windows to Ubuntu about 3 months ago, and I had been on Windows since 3.1

Commit. Let's not kid each other. If you don't commit you'll revert back to Windows within a day or two. It takes a while to get oriented to a new system. It will be frustrating at first.

Keep a log of changes you make. If you hose your system, and have to do a clean install again, it will be easy to re-do the changes you want back.

Try and find GUI front ends for some of the command line utilities (e.g. grsync for rsync). You'll already have enough to do in the terminal, best if you don't have to do everything in the terminal.

Get a couple good reference books (e.g. Ubuntu Unleashed or Linux Bible). They go into more detail than an AskUbuntu page, for example, if you want to know how to connect your Ubuntu machine to a Windows network.

There were some real annoying things about Ubuntu when I first installed it - like one global close/minimize/maximize instead of each window having its own. Fix the most annoying things first.

I feel pretty good about Ubuntu now. I definitely won't be going back to Windows. But it takes time...

Edit: This is a handy website for when you google a problem and your best hit is an AskUbuntu page with a one liner like:

open a terminal and type this ...

and you have no idea what .... does.

http://explainshell.com/

I keep my password files for KeePass on it. It is less than a meg so syncing is very fast and I get it on all my machines including my phone. So I have my passwords with me at all times and it is encrypted so I do not have to trust Canonical to not pry.

I also keep a few hundred wallpapers that I rotate on most of machines.

The latest drivers are the best the vast majority of the time. Easiest way to do it is to get the xorg-edgers PPA. Type the following into a terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade

After that point, you'll never need to worry about the drivers again, whenever a new one is released your package manager will automatically pull it in for you. There's a way to add PPAs through the software center (I think they call it "software sources" there), but I cba to take 15 screenshots to show you step-by-step, and the terminal is faster.

EDIT: Found a guide if you want to do it without the terminal. I still think it's much slower though.

There are issues with doing it the way others are describing, by going to the nvidia site, downloading and installing:

A) Your package manager might freak out at some point in the future if a package relies on your graphics card driver and it doesn't know one is installed

B) It won't update by itself, you'll need to repeat the process the next time a driver is released

C) Last time I checked, nVidia's official installer needed the X server (the thing that runs the desktop and creates windows and non-command line stuff) to be shut down while the installation happens, which will be very scary for a newbie to the command line, and you'll probably need a second computer to read instructions from as you're doing it. Not sure if this is still the case, but it was last year.

AirVPN, it has a open source client but they only support openvpn which for me doesn't matter. The company is run by people who care, that is why they are an organisation. They include port forwarding and ddns support if you would like that

Those are not GPG signatures, they are checksums.

See this stack overflow page for ways to compute and check those on Windows:

http://superuser.com/questions/245775/is-there-a-built-in-checksum-utility-on-windows-7

Meanwhile...

Firefox 50.0 beta1 is in ppa:mozillateam/firefox-next

https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/firefox-next

Thunderbird 49.0 beta1 is in ppa:mozillateam/thunderbird-next

https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/thunderbird-next

That's not a freetype package from the Ubuntu archive.

For some reason it looks like you enabled the following PPA (curiously called "Better font rendering"):

https://launchpad.net/~no1wantdthisname/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

What do you value more? Weight? Autonomy? Screen size? Graphics? How much are your willing to pay? Do you want the machine to just work or does tinkering a bit with it to get it to work doesn't bother you?

Without knowing anything, it is going to be hard to advise you. But, personally I bought one of those: Asus u43j and I love it. It's already an «old» model, there are already better models from the same «Bamboo Series». Everything works out of the box, except for Optimus.

You have to look out for Optimus laptops. These laptops have a nVidia GPU and an Intel IPU. The idea behind it, is that you switch to the nVidia GPU when you want to launch a game for example, and the rest of the time you use the intel IPU to save battery.

OPTIMUS DOESN'T WORK ON LINUX

Or at least not officially. There are efforts to make it work, the best being Bumblebee. With Bumblebee, your nVidia GPU is turned off, and you can turn it back on whenever you need to launch a game. Look at the readme, there is a list of known compatible laptops, you might want one of those. If for any reason any of those laptops doesn't suit you, try to avoid Optimus, since you can't be sure Bumblebee will support any other laptop that is not on the list (but it could).

I would go for LTS version since it has 5 year life cycle and through HWE (Hardware Enablement Kernel) you get newer versions of kernel that will enable better support for hardware. Graphics drivers can be upgraded with adding repository. Setting WINE and your game is even easier with Lutris so that isn't issue at all. If you really want newer kernel versions you always have Ukuu (free version is still good choice, I use it still and works for me)

Just examining the HTTPS certificates for those the last three are for Firefox functionality, the second is Web of Trust (https://www.mywot.com), and the last two are for push.services.mozilla.com (Mozilla Push Service). The first is for services.insttranslate.com, which might for some extension you use.

Open these links and it will show you an error because the hostname you asked for doesn't match the name on the certificate. The name on the certificate will be shown if you click on "Advanced".

It was the only suitable photo I had handy when drawing the mockup.

(Normally I do hand-drawn sketches instead. But this time I used Inkscape, because I wanted to see how well the design would fit in the vertical space.)

It's 20$ on their website also. http://www.worldofgoo.com/ Don't know but my wild guess is WoG wants to compete on steam by lowering price - so it's probably because of (still) small competition on linux. I'm waiting for steam to come to ubuntu to buy games. There are rumors for next month...

It's basically the same thing as snaps (some subtle differences). It's not gnome specific (installation guide for Ubuntu: https://flatpak.org/setup/Ubuntu/ ). And anyway apps like Telegram ( https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.telegram.desktop ) are not specific to any desktop environment anyway.

• Web Browser: Firefox
• Terminal: Alacritty
• IDE: Visual Studio Code
• File manager: Dolphin
• Basic Text Editor: Visual Studio Code, Emacs
• Video Player: VLC
• Music Player: VLC

Console Apps:
htop instead of top
ripgrep instead of grep

Gotcha. You will eventually run into problems running Gnome 2 on modern distros, so it might not be a bad idea to start evaluating alternatives. If you are a fan of Gnome 2, I would recommend checking out MATE.. There's even a custom rolled community version of Ubuntu with the MATE desktop available at http://ubuntu-mate.org and it's available now on the 15.10 base.

Well, to be frank, your PC is extremely old and standard Ubuntu just isn't made for machines from that far back. However Lubuntu, as /u/winston_orwell_smith suggested, could probably work reasonably well. It uses a different desktop environment, it's extremely light on RAM and it doesn't require powerful graphics output to run well.