 I think most desktop Linux users probably start off with using Ubuntu. I know I did. I started using desktop Linux about 13, 14 years ago, and I started with Ubuntu, and it was a great distribution. I still love Ubuntu, and these days, of course, I use Arch and Arch-based distributions, but there's nothing wrong with Ubuntu. I think Ubuntu, there's this misconception out there that it's strictly for new users. Well, it's true that Ubuntu is a new user-friendly distribution. You don't have to be a new user to use Ubuntu. You can be a power user, you can be a very experienced Linux user, and still do everything you want to do with Ubuntu. And today, what I wanted to do is I wanted to take you guys through, especially those of you that have been on Ubuntu for a few months, or maybe a couple of years. Maybe you want to up your game a little bit. I'm going to show you how I would customize Ubuntu to make Ubuntu a little bit more power user-friendly. So we're going to go from noob to power user using Ubuntu. So let me switch over here to this VM of Ubuntu 2104. This is a virtual machine that I spun up for this video, and it's pretty much stock vanilla Ubuntu 2104. Now to pimp this out a little bit, to make this more for power users, I think one of the things I really want to spend some time customizing first is the terminal and the command line, because I think most people assume that desktop Linux power users spend all their time in a terminal, all their time at the command line. And that's kind of true, actually. I spend a lot of time actually in a terminal. So that's going to be one of the first things that I really want to spend some time customizing and tweaking to my liking. So I'm going to open up the default terminal here. This is the GNOME terminal in Ubuntu, and I'm going to do control shift plus to zoom in. So let me control shift plus to zoom in so you guys can see the commands I run. Control shift plus zooms in, control minus zooms out. So the very first thing that I want to spend some time customizing is this very plain vanilla command prompt. I don't like that command prompt. I would like something a little sexier. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to install this command prompt called starship. Starship works with the bash shell, which is the default shell on Ubuntu. It also works with ZSH and the fish shell. And you can install starship on Ubuntu using snaps. So if I did a sudo snap install starship and give that just a minute, it may take a minute or two to download. No, it installed very quickly actually. Now to actually enable the starship prompt, what we need to do is edit our bash config, which is the dot bash RC file in your home directory. If you did a LS-LA here in your home directory, you will see that you should have a file called dot bash RC. Now what you want to do is you want to edit that file. So edit that using a text editor. The default text editor on Ubuntu is called gEdit. It's called text editor in the menu system, but the actual program name is gEdit. So do gEdit space dot bash RC. And it will open the dot bash RC file in gEdit. Now I'm going to go into preferences here. I'm going to make this font a little bigger so you guys can better read it. So let's see. Will it actually let me change the font? Yep. So I'm going to change the font size to change it to 16, just so it's nice and big so everybody can see what I'm doing here. And what you want to do is you want to go all the way to the bottom of your bash RC and then you want to create a new line. So I'm going to get my prompt down here and I'm just going to go down here and I am going to paste this line right here. And then this line that says a val and space, then double quotes dollar symbol and then parentheses Starship init bash and then closing parentheses, closing double quote. And what that's telling bash is, hey, when you launch into a fresh bash shell, load the Starship prompt. Now what you want to do is you want to save this. So I'm going to click save, then I'm going to close gEdit. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to close the terminal and I'm going to open a new terminal with a new bash shell. And we should see now the Starship prompt. I like that prompt. It's more minimal and but you know, it's a really nice prompt. If I CD into another directory so you guys can see how the paths look. You see you get the path and then below the path, you get the little right pointing Chevron that is your prompt. The next thing I want to do is I want to change the default color scheme of this terminal, right? I don't like the color scheme here. It makes no sense to me. It's kind of painful to look at, to be honest. So I'm going to go find a better terminal color scheme. So the theme that I want to install for the GNOME terminal is the Dracula theme. If I go to Dracula theme dot com, Dracula theme dot com slash GNOME dash terminal, you will get instructions for how to install the Dracula theme in the GNOME terminal. I'm mostly going to go ahead and get the Dracula theme for gEdit, which is of course the text editor inside Ubuntu. And I may also go ahead and grab the GTK theme. So this is your application themes. So that's what the background of all your graphical applications looks like. It also has a Dracula icon set that we could grab. I mean, we could really make the overall theme of Ubuntu instead of that really weird kind of purplish color that they go with. Maybe change it slightly to this much cooler Dracula theme. So let's go ahead and get this installed inside GNOME terminal first. So inside Firefox, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go in here and I'm going to zoom in so you guys can see the instructions on the page for the GNOME terminal. And what we need to do is we need to enter about four commands at the command prompt. So first of all, I'm going to copy sudo apt install decop cli. I'm just going to copy that and then open a terminal. I'll zoom in here so you guys can see me paste that into the terminal here. And then I'm going to run that command. All right, so we ran that command. Let's go back and run the next one, which is a git clone command. And let me I'm trying to copy it without copying the dollar symbol in front because the dollar symbol is not needed. That's just a representation of the dollar symbol. That's typically as part of the command prompts themselves. So let me get clone. Get is not found. So make sure to sudo apt install get first and hit yes. And now that that is installed, I'm going to up arrow a couple of times in bash to get the git clone command one more time. And now it should work now that git was installed. And then the next thing we need to do is CD into GNOME dash terminal. That's such a short command. I'm not even going to copy and paste that. I'm going to do a CD space and then GN. And then I'm going to tab and it'll auto complete that for me. So let's CD into that directory. And then finally, we need to do a install dot SH. We need to run that shell script. So I'm going to go back to the terminal and to run a shell script, you need to do a period slash and then name of script install dot SH was the name of that script. It says, please select a color scheme. Dracula is the only option. So I'm going to click type one and hit enter. No profile found. You need to create a new default profile to continue. Yes, to continue. OK. And then we'll just let it create a new terminal profile for us. Are you sure you want to overwrite this selected profile? Sure. And then it's asking something about directory colors. I'm not sure what this is asking here. It says enter choice. The default is two. I'm just going to go with the default choice there. All right. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to close the GNOME terminal that we had open. I'm going to relaunch the GNOME terminal. And that is such a much better looking terminal. Wow. I'm going to do a LS, a space dash LA to get a LS here in the home directory. Let me zoom in. I really, really like that terminal color scheme a lot better than what was here by default. So that is the Dracula GNOME terminal color scheme. Now let's go ahead and get this installed for gEdit. And it looks like there's only three things we need to do. We need to enter two terminal commands. So I need this WGIT command. WGIT is a command line utility. But it's a command line downloaded utility. So it's going to download something from the internet. Let me zoom in here so you guys can see this command. We're going to WGIT that URL there. And it's going to download the Dracula.xml file. And the xml file is a file format that gEdit uses for plugins. Then I'm going to go back to the web browser here. The next command we need to enter is this command here. So I'm just going to copy and then go back to the terminal and paste that. What it's going to do is move the Dracula xml file to the correct directory that it needs to go in. It says it cannot move Dracula.xml to home, dt, local, share, gEdit styles. Because it's not a directory. So I guess that directory doesn't exist. So what we could do is we could make deer. And then I'm going to copy this. So I'm going to do a copy and then a paste. I'm going to do mkdir for make directory and then the path to that directory. And then I'm going to up arrow back to the MV command. So move Dracula.xml to that directory. And now that we've done that, the last thing we need to do is activate in gEdit's preference dialog. So we actually need to open gEdit to make the changes take effect. We need to go into preferences. We need to go into fonts and colors. And there is the Dracula color scheme. I'm just going to select that. And now we have the Dracula color scheme. I'm going to go ahead and open the file picker here. I'm going to do dot bash RC. Just so you guys can see what the bash RC inside gEdit looks like. Very, very nice. So now we've got the Dracula theme inside good norm terminal. We got the Dracula theme inside gEdit. And lastly, I thought I would go ahead and download the Dracula GTK theme just so all our graphical applications have the Dracula colors assigned to them. So the instructions say download this dot zip file. So I'm going to go ahead and click that link. And it's asking, what do we want to do with it? I'm going to click save that file. And it's going to save it, of course, to the downloads directory. So I'm going to open up our file manager. I'm going to go into downloads. And there is GTK dash master dot zip. And then it says to extract the zip file to the themes directory at user share themes. So first of all, I'm just going to right click on it. And then I'm going to do extract here. And there is the directory extracted. Now we need to move this directory from our downloads directory to user slash share slash themes. The best way to do this would be using the command line because we need sudo privileges really to do this. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to clear the screen here. I'm going to CD into the downloads directory and do an LS. And you see GTK dash master. And what we want to do is we want to move GTK dash master to slash user slash share slash themes and cannot create directory GTK master because we did not give ourselves sudo privileges. So sudo MV GTK master user share themes and give it your root password. And now what we need to do is to activate the theme in GNOME, run the following commands in the terminal. So this should just be a quick copy and paste. So let's copy that and then go back into the terminal. And you see the theme actually did change. You see instead of a dark theme, now we have a white theme. And then lastly, we need to copy, I guess, this line here. So copy that, go back in the terminal and then do another paste. And now let's see what our themes look like. Actually, I don't want to close that yet because I probably want to go back in and get the icon theme too. So let me go ahead and click on the download link for the icon and then save that. And once again, it's going to save it to the downloads directory here. So let me go ahead and extract the zip from there. And that folder, Dracula, that's the name of the icon set is Dracula, that needs to go into user share icons. So let's go back into the terminal. And once again, doing LS, we're in the downloads directory. I think, no, we're not in the downloads directory anymore. So let's CD back into downloads, doing LS. And then you see, we have the Dracula folder there. That's the icon set. And now we need to sudo move Dracula. We need to send that to slash user slash share slash icons. Let's hit enter, give it a root password. And I think that should be everything that we needed to do on that. And now I can close all of the Dracula tabs, close the file manager. Now, out of the box, Ubuntu really doesn't have a way to change themes as far as themes you went and installed manually yourself like we just did with Dracula. Because by default, the only way to change themes is if you go into settings here, the settings manager and go into appearance. It just lists the standard Yaru themes that Ubuntu ships with out of the box. So what we need is to install a third party package here. So we need to install sudo apt install gnom-tweaks. Give it your root password. And then once that's finished installing, let's go ahead and launch gnom-tweaks. So hit the super key and then start typing gnom-tweaks and hit enter. And now go to appearance. And now go to applications. And I'm gonna click the dropdown menu and let's see what are the available ones, gtk-master, that is the Dracula theme. The cursor theme, we didn't do anything with cursors. The icon theme is Yaru, let's change that because we added a Dracula icon theme as well. And then once we have that set, wow, I really like that icon set. Let's open up the file manager and see how that looks with the Dracula theme. Yeah, that's really, really cool. I'm really digging this. So now that we got the file manager and the terminal and the text editor all set to the same theme, let me resize g-edit here. I forgot I had it full screen. How do we not make this full screen? Can I actually resize g-edit? I'm so used to using tiling window managers and not having to actually click on a border of a window to resize, kind of lost the ability on how to do that. All right, let's go ahead and close all these windows. Now that we have the Dracula GTK theme and everything, what we really need is an appropriate wallpaper that actually matches the Dracula colors. So I'm gonna go ahead and open Firefox again and then let's go ahead and Google Dracula theme wallpaper. Surely there's gotta be some collections of Dracula wallpapers out there. There are, and as a matter of fact, it's from the official Dracula website, Draculatheme.com slash wallpaper. And it looks like there is an entire wallpaper pack of various wallpapers. Looks like they're gonna take forever to load because there's a million of them. I'm gonna do control f inside Firefox for a find in page and I'm gonna search for Ubuntu and there is the Ubuntu wallpaper. And if I right click on it and let me go ahead and open image in new tab. And now I'm gonna click on that image and save image as, and I could save that image anywhere. I'm just gonna save it into the pictures directory and I'm gonna click save. And what I could do, I could actually right click on it and I could set image as desktop background. That way I don't have to go and move that image to a different directory, where wallpapers should be located, which is typically in user share background. Now it's asking, how do we want this positioned? How do we want it positioned in the center? How do we want this? I'm gonna go ahead and do center and set desktop background. Now let me minimize this and see what that looks like. Okay, that's too big. So we actually want to change this. So set image as desktop background. And instead of center, because it's a massive image, what I wanna do is I actually wanna choose fill as the option. So let's go down here to fill hit enter, set as desktop background. And now let me minimize the browser. Yeah, that looks perfect. And now that really matches everything we've done so far. Now the next thing I want you guys to start thinking about as far as transitioning from Noob to Power User is to get away from clicking icons to launch things. You should either just hit super and start typing here in GNOME or install another run launcher or have key bindings especially for the applications you open all the time. So I would definitely strongly advise everyone should have key bindings to open their web browser, their terminal and their file manager. Those should always have key bindings that you just hit a key binding and you open those applications. I also suggest you create a key binding to close any window that currently has focus. Never go and click the little red circle on the far right top of a window to close it. You should just have a simple key binding that closes all of your programs. So if I hit the super key and I start typing key bindings or just keyboard shortcuts, there it is right there, that program there. Let's click on that and let's go in here and see if we can add some key bindings or maybe edit some of the ones that are already here. The very first key binding I want to edit is closed window. By default it's alt F4, that's a windows key binding. That's kind of why they kept it but using a function key for a key binding that you're gonna use all the time is gonna be the most common key binding you hit. Let's not use a function key for that. My many keyboards don't even have a function key. I strongly suggest doing something like SuperShift C. SuperShift C is a common key binding and tiling window manager and many tiling window managers to close a window. I think it's the default key binding in both DWM and in Xmonad and maybe the default closed key binding and Qtile as well. I can't remember but that makes a lot more sense other than alt F4, so now that we've got that set let me actually see if that works. I'm gonna go ahead and open the file manager here and the file manager is the window with focus right now. If I did SuperShift C, you see that window goes away. That's how you will forever from this day forward close your windows. Don't worry about the mouse. Don't grab a mouse just to close a window especially if you already have your hands on a keyboard typing and then you gotta transition to the mouse. That's how you start having hand and wrist pain. So try to get away from the mouse and start using key bindings. I'm gonna go to the bottom of the key binding list here and I'm gonna hit the plus symbol and let's go ahead and add a custom shortcut. So let's go ahead and add a shortcut for Firefox and the command to execute Firefox is Firefox all lowercase and then set the shortcut and I'm gonna do that as Super F, why not? Super F for Firefox. That makes sense, right? So now if I do Super F, it launches Firefox. How cool is that? And then Super Shift C to close Firefox. Let's go ahead and add a couple of more because I mentioned you need a key bindings for your browser, your terminal, and your file manager. So actually, because we're gonna do the file manager, it would make sense for the file manager to be Super F. So let's actually edit the shortcut. Instead of Super F, let's go ahead and set this to Super B for browser. That makes a lot more sense. So now we've got that. Now let's set the file manager. The file manager for GNOME is actually a program called Nautilus. So you can type the word file manager for the description name, but the actual command to launch it is Nautilus and then set the shortcut. And we'll do that as Super F. And now click add and Super F now should launch the Nautilus file manager, Super Shift C to close. And then the terminal already has a key binding. It's Control Alt T. And you can keep that key binding if you want. For me personally, I like something much easier to type than Control Alt T because I'm opening a terminal constantly. So let's go ahead and add a terminal. And the name of the terminal actually is GNOME-Terminal. That's the command to execute that actually launches the program. And then set the shortcut. I'm gonna do Super Enter and then add. So Super Enter opens a terminal, Super Shift C closes the window with focus. And that's all I'm gonna do with key bindings right now but I strongly suggest you guys to explore other key bindings that will make your life a little easier because the more you get away from having to use the mouse and navigating these weird strange menu systems like the one here in GNOME, let me close out the web browser there asking about closing multiple tabs. I mean, when you start getting into, I mean, I don't even know how to get into the applications menu here in GNOME, it's so strange to even have to fool with one of these things. I would just type the commands. I would just hit Super on the keyboard and then start typing something like terminal, hit Enter to open a terminal, Super Shift C to close. But of course for the terminal now we just have a Super Enter to open a terminal, Super Shift C to close. But I wanted to open, I don't know, the software center. I just hit Super and start typing software and Ubuntu software is the third option there in the list. And it's gonna take a minute to open that program because it's kind of a heavy program. And there's the software center trying to load. There's probably having to do a sync of the repositories as well. One thing you should probably do is not use the graphical software center in Ubuntu especially if you're trying to transition from Noob to Power User. What I would do is I would open a terminal and let me zoom in so you can see. Learn to use the apt package manager. That's the command line package manager. So here's how this works. So to install software you need sudo apt install name of program. So if I was installing, I don't know, htop sudo apt install htop is how that would work. I give it root password htop was probably already installed. If I wanted to remove a program sudo apt remove name of program, maybe I want to remove htop. You know, I just, it's asking me, do I really want to remove it? No, I don't. I kind of like htop as a program. Now, if you didn't know the exact name of a program or if you're not sure if that program is even in the Ubuntu repositories, you could do a apt search name of program. So apt search htop. You don't need sudo privileges to search because you're just doing a search. You do need sudo privileges though when anytime you install or remove software. And of course, I get a list of all the programs that had htop as part of the name or as part of the description. The one I want of course is that one there. Now to update the system, you need sudo privileges because that involves installing software. So sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade is how you update the repositories and then upgrade all the packages that have updates available. This is gonna take a second. It's gonna update the repositories and then I did update recently so there were no packages to update. Now let me close this terminal with control shift C. Now, one of the things I like to do is, you know, as far as a power user, let's get into some really nerdy stuff. So let's talk about the startup applications on the system. So I'm gonna do startup, let's search for startup applications here. And these are all the programs that launch on startup in this VM. Now, after you install a ton of software on the system, again, this is kind of a new VM. So this list is not very long for me, but you may have 10, 15 things starting up when you first log into Ubuntu. And sometimes that slows the system down because you've got so many things trying to start up all at once. You guys, especially on older hardware, you probably have experienced this where it takes like two minutes for your full desktop environment to finally load because so much stuff is trying to launch. Now you can enable or disable some of the startup stuff, but if it's stuff that you really need to start up, but you don't want everything's trying to start up at the same time, what I would do is kind of delay the startup process for some of these. For example, NextCloud here, I've got the NextCloud desktop client installed in this VM. It's not installed by default on Ubuntu, I added that. But what I could do is, you know, if I wanted to delay NextCloud from starting up, you know, with every other program because it takes a while for NextCloud to load and everything, what I could tell it to do is, this is the command that is running on startup. It's launching NextCloud in the background, but instead maybe I want it to sleep for 10 seconds. So do sleep space 10 and then semi-colon. Semi-colon means, hey, I'm done with this command, then run this command. So we want it to sleep for 10 seconds and then run the NextCloud command. So now when I first log in to Ubuntu now, all my startup programs are gonna start up, but NextCloud is gonna wait about 10 seconds before it starts up. So that might help the startup process as far as, you know, save some of the congestion that's going on with so many programs that are trying to launch all at once. Another kind of power user tip that I sometimes play with Ubuntu because Ubuntu does things a little differently than some of the other distributions that I run. Let me launch a terminal, I'm gonna type reboot. I'm gonna go ahead and reboot this VM and notice we don't get any kind of grub screen, right? We just, you know, when I reboot, I immediately get this Ubuntu splash screen here. We never had a grub menu. So I never could, you know, choose a different kernel if there were multiple kernels installed or anything like that. You know, we just quickly get to our login manager and that's that. And this VM has a little bug where it doesn't display the output immediately. Just give it a second and there we go. But sometimes I like seeing the grub menu displayed, right, because on most Linux distributions you actually get a grub menu. So here's how we would enable the grub menu here on Ubuntu. First, I'm gonna hit super enter to get our terminal. And remember that I added that key binding. So what we need is sudo privileges and then we need a text editor. We'll use gedit sudo gedit and I'm gonna do slash itsy slash default slash grub I believe is the name of the file. Give it root privileges. And there is that I need to go back in here and make the font bigger. I guess I didn't save that before. So, or maybe it's a problem because I'm the root user now. The root user I guess has different settings than the regular user. Select that and close that. All right, I'm gonna make the text editor here full screen. What we wanna do is go down to this line that says, well, you can't even read that. The line that says grub timeout style equals hidden. I'm gonna change that. I don't want that to be hidden. I want that to actually be menu. So grub timeout style equals menu. I hate that the highlighting is so weird there. And then the next line is actually grub timeout equals zero. That means how many seconds should the grub menu be displayed? If it's set to zero, it's never gonna be displayed. So change the zero to something like two seconds, right? So you actually get the grub menu. It's there for about two seconds. So if you wanna change it, change it in two seconds. If you don't, you automatically, continue on to the splash screen and eventually your login manager. So now that we've done that, I'm gonna hit save here in the text editor. Close the text editor. I'm gonna type reboot one more time. And we're not gonna see the grub menu because I forgot one step here. Let me go ahead and log back in. There was one other thing. You can't just edit the grub config. You also actually have to make grub update itself. You need to do a sudo space update dash grub. Give it the root password. And then once that's done, do a reboot. And now we should see the grub screen. And I have two seconds to start moving, you know, doing something on the keyboard. And once I do that, you know, it's not gonna get past this screen until I actually click on something. I'm gonna click on Ubuntu 2104. I'm just gonna go ahead and boot in to the, you know, the default kernel. Now one last thing I would do personally if I was in a Ubuntu user. And I know this is not for everybody, but for me, because I do everything with a keyboard, I open all of my applications using a run launcher, you know, and then the common applications I have key bindings to, I don't need this dock at all, right? I'm never going to use this dock. So the next thing, me personally, I would go into GNOME tweaks and I would go into extensions and I would turn off the Ubuntu dock if there was a way to turn it off. It doesn't look like there is. I can use the command line though to get rid of the dock though. So let me do a super enter to launch a terminal. I'll zoom back in here. What I'm gonna do is sudo apt remove. We're gonna remove a program. The program we're gonna remove is GNOME dash shill dash extension. I just hit tab to complete the extension word. And then Ubuntu dash dock and a tab completed the entire thing for us. So that particular program is actually the dock here on the side. And if I remove that program, we'll get rid of it. And of course, if later you found out that, hey, I really like the dock. I wanna reinstall it. You can reinstall it, no problem. So there's no permanent damage done or anything by removing it. And now that we've removed it, what we should do is actually log out. So let me go ahead and go into log out. Now let's log back in. And now I don't have that useless dock on the left hand side because I'll never use it now. I can open my terminal. I can open my file manager. I can open my web browser and other programs that I wanna use. Let me close all of that. I can just hit super and start typing. I don't know, maybe I want whatever the movie player is. I'll just start typing movie videos. And that would be the movie player super shift C to close. And that's really very usable already. Even for me, I'm not the kind of person that the GNOME desktop environment especially is made for, but I could happily use that now. And with just a little bit of time, the 30 minutes or so I spent there, I'm already pretty comfortable using that desktop environment. So that was just a little bit of what I personally would do is somebody that's used desktop Linux for a long time. And I consider myself a bit of a power user. I spend a lot of time in a terminal and at the command line do scripting and things like that. I like tweaking the system. That's some of what I personally would do a boon to if I was using it on my main machine. Now, before I go, I need to think a few special people. I need to think the producers of this episode. I want to think Ebsi, Gaye, James Mitchell, Wakame, Allen, Chuck, David, Dylan, Gregory, Erion, Paul, Polytech, Scott, Steven, Sven, Wesson, Willie. They are the producers of this episode without these guys. This episode wouldn't have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, please consider doing so. Look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. Oh, I forgot to install Emacs.