 I've been using Linux on my desktop for a number of years. And some of you may even cringe a little thinking about those early years of the Linux desktop when it was, well, clunky and not sophisticated and a lot of problems getting the X-word driver to work with your mouse and way too much time spent playing with serial mice. Yes, that's how long ago I started playing with Linux desktop when there were serial mice, not USB. Now, Linux has become pretty simple. Grab a thumb drive, load your favorite distribution on there and picking your favorite distribution can be confusing but nonetheless, there's a lot more options out there. So there's so many options and it just works on a majority of hardware out there. So it's not this big, I don't know what I'm gonna do and what it's going to work on. I wanna talk today about PopOS 1910 and some of the keyboard shortcuts and some of the usage of it. So I figured this might be some interesting topic for those going, I'm lost when I load it. I don't understand this weird interface because I've only come from the Windows world which is granted a little bit different. And to me, it feels really clunky and slowly coming along to the way Linux has been doing things for a while like with virtual desktops and things like that. Little bit of housekeeping. We would love you to check out the Affiliates We Love page and this is over on our website, lornsystems.com. You can go to affiliates we love. We have a long list of companies and maybe some of them interest you for signing up with offer codes that we have here. And we even have in case you're wondering when I was a PayPal one, this is just throw money at us a few years ago. You're not just gonna throw a few dollars at you. We don't mind. This does help out the channel and I am trying to keep the channel as ad-free as possible. So these are actually all affiliates not actual direct channel sponsors. I don't have any of those at the moment. 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I'm trying to help educate people through some of these videos but I can't teach you everything and the people at IT Pro TV have a course for all kinds of things and even myself I've used some of their courses to gain more knowledge on some of the topics. All right, to the content here. The first thing I wanna mention is the real obvious. Windows and Linux are clearly two very different operating systems and also Windows being the more prevalent operating system on the desktop and many companies catering to having drivers written for Windows means you have a wider variety of hardware compatibility. I have in my hand a Dell. XPS, I think it's a 75 something series but it's not sold with Linux on it. Dell has models that are sold with Linux that are very Linux compatible. This is not one of them and my friend wanted me to see if I could get Linux on it. I can definitely get it installed but it doesn't work well. So first off, if you're gonna go Linux in specifically Papa West 1910 while I find the compatibility to be excellent. Matter of fact, 1910 worked the best on that laptop but some features like this has that new fancy OLED screen. The dimming wasn't supported for example. So I'm aware that there are challenges if you decide to go Linux instead of Windows. Finding hardware compatibility is one of them. Papa West versus Ubuntu, in my opinion. I have had better luck with it because they bake in different drivers. They bake in some enhancements for different laptops or different pieces of hardware such as even desktops that work a little better but that particular laptop is not fully supported and it's also an i9 and really fancy and about $3,000. It's cool, I wish it did work but it does not. He's gonna put Windows back on it. Back to what am I running? So I am running my Lenovo L480. I've done a review on this particular computer and I love Papa West on it. I did have problems running other distributions on it because some of them, well, they had some issues with this particular laptop and some of the ACPI functions. Papa West on the other hand, like I said, it's all the reasons I like it. Ubuntu runs perfectly fine on this one as well. The 1910, but so does Papa West. Now in that regard, System76 are not only the producers of Papa West, they are also a company that produces laptops that are gonna be fully compatible and as well as desktops that absolutely out of the box, you know they're gonna work with every feature because one of the questions that comes up of, well, if I load Linux when I lose all the battery life and things like that, not necessarily. If the system is fully supported, then you can still get excellent battery life and I've not done A2B tests on every single laptop but I do know this has excellent battery life on my Lenovo. These ones that they sell over at System76 are gonna have good battery life as long as all the ACPI functions are supported and when I close the lid, it goes asleep and things like that work perfectly fine on here. Once you get over the hardware, and well, this is particularly, we'll show you this is running on, and we'll do the about. So we're right on top of this. This is Papa West 1910 and Core i5-A250U with just the standard Intel 620 graphics. Nothing particularly high end right here. So you can at least base it like that for performance. The menus open fast, the things slide out nice and smooth. There's no real problems with it. Now, obviously the first thing you're gonna notice, Papa West versus the Fun2, they both use GNOME. Papa West has customized GNOME a lot. This is one of those things when you're switching from Windows, you're used to the Windows UI and the only time there's a change to it is when you go from Windows 95 to 98 all the way to XP to seven to, you know, oh man, Vista and now Windows 10. Yes, you've seen UI changes in there. Linux is different because you can have a Linux system as in the kernel is Linux, but the UI changes based on what UIs get loaded. This is the one I prefer is GNOME. There are ones that look more Windows-like with a start button at the bottom. I find them to be very kind of clunky. Even Microsoft with Windows 10 uses a more to me a modern search and launch function because if I know what I'm gonna open, it's easier to open. Now, one thing I'm gonna point out here, you notice at the bottom, the alt and tab showed up. This is a little tool I have loaded and I know someone will ask about it. It's called screen key. And if you do screen P dash, well, the command that you see here and another tool called slop that's loaded. This allows me to run screen key on this and then show you what keys I'm pressing to make things happen. So super key up and down, switching between virtual desktops. So I figured this would be easy for our little guide here to show you some of the differences, Windows versus this and how you navigate the UI. Now, the first thing is I'm pressing the super key. When I do the expanded out menu like this, the only time it doesn't show the super key, but super key is what does that or Windows key if you're on any standard Windows computer. And so we're gonna kind of start there. So how do we get this thing connected? Well, most of the distributions and GNOME based ones and specifically POP OS one we're talking about here, your connectivity is over here. So if you wanna switch to networks, yes, Notes Me Senpai is the long running joke name for the network that I'm connected to at our office here. But if we hit select network, we can choose other ones like LTS IoT and our neighbors. We can jump on their Wi-Fi as well if we want. We've tried talking about this open neck here. They don't care. Let's re-switch to it. So your standard to get connected on Wi-Fi pretty straightforward and simple and the network settings, if you needed to go further in here, you can go in here, you can go to the Wi-Fi settings. It pulls up the settings menu and you're able to dive in here a little bit deeper. There's also a standard network settings where if the wire was plugged in, it would be right here and you can do all your standard configurations. So not too hard to do, but this is where things get a little different. This is the launcher. Now this is something we see in Windows 10 where I can type settings or I can type in network. Now the difference between, I guess, well, network, right? It's still case sensitive, ATW or K. I can go to the settings here or here. Now, like I said, very Windows, like what you may have noticed, it's instant, it comes up. I've always been pained by Windows 10, just even on a fast computer, it search function doesn't always nail it. They seem to be getting better at it, but they've been this way for a while on Linux. So this is something that's been around for a while being able to launch things this way. And let's say I want to open up GIMP, which is the photo editing program I use. I can launch it just by doing that. Now, window navigation, you're like, okay, I made a full screen. How do I switch to other applications? Well, just like Windows Alt-Tab, works perfectly fine, but people then want to minimize it. Well, there's a way to do that. And it's super key H for hide. And there is an entire list of keyboard shortcuts. Now, these are specific to Papa West. Some of these do work in Ubuntu as well, but the event is a little bit more customization. What about those keyboard shortcuts? Well, maybe you want to edit them. Typing in KEYB, keyboard shortcuts. It also finds key base at the top. And they're all customizable if you want. And I believe there's more here than even you have inside of this little list. Yeah, I think that list is a little bigger for the keyboard shortcuts, but this is one of the reasons people like Linux so much. It's very customizable, including things like the keyboard shortcut options. Now, virtual desktops is something that I believe is slowly coming to Windows, and it's not quite the same as the way it works in Linux, but we've had this in the Linux world for a long time. And it's kind of a thing to grasp and listen to, to deal with, and it's like this, okay, what's this desktop versus this desktop? Now I remember years ago, back in the early Windows days, there was an add-on that allowed this, so it was like really cool. I used to use it all the time, and its name eludes me, but I loved when I could start switching to it right natively within Linux. I'm like, oh, great, this is like, I don't know, 10 or 15 years ago, maybe longer, when this feature started to become more popular. And it's implemented in different ways versus what type of system you're using. This is a GNOME-based system, so this is the GNOME implementation. Now the way a virtual desktop works, I have this here. Now let's launch something. Back to where's my start button. We can launch things by pressing the start key here. We can just find the applications that are here. This application's running, so it's got the little dot under it. This one's running. Let's open up our file manager here. So now when we open it again, the little dot under it means file manager's running. All right, so here's the file manager. Not too difficult. Looks like your standard Windows Explorer, but there's a few tricks up its sleeve. Let's open up the downloads. It's got tabbed-based, so we can look at different things. Let's see, open this tab over here, and we can go from place to place. Now, because you do not run as a privileged user, some things are gonna kind of be off limits. And you see this nice little home, select all, but if you wanted to get to this, just a quick, whoops, wrong key. That's the wake-up key, but it's next to the other one anyways, the control key, but control L is what we wanted to press, and then we can go to slash, which is essentially similar to C drive. Because Linux uses mount points, it's sometimes a little confusing, but you're only restricted really to read right access to your home slash your username, but yes, you can get to, so to speak, the root of it all, which may be similar to the way C is on Windows, and it does let you navigate through there, but it does by default kind of obscure it, because you notice when there's not like a go up a level, but there is here. It always, that's why it brings you back to home, that's what you have read right permission for. And you don't really need to do things outside, you keep everything in your home, that's kind of a general good rule for the way the file system works. Now, what about connecting to things like, oh, I don't know, a Windows share, how do you do that in Linux? That must be really confusing to do. Actually, it's mounted right here, that's why we can see how you can unmount it with the little eject button. We just hit the control L again, and there it is, SMB 192.168.3.8, that's the share address. Please note the slash is, even if it's a Windows service, they'll go this way, and the first time you connect to one of these, it would do something, so actually let's unmount this one, and then we'll go to control L, SMB colon slash slash 192.168.3.4 slash, I think it's studio is one of them. Oops, I spelled studio wrong, that doesn't matter, it'll give me an error, but now it wants to know what username you want to do to connect. So, registered user, orange T, you're just anonymous, we're gonna hit anonymous, I'll get an error because that directory is wrong, control L again, STUD IO. What I want to connect to is anonymous, registered, you can also save the password, save forever, put the domain in, et cetera, and away you go, so that's how you would connect. Now, back to some of the navigation, we're gonna go back up to this. What if I wanted to open up something here, and we'll launch from here, just to show you that we can do this, we'll launch the calculator, but we want the calculator to be on the other screen, all right, I want that moved over here. So, I can actually grab things when I use that super key, and we'll drag it, now the calculator's there. Let's open up, hit the super key again, open up LibreOfficeWriter, what if I want this on another one? Well, it's the same thing, we can just go ahead and drag that, and it creates another one. Now we actually have three virtual desktops, you notice how they're being created on the fly? It creates them on the fly on an as needed basis, so here's each one you're working on, and one of the use cases that I use this frequently for is when I'm monitoring something, I wanna work here, but monitor here, so I can just do this real quick, I can be working away, doing my thing, and over here maybe a message, and sometimes I'll move all my messaging applications like here, that way I can reply to messages, have them in exactly the positions I want, so I usually have more than one messaging thing open, have them scattered across the screen, and away you go. Now what about this minimize button? Yes, super key, H will minimize things, and you can just go back to those things, and by the way, when you switch them between desktops, you notice it switches to the desktop that it's on, but some of the other sticky sides like this work, sticky sides like this work, double clicking brings it back full screen, so you don't end up really, to me, I never used the super case to minimize, but it's something you can do, and you do have the close window, which is hitting the super H, so actually let's tab over to here, and then we'll hit super key, was it W, yeah, and you can close it, of course the X closes it well. Now one more thing I'll note about this, is when you're in here and you say new window, let's go back over to, let's pull up YouTube or something, now we have a new problem, we only see one Firefox, but there's two, so all I'm doing is you notice alt tab, and then arrowing between them, so when you tab between them, you can group them, there's ways you can tweak this, and turn the grouping on and off, I generally like it on, but it can be kinda handy for this, but then you can also say, take this and move it over to another desktop, so we'll hit the super key, and we can drag this one over to this desktop, and away you go. Now something else you can do is super key, when I'm selected on this window right here, super key shift up, see what happens now, I just moved it to this desktop with this on here, so now when you look, these are on these desktops again, let's move this one to the bottom, so super key shift down arrow, now this is on the bottom one, and we're just gonna do super key up arrow, this is in the middle one, and this is at the top one, so you can see it's not too difficult, but once you get used to it, you can see this creates a really good workflow, and being able to use it, it's not too hard to learn these, and I recommend things like even print these out, stick them on the wall next to here, something to kinda learn how they work, it's not that difficult to get in there, but people do suspect that it's kind of this big daunting task to learn Linux because they're used to things being the way they are, now what if I wanted to add something here like calculator, don't you launch it all the time, or what about actually something I do launch all the time, and I just reloaded this laptop, and I didn't pin anything to the side here, so I liked opening shutter, great tool for doing screenshots, so shutter's a great utility for this, and what we're gonna do is, once you open it, we can do all these options that may, some of you have contacts, many of you are we add to favorites, now what happens when I close it, I'll go ahead and do this, it's now there, but not launched, see how there's no little dot under it, put this, hit it again, now there's a dot under it, not too difficult to get to. Now, well the last things I'll kinda cover, and there's just some brief overview things, there's a lot of different deeper dives into here, but when you know, the file system, like I said, things start at home, so I can open up and create, et cetera, much of these dialog boxes are gonna be familiar to users of other operating systems, so I'll close all that, but how did you get that software on it, how do you load things on this time, that seems really confusing, now, pop does this by default, now I left it on here, they have the pop shop, the way Linux works is repositories, this is a absolutely wonderful way to do it, and think of it the same way, this concept's been around for a very long time in Linux, and people think it's something new happening in the Android world, or the iPhone world of having a store to get things in, it's not, so it's something that has been part of what we refer to as the repository as a place where I can get things, like games, and let me find a game I'm looking for, like frozen bubble, I'll say I wanted to install it, I would just go here, it's a small game, I hit install, that would require a super user privilege, it'll prompt me for my password, which I'm not gonna type because it'll show it on the screen, and you can authenticate and log in, simple as that, and now it would install that application on here. It does not have the same requirements like people think before that, oh my gosh, everything's going to be completely command line and confusing, matter of fact, even things like Steam, because Steam has Linux support, here's Steam, you can install Steam on Pop OS, they've done all the proper tweaks and included this in the repository, and this is where different Linux distributions have different methodologies, because they've included a lot of different things in Pop OS, including like a Steam library, already attached, these are things you could customize most any Linux distro to do, but Pop OS has taken the time to do a lot of this for you, it makes it pretty handy, and you can do things like install Steam. The last thing I'll cover, because if you're like me, you have to use this in a business environment, not just at home, maybe you gotta print things, and that's a painful, terrible printing is awful, right? Okay, it's been better, but we have some network printers here, and adding them as easy as just hitting add, it'll start finding printers on my network. And unlike Windows, where it just starts running around, finding them for you, you actually do have to click on them, and then I can click add, and it actually works with a pretty good variety of printers. These network ones we have right here, the two I usually use is this LaserJet 4015, an older model, and a Canon MF2030, these are both just tied to our network. It does support a lot of different USB printers, there's a pretty big variety of drivers, it seems to lend its support better to a commercial one, and a lot of companies, including like from Lexmark and HP do offer Linux drivers that they're needed, but I've often found the drivers that come with it is really good and well supported. Now, the display changes and things like that, if you're on a laptop, you don't usually change much, but if you're on desktop, maybe you care about the resolution, but hopefully most people, if you're running modern hardware, it's 1920, 1080, but yeah, that is completely switchable, and I'll point out on a Dell that I tested, because it has a 4K OLED screen scaling, I have it turned off on here, but yes, it is supported, so you can do all the proper scaling, and that actually worked perfectly fine in there, so when you're testing Linux with 4K screens, it works quite well. There's also little things you can tweak like appearance and search and how you wanna attach our line accounts. One of the nice things is, once again, comes down to all that customizability, so these are the screens, and if I clicked on it, do I wanna set as the background or the lock screen or set background and lock screen, that way when I bring to the lock screen, it's gonna have it on there, and for appearance, by default, there's only two in here, the SSDs can be further customized, and they've done a nice job on this, in my opinion, so if I wanna switch to the light theme, because maybe you like a light theme or maybe you want a dark theme, it's just one click away, these are natively built in, this is kind of a stock install. Now they've also done things like your default applications for things and such are in here, so you can customize notifications, default applications, things like that's pretty nice setup for all this, that way you can have like, this is what launches for that, it does give you all that tweaking, and of course you can go further. Here's the power settings, which I can adjust the screen brightness, which by the way, the media keys, volume up and down, as you see I'm pressing, that works fine, so the screen brightness, of course it's not gonna do anything for you guys, because you're on a mirrored setup here, so all those standard functions, the media keys, I frequently find when I look at Linux on laptops and desktops, this works perfectly fine as well, so you don't have to be quite as scared as Linux, there is obviously some changes, Linux isn't Windows, so there is some concepts you have to learn, but from a navigation standpoint, although it may look a little different, once you get used to this workflow, I really find it to be very easy compared to Windows. Windows always feels very clunky to me when I'm trying to do things to manipulate and move files. This tabbed view, the views of the file manager being able to do that, plus the power of the command line, which Windows finally, because you can load Bash on a command line of Windows, that's something I really like, and many people I know and many of my developer friends have been like, yeah, we've loaded the whole, you know, Bash shell, it's handy having all that Bash scripting and abilities that you get with a Linux core inside of Windows, definitely an improvement, but I kind of like running it natively on Windows, or on Linux instead of Windows, so I'm doing it all with real. So I'll leave links to PopOS, not that it's hard to find, and you can read more about it, you can go through some of my other Linux tutorials where I talk about different things in here, but it is a great thing for me. I've always run it as my daily driver for a number of years, and these latest versions have been so much smoother, especially this latest version of PopOS. It's fast, it's just smooth as butter on it, it's even smooth on my older laptop, I didn't really have any problems with it either, upgraded the older ones as well, and thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from the channel, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. If you'd like to hire us, head over to laurancesystems.com, fill out our contact page, and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on. If you wanna carry on the discussion, head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can carry on the discussion about this video, other videos, or other tech topics in general. Even suggestions for new videos, they're accepted right there on our forums, which are free. Also, if you'd like to help the channel in other ways, head over to our affiliate page. 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