 Ubuntu is the most popular distribution out there. By far, the most people who use Linux are using Ubuntu. And that's really important because it means that the vast majority of new users who want to use Linux probably start with Ubuntu simply because it's the one they find on the internet that is the most popular. Most people are always going to choose the most popular thing because they're going to associate that popularity with it being the best thing. Now, we can have a debate over whether or not Ubuntu is the best distro all day long. And I guarantee you that the Linux community is never going to agree on that. It's just not possible. We can't agree on any distribution as the best one. We all have our favorites. And trying to point new users at the best one is just not a good thing. It's a fool's errand, right? It's just not something that is going to be possible. So pointing them at the most popular distro is what's most likely going to happen. And that happens to be Ubuntu. So for those of you who are either just getting into Linux or just getting into Ubuntu for the first time, what I thought I'd do today is talk about five things that you can do that will make Ubuntu way better out of the box. And they're all really, really easy. So let's go ahead and jump in. Okay. So the first one is to install GNOME Tweaks. Now basically what GNOME Tweaks is, is a application that you can install that will allow you to change and tweak several different things about the system. So you can do this by opening up the software center and then by searching GNOME Tweaks just like so. And it will take a second to get up there and then you hit install. It'll ask for your password and we'll install that thing. Now while we're waiting for that, basically what this allows you to do is allows you to go through and set certain settings that you aren't able to set by default. So these are settings that are not in the default settings panel. So let's go ahead and open this thing up. So hit the Windows key, which is also known as the meta key, and then type in tweaks. And that will bring up the icon you hit enter and it will open. Once it's opened, you may get a pop up here that says extensions have moved. We'll talk about GNOME extensions here in a minute, but let's just go ahead and focus on GNOME Tweaks to begin with. So this will actually allow you to do several things. It'll allow you to change the GNOME theme. So you can go through and change it to the dark theme, which we'll talk about dark theme here in a minute. You can change the cursor icons, all that stuff, and we'll talk about the shell and stuff later when we talk about extensions. You can change the wallpaper from here if you want to. This is not the only place you can change the wallpaper. You can also do that from the settings panel if you would like to do that. It's probably a better place to do it simply because it actually just shows you the wallpapers. But you can also change the lock screen wallpaper from here as well, which is not something you can do in the regular settings application. You can also control your system fonts from here, control several keyboard and mouse settings from here. All the startup applications can be controlled from here. I do believe that this is in the stock settings app as well, but I'm not sure about that. You can change several things about the top bar up here, including what the date and time actually shows up here so you can choose whether it shows the week, day, second, and so on and so forth. You can't change from the 24 to the wall power clock here. You do that in the settings panel, the regular open to settings panel. Here you can change several things about the window title bars, things like whether or not what happens when you double click, middle click, secondary click, and so on and so forth. The windows category will allow you to change several things about what happens when you open and spawn new windows and what happens when you hover over the windows themselves. And finally, you control what happens to workspaces when you spawn new ones. You can also control how many workspaces you have. So that is going to have tweaks. There's just a ton of stuff here that you can do. Now we'll actually be coming back to this here in a few minutes to do one of the other tweaks. So but I'm going to go ahead and close this for now. Now the next thing you'll want to do is figure out what you want to do about Snap. Now this is a very ambiguous tip. And the reason why is because some people are going to not even care what they do about Snaps. For the most new users, don't worry about this tip at all. Just use it the way Ubuntu has meant to use it. If you find that you don't like Snaps later on once you've learned what Snaps actually are, you can then go through and disable them or use a different distro. But basically what I mean by this tip here is that out of the box Ubuntu comes with a lot of Snaps installed. Firefox, the GNOME Store, or the Software Center, and we can actually see what Snaps are installed. We zoom in here and do Snap List. And this shows that we have Firefox, several GTK themes, and the Snaps Store. All are Snaps. One of the reasons why this is a problem is because on cold launch, meaning that you've never launched the application before during your current session, your first launch of that application is going to be really slow. And there are several other things about Snaps that are just kind of annoying. Sometimes they don't play really well with themes. A lot of times the buttons up here have been disappearing, at least for me for whatever reason. And that's not a great thing, right? It's just sometimes they're broken. Sometimes they're really slow. And on top of that, the whole idea that they're controlled by Canonical, it's not necessarily the greatest thing. But you can use them. If you have no problem with any of the things that I just said, leave this the way it is. But if you don't care for Snaps, there are several things you can do. You can go through and tediously pull Snaps out of Ubuntu and uninstall SnapD and never have Snaps here installed. It's not the best solution simply because eventually you're going to go through and try to install something and in the background, it'll actually install Snap again and you'll end up with a Snap whether you want it or not. So getting rid of it is kind of a pain in the tuchus. What you can do instead is just ignore Snaps completely. You can pull Firefox off out of the Snap thing and install the Firefox binary. There are several tutorials online on how to do that. So if you want to find out how to do that, you can do that. You can do the same thing with the Snaps Store if you really want to or just ignore the Snaps Store completely and just use app. My recommendation would be to go through uninstall Snaps like this. So Snap, remove Firefox and then enter your password and it'll go through and uninstall Firefox and then you can go through and install the binary for Firefox if that's what you want to do or you can install a different browser. And another reason why you might want to go through and not use Snaps is simply because Flatpak is better. Now this is my opinion, but for me Flatpak is just better. So you can go through and use the Flatpak of Firefox if that's what you want to do. You can go through and install a lot of stuff from Flathub if that's what you want to do. For me, Flathub and Flatpak are just better than Snaps. You don't have a lot of the problems that you get with Snaps. They're not slow. They seem to be a little bit better on permissions and such. So there are a lot of benefits to using Flatpaks instead. Or you can just stick with Snaps. So this whole tip here is just to get you thinking about what you want to do. Most people probably just going to stick with Snaps. But the rest of you who are really not interested in using Snaps, I would just highly recommend ignoring Snaps, getting rid of Firefox, installing the binary, and then moving on with your day. They're using Flatpak or using apt instead of using any of the Snaps at all. One way or another, by the time you go through and install Ubuntu, this is a decision that you probably should make. The reason why you should make it is because you want to do the next thing. And the next tip is to install the GNOME extension manager. Now the GNOME extensions manager is an application that will allow you to do what it says on the tin, which is manage your extensions. Now, by default, this is not available on Ubuntu. So if we go back to the software center and we actually search for GNOME extensions manager, we're actually going to get nothing. It's not here. It's not available as a Snap. And the only thing that can be installed through the Snaps store here is Snaps. The GNOME extensions manager is just not there yet. Hopefully eventually they'll go through and actually package that as a Snap. That'd be cool. But instead, what you're going to have to do is go to FlatHub.org. And we're going to have to set up FlatHub in order to do this. But what we want to do is search for GNOME. And this is the one that we want right here. Now, in order to actually install this, we're going to have to have FlatPaks enabled. And in order to enable FlatPaks, you actually have to go through and do this. You click on Quick Setup at their homepage, click Ubuntu. Do this line first. So we're going to install FlatPak. And it will eventually ask you for your password if it hasn't already. Go down here and we need to do this part here. Might as well just copy and paste. Control Shift V in order to paste in the terminal. Hit Yes again. And then the next thing we need to do is do this one here. It's going to ask you for your password again. And then what we're going to want to do is do Pseudo Reboot. And then we can actually go back to the GNOME Extensions Manager. Extensions Manager. Right here. Click on this. Scroll all the way down. Copy this one here. Open up a terminal, Control Alt T, and paste that, which Control Shift V, hit Enter. It's going to ask you Yes. And then Yes again. It's going to install it. It might take a few minutes, depending on the speed of your internet. And then we'll show you what this does. Okay, once that's installed, you want to hit the Super key, which is the Windows key. Type in Extensions in order to do this, you'll actually have to learn how to spell. Unfortunately, that's the step that I've never actually been able to take. Now here's where it gets a little confusing because you're going to have two of them. This one here, if you open up by default. This one here just manages your installed extensions. For the most part, this is the most useless piece of software that was ever invented. You can't do much with it. You can't install extensions. You can disable them. You can control the settings, but other than that, it does nothing. It does come by default. And it's the officially supported way of managing your extensions. So you might want to use it. For me, the one that works better is, again, if you type the appropriate thing is the Extensions Manager, which looks like this. Now it looks very similar. And you can see that this first screen does look like that extensions app that we just looked at. You can go through and manage the installed extensions. You can manage their settings and so on and so forth. What's cool about this is that you can actually go through and install extensions right from this application. If you did not have this, then you'd have to go about the traditional way of installing extensions, which is a tedious process to say the least. You'd have to go to, you'd have to go to this website here, and you'd find out that you have to install a browser extension, then you have to do this, and I'm not going to allow that. I don't need it. But that's how you'd go about doing it. It's not a great process. Then you'd have to open up the Extensions Manager or the extensions application, which we showed you. It's not great. The point is, if you have this here, if you went through the process of installing Flat Pack and going through and enabling Flat Hub and getting to this part, you can install extensions right from here. Now, why are extensions cool? It's because they allow you to extend the ability of the GNOME desktop, which is what Ubuntu uses. So for example, user themes. User themes will allow you to change the theme of the bar along the top and the drop-downs that come along with it. Even with GNOME tweak tool, you can't do that by default. You have to have this extension installed. Another extension that's really cool is called dash to dock, and you just search for this. Install this, install, and then you'll see that your bar moved along here down to the bottom. This actually has several settings. You can find the settings for dash to dock right here, and you can go through and change how that looks. You know, appearance, you can make it different themes. You can go through and auto hide if you want to do that. You can change whether or not the applications button is shown and so on and so forth. There's just a ton of stuff that you can do. And obviously, if you choose, you don't want that, you can just go through and disable it. And why didn't go back to the side? I don't know. I'm sure there's a way to change that if you wanted to. You'd probably have to uninstall dash to dock in order to actually get that to work, but we'll just go ahead and re-enable it. Sometimes that's re-enabled, which required me to actually log out and log back in because some things were broken. Now, that actually goes to show you my experience there is that sometimes things break with extensions. These are not officially supported, so sometimes with the extensions, things break. So that's the idea behind the economic extensions manager. There are hundreds of these things that you can go through and just kind of use. Now, like I said, your mileage may vary. Some things may not work well. Some of them may break something. If that happens, you can go through and install them fairly easily. I would highly recommend using this application here instead of going through and using the website like that I showed you earlier, because this one here will actually go through and tell you what can and can't be installed on your version of Ubuntu, like for example, this one here, not supported by this version of GNOME, so you can install it. So that really helps you from making a serious error of trying to install something that just would not work. Now, moving on to the next one. The next one is what I think is the most important tip that I can give you for Ubuntu. And that is this. Open up a terminal. Do sudo apt install vim. Enter your password and let it install vim. Now I'm not going to count this as a tip for everybody because most people probably are going to open up the terminal anyways and they'll never need to use vim. In the cases that they do, Nano is here for those people and they'll never have to use vim. For everyone else to make Ubuntu 100 times better, install vim. Why vim is not installed by default? I don't know. The reason why I like vim is because vim is awesome. It is the tool of the gods and if you have to edit text in the terminal, you should be using vim. That's just an opinion, but it's the right opinion. So moving on, like I said, I'm not going to count that one. That's just mostly, you know, opinion based. The next one is a very superficial way of making Ubuntu better. And that is enabling dark mode. So by default, this is what all of your applications look like. They're very, they're not as white as they could be, but they're definitely pretty bright. So in order to change the theme to dark mode, you can open up the tweak tool. Just like we did earlier, go to Appearance, go to the applications, Yaru dark, and that will change to dark mode. And this is way better than the light theme that is included by default. This should be default in my opinion, but it looks way better. So it's not necessarily something that's going to make you more productive or anything like that, but it does look better. So once that's done, that's the, that's the tip. The next tip on the list is to enable minimum, click to minimize. Now click to minimize is something that used to be enabled on Ubuntu by default, but it's no longer there. So let's just say we have this file manager open and we want to minimize it. Now you could go up here to the minimize button and do that just like you would normally, but a lot of times you're used to being able to click on the icon in your doc in order to get to minimize and that, and you can see me, I'm clicking on this and it's just, it's doing absolutely nothing. Now it will bring it back up if it's minimized already, but it's not going to minimize it for you. So in order to actually go through and enable, click to minimize, you need to enter a terminal setting. So we open up a terminal and let me actually go get this thing. I saved this and as you can see, this dark mode does not work very well in this term, in this text editor, but that's okay. We'll enter this command here, which I will paste down in the video description so you can actually find this to enter. And that's it. Now what we should be able to do is now click on this terminal icon and it will minimize it. Open up, minimize, open, minimize, cool, right? Now that is it for my tips for this time. I'm sure I'm going to find some more immediately after this video that we're way better, but that's beside the point. So if you have tips that can be used to make Ubuntu better, leave those in the comment section below. You can follow me on Twitter at Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take a look at my current patrons. Today Devon, Patrick O, Marcus, Megalyn, Zex, Neftool, Steve, A, Sebrega, Linux, Eric, Mitchell, ArtCenter, CarpenterDead, Jeremy, Sean, Odin, Merton, Andy, P, Merrick, Camp Drashley, J-Dog, Peter, A, Crucible, Darkman, and St. Pilate, and Primus. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.