Top X+1 things to do after installing Zorin OS 16

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1. Install An automatic wallpaper changer, downloader and manager.
   Variety changes the wallpaper on a regular interval using user-specified or automatically downloaded images. Install from the Software Manager.
   

   

2. Install Pop OS Shell - Pop Shell is a keyboard-driven layer for GNOME Shell which allows for quick and sensible navigation and management of windows. The core feature of Pop Shell is the addition of advanced tiling window management — a feature that has been highly-sought within our community. For many — ourselves included — i3wm has become the leading competitor to the GNOME desktop. Read the full How-To install it.
   

   

3. Install Timeshift. Timeshift for Linux is an application that provides functionality similar to the System Restore feature in Windows and the Time Machine tool in Mac OS. Timeshift protects your system by taking incremental snapshots of the file system at regular intervals. ... It is designed to protect only system files and settings. Available in Software Manager.
   

   
   
   
   

4. Install Preload: To Speed Up Your Linux Application Loading Time.
   Preload is an adaptive readahead daemon. It monitors applications that users run, and by analyzing this data, predicts what applications users might run, and fetches those binaries and their dependencies into memory for faster startup times.

Install Instructions:

Step 1

Run update command to update package repositories and get latest package information.

sudo apt-get update -y

Step 2

Run the install command with -y flag to quickly install the packages and dependencies.

sudo apt-get install -y preload

Preload - manual

5. Install Gnome Tweaks - Gnome Tweak Tool is used to customize Gnome's looks and behavior. Install from Software Manager.
   
   

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7. Installation of Microsoft’s core TTF fonts. The Microsoft fonts are not a part of the repository, however we can install the Installer for Microsoft TrueType core fonts which will fetch and install the fonts for us. Execute the following command:

$ sudo apt install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

After the installation, scan the font directories on the system to build fresh font information cache files. To do so execute the bellow command from the terminal window:

$ sudo fc-cache -vr

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8. Fix Windows and Linux Showing Different Times When Dual Booting

To make this change, first open a Terminal window on your Linux system. Run the following command to put the real time clock on the motherboard into local time. Linux will store the time in local time, just like Windows does.

timedatectl set-local-rtc 1 --adjust-system-clock

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9. Install Mac OSX fonts - Fonts available for Mac OSX work just as well on Linux. They are easy to install as well.
   Follow this guide.

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[Storm]

First thing first, that people seems to forget and can give a headache. Update your system before anything else.

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10. Install Individual Free Fonts

There are many fonts you can get individually to extend your font collection. You can install them, as with any other package, using:

sudo apt install PACKAGE_NAME

Replace PACKAGE_NAME with any of the following:

• fonts-cantarell
• lmodern
• ttf-aenigma
• ttf-georgewilliams
• ttf-bitstream-vera
• ttf-sjfonts
• ttf-unifont
• fonts-entypo
• fonts-isabella
• fonts-mplus
• fonts-prociono
• ttf-anonymous-pro
• ttf-engadget
• ttf-staypuft
• ttf-summersby

Install All at Once:

If you don’t only need one or two more fonts but have decided to drastically expand your collection with everything we mentioned up until now, don’t install each package individually. You can bring them all on board at once by combining their installation in a single apt command, like:

sudo apt install ttf-mscorefonts-installer fonts-cantarell lmodern ttf-aenigma ttf-georgewilliams ttf-bitstream-vera ttf-sjfonts ttf-unifont fonts-entypo fonts-isabella fonts-mplus fonts-prociono ttf-anonymous-pro ttf-engadget ttf-staypuft ttf-summersby

Copy the line above, paste it in your terminal, press Enter, and soon you’ll be playing with a ton of new fonts.

source: How to Install Fonts in Ubuntu - Make Tech Easier

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11. Install Clipboard Manager extension for Gnome-Shell - Adds a clipboard indicator to the panel, and caches clipboard history.

• Install it from Clipboard Indicator - GNOME Shell Extensions

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12. Install Neofetch

Neofetch is a command line system information tool which supports almost all operating systems. It displays the system information in the terminal along side the operating system’s logo.

Neofetch displays which Linux distribution you are using, Host and Kernel details, desktop environment. On the hardware side, it displays information about the CPU and GPU, total memory available by current usage and the uptime for your machine.

It also displays number of dpkg and snap packages installed.

Installation in the Terminal

copy and paste this code:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install neofetch

source: https://thelinuxuser.com/install-neofetch/

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[pazoff]

13. If you have NVIDIA video card and also Intel integrated video on your laptop you may want to switch between them and you can use Prime Indicator - Intel/NVIDIA GPU Switch to do that.

You can also use terminal commands to switch graphics card. For example, this command will switch to Intel graphics card.

sudo prime-select intel

To switch to Nvidia card:

sudo prime-select nvidia

To check which card is being used right now, run this command:

prime-select query

source: How To Switch Between Intel and Nvidia Graphics Card on Ubuntu

If you have any problems with an external monitor:
Open this file in your favorite editor (vim, nano, gedit, etc.).

sudo nano /lib/modprobe.d/nvidia-kms.conf

And comment out the the nvidia-drm modeset option.

# This file was generated by nvidia-prime
# Set value to 0 to disable modesetting
# options nvidia-drm modeset=1

source: https://www.dell.com/community/Precision-Mobile-Workstations/External-Monitor-not-working-Ubuntu-nvidia/td-p/6241315

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[Altand]

Change swappiness value, cause default is too high for modern systems.
sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf
Add line in the bottom of that text file:
vm.swappiness=10
Press save and then reboot pc.
Also if you're having SSD, then u need to edit one file for it's longer lifespan:
sudo gedit /etc/fstab
And find a line where your system/root/home (usually it's on SDA2) partition has been installed, and after line errors=remount-ro add line after adding,noatime. It should look something like this:
ext 4 errors=remount-ro,noatime
But don't edit efi and swap partitions. Save and reboot.

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14. Install CPU Power Manager.
    A way to reduce energy consumption. It is about limiting the frequency of the CPU, lowering its performance. While this is something that has always been doable, it generally requires complicated terminal commands. Fortunately, there is an extension for GNOME that can help you more easily configure and manage CPU frequency. CPU Power Manager uses the frequency scaling controller intel_pstate (compatible with almost all Intel CPUs) to control and manage CPU frequency from your GNOME desktop.
    
    

General characteristics of CPU Power Manager

• We will be able to see the current CPU frequency. Obviously, we can use this window to see how often the CPU is running.
• Set the maximum and minimum frequency. We will be able to establish maximum and minimum frequency limits in terms of percentage. Once these limits are set, the CPU will operate only in these ranges.
• Activate and deactivate Turbo Boost. Most Intel CPUs have the 'Turbo Boost' feature. Through this, the CPU cores are increased beyond the normal maximum frequency seeking additional performance. While this can make the system more efficient, it also greatly increases energy consumption. Therefore, if we need to do anything intensively, it is good to be able to deactivate Turbo Boost and save energy.
• We will be able create profiles with a maximum and minimum frequency. These can be easily activated or deactivated, instead of touching the values.

Read more at CPU Power Manager, controls and manages the CPU frequency | Ubunlog

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15. Install nohang - package provides a highly configurable daemon for Linux which is able to correctly prevent out of memory (OOM) and keep system responsiveness in low memory conditions.

What is the problem?

OOM conditions may cause freezes, livelocks, drop caches and processes to be killed (via sending SIGKILL) instead of trying to terminate them correctly (via sending SIGTERM or takes other corrective action). Some applications may crash if it's impossible to allocate memory.

Here are the statements of some users:

"How do I prevent Linux from freezing when out of memory? Today I (accidentally) ran some program on my Linux box that quickly used a lot of memory. My system froze, became unresponsive and thus I was unable to kill the offender. How can I prevent this in the future? Can't it at least keep a responsive core or something running?"

— serverfault

"With or without swap it still freezes before the OOM killer gets run automatically. This is really a kernel bug that should be fixed (i.e. run OOM killer earlier, before dropping all disk cache). Unfortunately kernel developers and a lot of other folk fail to see the problem. Common suggestions such as disable/enable swap, buy more RAM, run less processes, set limits etc. do not address the underlying problem that the kernel's low memory handling sucks camel's balls."

— serverfault

"The traditional Linux OOM killer works fine in some cases, but in others it kicks in too late, resulting in the system entering a livelock for an indeterminate period."

— engineering.fb.com

To install on Zorin 16 /Ubuntu 20.04/20.10

To install from PPA:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oibaf/test
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install nohang
$ sudo systemctl enable --now nohang-desktop.service

source: GitHub - hakavlad/nohang: A sophisticated low memory handler for Linux

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16. Install Android in VirtualBox - If you’re itching give Android a try but don’t necessarily want use your whole computer for the task, the best option is to run it in a virtual machine using VirtualBox. It’s actually pretty easy to set up, and will offer you the full Android experience in a matter of a few minutes. Let’s do this thing.
    
    

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[pazoff]

17. Download some free wallpapers

4000+ Colors HD Wallpapers | Background Images

630+ Design HD Wallpapers | Background Images

65800+ Earth/Nature HD Wallpapers | Background Images

2500+ Fractal HD Wallpapers | Background Images

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18. Install and use Fish Shell - fish is a smart and user-friendly command line
    shell for Linux, macOS, and the rest of the family.

What’s Special About fish?

Easy to understand and use

Unlike the other shells that need a lot of setting-up to work the way you want them to, fish works perfectly right out of the box.

It ships with the most widely used features already included, which are present when you start using it without needing to install any additional plugins or tweak any configuration files unless you want to. Its syntax is simple, clean, and consistent.

Syntax highlighting

Syntax highlighting is a feature that we all wish our CLI could perform. It saves a lot of time and frustration. Well, fish does it, and it does it pretty well.

It shows you whether your command or the directory to be searched exists before you even hit enter. You’ll know whether you’re typing anything wrong before you hit enter. This makes it easier for people to parse commands, and find errors.

It highlights (most) errors in red, such as misspelled commands, misspelled options, reading from non-existing files, mismatched parenthesis and quotes, and many other common errors.

It also features highlighting of matching quotes and parenthesis. Oh, and it’s pretty, colorful.

Configuration for fish shells

The fish community maintains Oh My Fish, which is a shell framework inspired by Oh My Zsh. It offers a lot of beautiful prompt themes and awesome plugins, is lightweight, awesome, and easy to use.

It also offers a web-based configuration feature. Just type:

fish_config

You will land on the website with which you can customize the skin of your shell.

Inline searchable history

This is an interactive feature of this Shell. You begin typing a command and press the up key to see all the times in the Shell history where you used that command before.

To search the history, simply type in the search query, and press the up key. By using the up and down arrow, you can search for older and newer matches. The fish history automatically removes duplicate matches and the matching substring is highlighted.

These features make searching and reusing previous commands much faster.

Inline auto-suggestion

Fish suggests commands as you type and shows the suggestion on the right of the cursor, in grey. If you mistype a command, it will show in red to indicate that it’s an invalid command.

It also suggests the most frequently used commands and auto-completes while you type, based on your history and valid files available.

Tab completion using man page data

Fish can parse CLI tool man pages in various formats. Type in a command and “tab” through all the suggested auto-completions.

Steps to install and use Fish Shell

sudo apt install fish

Once the installation is completed, you can start using it by switching your current shell to Fish, for that type-

fish

Set Fish as Default shell

After using some time, if you like this colorful and friendly shell, then you can set it system default instead of bash.

chsh -s /usr/bin/fish

Log out of your system and log in again to apply the changes.

Customization

To change Fish properties, we can create a configuration file-

nano ~/.config/fish/config.fish

Switch back to Bash

If you didn’t like Fish and want back your Bash again on the terminal, then run

chsh -s /usr/bin/bash

log out and log in again.

To learn more about this shell command see the official documentation.

source: Command to Install fish shell on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS - Linux Shout

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19. Install and Use Gdu Disk Usage Analyzer - Linux has plenty of tools and commands for checking disk utilization. Some of these tools and commands come pre-installed. Take a look at the following list of commands for checking disk usage information, these can be found on many Linux distros by default:

df: shows usage for file system disk space.
du: estimates disk usage for files, directories.
ls -al: displays all the contents of a folder.
stat: shows the status of a file and file system.

Ubuntu also has a GUI-based tool called ‘Disk Usage Analyzer’ for analyzing disk usage. Likewise there is another tool ‘GDU Disk Usage Analyzer’ to view disk usage on many Linux-based distros and macOS.

GDU is written in ‘Go’ language and the official GitHub page frames it as ‘Pretty fast disk usage analyzer’ particularly for SSDs. It also works for HDDs but the performance is not as efficient as in SDD.

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20. Install BpyTop - BpyTop is a Linux command-line utility for resource monitoring. It shows usage and stats for processors, memory, disks, network, and processes. So, if you enjoy working with Terminal, it could be useful for you to monitor your system resource usage. BpyTop is the python version of bashtop and licensed under Apache License 2.0. Using this utility allows you to have a dynamic real-time view of a running system.

Full Article: Tutorial Install BpyTop on Ubuntu / Centos / Debian - Eldernode Blog

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21. Install and use Ventoy - an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files.

With ventoy, you don't need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the image files to the USB drive and boot it. You can copy many image files at a time and ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them.
x86 Legacy BIOS, IA32 UEFI, x86_64 UEFI, ARM64 UEFI and MIPS64EL UEFI are supported in the same way.
Both MBR and GPT partition style are supported in the same way.
Most type of OS supported(Windows/WinPE/Linux/Unix/ChromeOS/Vmware/Xen...)
730+ ISO files are tested (List). 90%+ distros in distrowatch.com supported (Details).

Official Website: https://www.ventoy.net

Ventoy - An Easy to Use MultiBoot USB Tool.

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22. Install timeshift-autosnap-apt - Timeshift auto-snapshot script which runs before any apt update|install|remove command using a DPkg::Pre-Invoke hook in APT. Works best in BTRFS mode, but RSYNC is also supported (on ext4 might be slow though, but your system is automatically snapshot before upgrade/install)

Features

• This script is a fork of timeshift-autosnap from the AUR, but adapted for usage with the APT package manager of Debian or Ubuntu based systems.
• Creates Timeshift snapshots with a unique (customizable) comment.
• Keeps only a certain number of snapshots created using this script.
• Deletes old snapshots which are created using this script.
• Makes a copy with RSYNC of /boot and /boot/efi to /boot.backup before the call to Timeshift for more flexible restore options.
• Can be manually executed by running sudo timeshift-autosnap-apt.
• Autosnaphots can be temporarily skipped by setting "SKIP_AUTOSNAP" environment variable (e.g. sudo SKIP_AUTOSNAP= apt upgrade)
• Supports grub-btrfs which automatically creates boot menu entries of all your btrfs snapshots into grub.
• For a tutorial how to use this script in production to easily rollback your system, see System Recovery with Timeshift.

Full Article and Installation: GitHub - wmutschl/timeshift-autosnap-apt: Timeshift auto-snapshot script for Ubuntu and Debian based systems which creates snapshots of your system with timeshift before a package install, remove or upgrade using DPkg::Pre-Invoke hook in apt. Fork of timeshift-autosnap from AUR.

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23. Install a good email client - Mailspring.
    
    

Mailspring is beautiful, user-friendly, and works how you expect it to work. It's also fast and has all sorts of features that are very useful, like the ability to cancel sending e-mails a few seconds after you send them, also:

• Multiple accounts (IMAP & Office 365)
• Touch and gesture support
• Advanced shortcuts
• Lightning-fast search
• Undo send
• Unified Inbox
• Read receipts, link tracking, and more
• Mac, Windows, and Linux support
• Themes and layouts (including dark mode)
• Localized into 9 languages

Install from Software app or mailspring website Mailspring - The best free email app

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