Comfy Ubuntu

1 Pop!

Pop!_OS is a pretty good alternative to Ubuntu that shares a lot of infrastructure. You can read two fannish histories of this distro:

• Popaganda – A bite-sized history.
• Popaganda: Differentiation

It is not the same as Ubuntu, but shares many tools with Ubuntu so sometimes you can cross your fingers and pretend.

I am a fan of this OS. A hundred small Ubuntu annoyances are buffed away. Case study: You can tell what format an app will be installed in, for example, which is necessary since as much as they would like the app packaging to be something that we can ignore, in practice it is an unavoidably intrusive feature of Linux for now, and we need to be able to give informed consent to the various trade-offs in practice. In Ubuntu you are left wondering “was that a snap, a flatpak, or a deb or some combination of the three?” and inevitably end up reverse engineering which when something breaks.

Pop!_OS, that is, tries to make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Notes:

• Wayland is supported (but not yet for NVIDIA)
• Misc community support: Pop!_Planet

2 Basic

apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev build-essentials

3 apt or apt-get?

apt, unless you have a compelling reason.

There was a GUI for a while called synaptic, but it seems to have fallen into disrepair.

These days there is a friendlier command-line, Nala.

• Nala source
• Nala wiki

4 Non-packaged apps: homebrew

homebrew is the goods:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Probably I want all the libraries which are too patent-encumbered to be bundled with my holier-than-me distribution. This means codecs and other content-related apps, e.g.

brew install libsamplerate libsndfile ffmpeg node pandoc

Linuxbrew is how you would install shiny hipster things which get their value from new features that came out yesterday and which you like before they are cool. It claims to support Julia, but AFAICT that doesn’t work. node.js does, though.

I would typically do

brew install hugo pandoc fish ffmpeg syncthing

5 Hardening

• 130 Best Linux distributions for misanthropes as of 2021
• Security Hardening Ubuntu 20.04
• CIS Compliance for Ubuntu
• Ubuntu system hardening guide for desktops and servers
• System Updates

6 Fish shell

Since I use fish shell as my default but Ubuntu automatically executes the bash startup script .profile on login I ran into the following errors on login, when it tried to run the fish init in a bash process

bash: set: -g: invalid option
set: usage: set [-abefhkmnptuvxBCHP] [-o option-name] [--] [arg ...]
bash: set: -g: invalid option
...

This may be related to an intermittently reported bug in homebrew.

The fix is to change the automatically-added line in .profile to be

eval $(SHELL=bash /bin/brew shellenv)

and to add

eval (/bin/brew shellenv)

to ~/.config/fish/config.fish.

Note that this can cause surprising side effects; notably if I install homebrew Python (and many homebrew apps need Python and will install it for me) I will find my default user Python is homebrew Python, which breaks certain Ubuntu apps that expect my default user Python to be system Python. I should probably file some bug reports for that for either homebrew or the affected packages; it is undesirable. For now I recommend

brew unlink python

If there are problems with installing Haskell packages with an error like

gcc-5: error: unrecognized command line option '-no-pie'

(e.g. pandoc) then try:

brew install gcc@6
HOMEBREW_CC=gcc-6 brew install pandoc

Setting it as a default shell, now? If brew installed, add /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/fish to /etc/shells. Then run

chsh -s /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/fish

Otherwise

apt-add-repository ppa:fish-shell/release-2
apt install fish
chsh -s /usr/bin/fish

From within fish, one should add a user script path

set -gx PATH ~/bin $PATH

7 Packaged apps

I mean, applications packaged in one of the special pre-rolled formats like snap or flatpak or AppImage.

Flatpak is built into Pop!_OS but not stock Ubuntu. For that you need

add-apt-repository ppa:alexlarsson/flatpak  # before 18.10
apt install flatpak
apt install gnome-software-plugin-flatpak  # Integrates into GNOME
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub \
  https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Possibly one also should limit snap’s disk usage which I usually do, although I don’t know if there are downsides.

sudo snap set system refresh.retain=2

8 Networking

ufw enable

9 Graphics etc

I suppose one should have gimp installed. May be worth installing a fancy version from PPA to ensure version 2.10 or greater which has necessities such as WebP support.

add-apt-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp
apt install gimp

OTOH the flatpak distribution of GIMP has a lot more plugins.

flatpak install flathub org.gimp.GIMP
flatpak install flathub org.gimp.GIMP.Plugin.GMic
flatpak install flathub org.gimp.GIMP.Plugin.Fourier
flatpak install flathub org.gimp.GIMP.Plugin.Resynthesizer
flatpak install flathub org.gimp.GIMP.Plugin.LiquidRescale
flatpak install flathub org.gimp.GIMP.Plugin.LensFun
flatpak install flathub org.gimp.GIMP.Plugin.BIMP

Krita is a better image editor from a UX perspective, although missing some hardcore nerd features.

snap install krita

For desktop publishing, Scribus

add-apt-repository ppa:scribus/ppa
apt install scribus-ng

10 Academic necessities

apt install fonts-ebgaramond \
  fonts-cmu fonts-firacode \
  fonts-lmodern fonts-stix fonts-powerline \
  fonts-texgyre \
  fonts-noto

pushd ~/Downloads
wget https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code-pro/releases/download/2.038R-ro%2F1.058R-it%2F1.018R-VAR/OTF-source-code-pro-2.038R-ro-1.058R-it.zip -O sc.zip
if [ ! -d "~/.fonts" ] ; then
    mkdir ~/.fonts
fi
unzip sc.zip -d __sc
cp __sc/**.otf ~/.fonts/
rm -rf __sc
rm sc.zip
popd
fc-cache -f -v

11 Developer stuff

# Basic essentials
apt install r-base r-base-dev
# Specific packages I use need these extras
apt install libatlas3-base libopenblas-base libv8-dev libfontconfig1-dev libcairo2-dev libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler libjq-dev

# update indices
apt update -qq
# install two helper packages we need
apt install --no-install-recommends software-properties-common dirmngr
# import the signing key (by Michael Rutter) for these repo
apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9
# add the R 4.0 repo from CRAN -- adjust 'focal' to 'groovy' or 'bionic' as needed
add-apt-repository "deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs)-cran40/"
apt install --no-install-recommends r-base r-base-dev

add-apt-repository ppa:c2d4u.team/c2d4u4.0+

bash Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh
# simulate login/logout here
exec bash -
# don’t be so aggressive conda
conda config --set auto_activate_base false
conda init fish  # fish users

conda activate base

conda install ipykernel nbstripout

conda install pytorch torchvision cudatoolkit=10.1 -c pytorch

sudo wget -qO /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/sublimehq-pub.gpg https://download.sublimetext.com/sublimehq-pub.gpg
echo "deb https://download.sublimetext.com/ apt/dev/" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sublime-text.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install sublime-merge

12 File syncing

See also file sync/backup.

apt install rclone

### Syncthing

There is a medium-fresh version of Syncthing in the Ubuntu repository, so you can simply

```bash
sudo apt install syncthing

brew install syncthing

# Add the release PGP keys:
sudo curl -s -o /usr/share/keyrings/syncthing-archive-keyring.gpg https://syncthing.net/release-key.gpg
# Add the "stable" channel to your APT sources:
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/syncthing-archive-keyring.gpg] https://apt.syncthing.net/ syncthing stable" | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/syncthing.list
# Increase preference of Syncthing’s packages ("pinning")
printf "Package: *\nPin: origin apt.syncthing.net\nPin-Priority: 990\n" | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/syncthing
# Update and install syncthing:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install syncthing

/usr/bin/syncthing

$ cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches
8192
$ sudo sh -c 'echo 204800 > /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches'
$ echo "fs.inotify.max_user_watches=204800" | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf
$ cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches
204800

13 Multimedia

apt install graphicsmagick-imagemagick-compat graphicsmagick

Some time in 2021-12 the Spotify flatpak stopped working for me (I get a blank window). The Spotify for Linux deb packages work fine though:

curl -sS https://download.spotify.com/debian/pubkey_5E3C45D7B312C643.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb http://repository.spotify.com stable non-free" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/spotify.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install spotify-client

14 Mail client

For my use case, Thunderbird is the least worst

15 Browser

A nice browser is necessary, no?

I use Firefox. Google Chromium is also OK, or Brave. Chrome seems to be getting creepy these days. If you nonetheless want Chrome for profile sync or some other features not in plain Chromium, askubuntu says:

sudo bash
wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | \
    apt-key add -
echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" >> \
    /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google.list
apt install google-chrome-stable

Standard disclaimer: the other features that are not in plain Chromium may include Google spyware.

Maybe you would like to sidestep that issue with the possibly-better crypto privacy dotcom buzzword browser Brave?

sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg arch=amd64] https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/ stable main"|sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brave-browser-release.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install brave-browser

16 Editors

Not all the good editors are packaged by the system. The fashionable ones are installed separately.

I like vs code

Once the right editor is there, set it as default either system-wide

update-alternatives --config editor

or per-user

alias editor=code

or per-user-per-MIMETYPE:

xdg-mime default code.desktop text/plain

17 Password manager

Obviously password managers are essential. passwordstore:

apt install pass

Bitwarden comes as a flatpak.

18 Clipboard

The usual clipboard stuff.

Recent Ubuntu is missing the essential utility xclip:

apt install xclip

CopyQ (every desktop) seems most popular and works well.

apt install software-properties-common
add-apt-repository ppa:hluk/copyq
apt install copyq

It seems to be available as a packaged app too although it was buggy for me; lots of errors in the notification log.

flatpak install --user --from https://flathub.org/repo/appstream/com.github.hluk.copyq.flatpakref
flatpak run com.github.hluk.copyq

The app reveal shortcuts do not work for me in recent Ubuntu, but a workaround is to put the command copyq toggle into a keyboard shortcut.

Useful: CopyQ Keyboard shortcuts.

Alternatively, Zazu offers a clipboard manager.

See also clipboard managers for some in-depth and cross-platform comparison and some security warnings about these.

19 Terminal

How best to emulate 1970s hardware on Ubuntu as modern practice dictates? Hmmm. I like hyper (deb download of unknown provenance). Terminator seems to be an acceptable default option for a pure native app without many bells or whistles.

20 Launching applications

One could use a custom launcher, e.g. Zazu or do. But the built-in launcher on Gnome at least is pretty good, so I do not bother.

21 Mouse

Also trackpad buttons. For my Razer Blade there were extra things to do. There are also some tips there about making settings persist.

Kai Koenig reveals that you can have the button assignments different between mouse and keyboard. This is useful for me, since I mouse left-handed and trackpad right-handed, for reasons of avoiding RSI.

This needs the xinput trick

xinput -list

to find the name of your mouse, then

xinput set-button-map "2.4G Mouse" 3 2 1 &&

Making it work generically for all peripherals and not each specific mouse requires fancier footwork.

If you just broke your right touchpad button but are too lazy/cheap/busy to fix it, you can enable simulated right clicks in the universal access menu, which works in most apps. Like most accessibility features, the right click simulation works frequently but some apps clearly have not thought about it and the clicks go weird.

22 Keyboard

This mapping

key <HOME> {    [  Prior        ]   };
key <PGUP> {    [  Home         ]   };
key  <END> {    [  Next         ]   };
key <PGDN> {    [  End          ]   };

is an ideal xkb mapping for my silly keyboard design. (see also).

23 Desktop could be nicer

apt install compizconfig-settings-manager compiz-plugins

# Only if you want the very fresh version
add-apt-repository ppa:freyja-dev/unity-tweak-tool-daily
apt install unity-tweak-tool

24 Encryption and identity

ssh setup:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -o -a 100
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -o -a 100

Verify Debian

apt install debian-keyring  ## keys of extra-paranoid nerds
add-apt-repository ppa:tails-team/tails-installer
apt install tails-installer  ## for installing the paranoid tails OS
apt install pius signing-party  ## citizen identity verification

You should always have the utilities Cryptomator and zulucrypt on hand.

One way of getting Cryptomator:

add-apt-repository ppa:sebastian-stenzel/cryptomator
apt update
apt install cryptomator

Zulucrypt is

apt install zulucrypt

Or you can download a slightly fancier version from the package creator.

25 Dual-booting with Windows

See dual boot: windows/linux

26 Offline documentation

Zeal is not bad.

add-apt-repository ppa:zeal-developers/ppa
apt install zeal

27 Razer-specific

See comfy razer.

28 Virtual machines

You want to run virtual machines?? Be aware Ubuntu may have special needs wrt config.

virtualbox is passable. These days I prefer libvirt, unless there is some particular machine image that I need that only runs on virtualbox for some reason. ATM there are none.

apt install virt-manager qemu-kvm

wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | \
  sudo apt-key add -
wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | \
  sudo apt-key add -
sudo add-apt-repository 'https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian contrib'
sudo apt install virtualbox virtualbox-ext-pack

29 If only I could temporarily disable lock screen

Caffeine.

apt install caffeine

30 Mounting that Windows partition on login

By default, the various disks that I plug into my machine are visible in the sidebar, but until I click on them they are not actually mounted so I can’t use the files. “Clicking on stuff” is not a satisfactory workflow, especially if you have other scripts that depend on data on my external drive. So fix that.

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.media-handling automount true

dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/media-handling/automount true

apt install dconf-editor
dconf-editor
# make changes by clicking on things

udisksctl mount --block-device /dev/disk/by-uuid/[uuid]

/usr/bin/udisks --mount /dev/[sdc1 or something]

sudo blkid

ls /dev/disk/by-uuid

udisksctl mount --block-device /dev/disk/by-label/[label]

31 Media

apt install gst-plugins-ugly gst-plugins-bad

add-apt-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-releases
apt-get install handbrake-gtk handbrake-cli

32 VPN

Fiddly on Linux. See VPN

33 Comms

curl -s https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt/keys.asc | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt xenial main" \
 | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list
sudo apt install signal-desktop

snap install signal-desktop

curl --remote-name https://prerelease.keybase.io/keybase_amd64.deb
sudo apt install ./keybase_amd64.deb
run_keybase

34 Mounting android devices

I found that some newer/rarer MTPFS devices aren’t supported by 18.04 as filesystems. Should I try another MTPFS entirely, such as go-mtpfs?

Research ongoing for this one.

sudo apt install golang-go
sudo apt install libusb1-devel
mkdir /tmp/go
export GOPATH=/tmp/go
go get github.com/hanwen/go-mtpfs
mkdir xoom
go-mtpfs xoom &
cp -a ~/Music/Some-Album xoom/Music/
fusermount -u xoom

35 Additional config

SystemMaxUse=100M

sudo journalctl --rotate
sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=2d

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:danielrichter2007/grub-customizer # Optional on 19.10
sudo apt install grub-customizer

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:teejee2008/ppa
sudo apt install ukuu

36 Power management

The arch guide explains the terminology. The TLP debugging guide and FAQ are also useful. Suspend is what I would normally call sleep where the computer just goes quiet and keeps the RAM powered up. Hibernate is when it suspends the whole state of the machine to RAM.

TLP and its GUI TLPUI can help tweaking power management for the non-power-management-obsessive. See also the system76 guide.

apt install tlp tlp-rdw --no-install-recommends
add-apt-repository ppa:linuxuprising/apps
apt install tlpui

You can do it more manually if desired, but it gets kinda complicated.

One could put a hibernate button in the shutdown menu if that seemed exciting.

Temperature monitoring and fan management is via lm-sensors.

Power monitoring happens by powertop

apt install powertop
#reboot here, then calibrate
powertop -c

#!/bin/sh

case $1/$2 in
  pre/*)
    echo "Going to $2..."
    # Place your pre suspend commands here, or `exit 0`
    # if no pre suspend action required
    exit 0
    ;;
  post/*)
    echo "Waking up from $2..."
    # Place your post suspend (resume) commands here, or `exit 0`
    # if no post suspend action required
    sleep 15 # wait for my usb reset script to finish, hopefully
    xinput set-prop `xinput list --id-only "Bluetooth Mouse M336/M337/M535 Mouse"` 314 1  # logitech natural scroll
    setxkbmap -option compose:caps  #Caps lock is for typing diacritics
    ;;
esac

sudo chmod +x /lib/systemd/system-sleep/fixthings

37 Misc useful infrastructure

sudo apt install synaptic  # sometime I want old school debian style package manager
sudo apt install curl  # so many things depend on this why is it not there?

38 Accessing foreign file systems

See Linux FS hacks, but, in brief,

sudo apt install exfat-fuse exfat-utils ntfs-3g # interoperability for external drives

39 Installing and migrating

If I have encrypted and LVM layers on your disk, migration is a many-stage process. The official magical incantation is quite long, and includes some surprising orderings. To reinstall grub there are some standard steps, but for encrypted drives there are some extras to get the boot partition in place. YMMV.

mount /dev/sdXY /mnt
mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev &&
mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts &&
mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc &&
mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
mount /dev/sdX2 /mnt/boot
mount /dev/sdX1 /mnt/boot/efi
chroot /mnt
grub-install /dev/sdX
grub-install --recheck /dev/sdX
update-grub