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The Linux Experience

Things I learned while using Ubuntu as a Desktop

Installation

My installation went overall smoothly, but I did hit a few hurdles and learned some important information for future installs.

Making a bootable flash drive

Most people will swear by software like Balena Etcher, but it turns out you can flash any .iso file to a usb on Mac and Linux without any additional software with the dd command.

I tried this a little after booting up ubuntu to try Arch on some ancient macs (which mostly failed /:). The Arch Linux wiki (which has great tutorials on most linux things) has a guide on using this utility, but the way I used it was something along the lines of: sudo dd if='path/to/my/download.iso' of='' bs=4M status=progress Where the paths given to if and of are the file you want to copy the Ubuntu.iso in my case, and the drive location which would probably be something on /dev (use at your own risk!)

But, If you don’t want to deal with those shenanigans something like Balena Etcher is just fine.

The weirdness of UEFI and windows

I have heard of dreaded scenerios in which someone tries to dual boot windows and linux on the same machine, and linux end up getting disabled or worse. To my relief, this seems to be only if you install linux first

With that problem out of the way, I plugged in my bootable usb and tried and failed many times to install Ubuntu. Until I finally succeded after overcoming these problems:

  1. Safe graphics mode: I don’t know if this was actually a problem or not (see my second realization) but I kept getting a dumb error message while attempting to run the Ubuntu ISO. There are two options: one is Try or install Ubuntu and the other is Ubuntu (safe graphics) (note: these are names from memory and might not match the exact options). Safe graphics seemed to be the right option in the end with my NVIDIA GPU (I can hear the screams of older linux users)
  2. There are two partitions on the USB that I flashed, one is just called Ubuntu, and the other is something like UEFI ... Ubuntu I didn’t know what the UEFI one was and thought it might cause problems, so I just booted ubuntu. wrong choice. This made it seem like it was installing the right software, but no. Installing from this mode made my SSD incompatible with the UEFI (no, not in a permanent way), after many attempts, I made the stupid realization that I should try UEFI mode. After doing that it worked.
  3. My wifi Card isn’t supported by the installer Kernel …or the installed Kernel. I am yet to figure this one out, but I would strongly advise anyone installing to have an ethernet cable handy, and try all ethernet ports on your machine if you have multiple!

After overcoming these two hurdles, I progressed to the next phase:

Set up

OhHhHhHHHH, BOooYyyY!

Realizing that even ubuntu has challenges

Before installing, I was leaning to install Arch Linux (mostly for the meme and clout). I was afraid that there would be a painful lack of customizability and I would be stuck with closed source software (*gasp*). But it turns out that Ubuntu is not lacking in challenge or adaptability.

Dare to be stupid

Don’t

Luckily I don’t have this problem, but I used to. DON’T BLINDLY FOLLOW AND RUN COMMANDS FROM ANY SOURCE. That means, online guides, forums, your favorite (or least favorite) LLM. Any of these could break your machine or hack you. Always man your command and see what it’s trying to do especially if it is being sudo’d

Some dubious advice

I got this advice mostly from ChatGPT, so take it with a grain of salt. But I have been encountering various performance problems while using ubuntu (including bluetooth being super unstable), and it claims that power saving mode is doing this. This checks out in my mind and seems to slightly improve some of these issues. So, be careful with the cursed button.

Security

DISCLAIMER: I am not a security professional, follow this guide at your own risk “Linux is soooooooo secure”, they said, “Everything is already set up”, they said, NO! It turns out, that desktop linux has a serious lack of preconfigured safety. And while I can’t and won’t cover everything, these were the most egregious errors.

Lack of a (configured) Firewall

Yep, anything on your network can send whatever it wants to your computer, no questions asked. This is usually considered a serious problem. Luckily (and unluckily) Ubuntu comes with an Easy to use firewall called ufw. What’s the catch? IT’S NOT CONFIGURED OR EVEN TURNED ON AaAAAAaaaaAAaaAAaAAA. Anyways, here’s how you do that:

Not many things are sandboxed

Any app you install, can, by default access any data on your drive that you can read and/or modify. This is bad. If possible source your apps from snap or use AppArmor. I am still learning this too, so find yourself a more comprehensive guide.

Useful guides and resources

I am not completely new to Linux, and thought that these resources and few tips would help a little: