27 Things to Do After Fresh Installation of Ubuntu 15.10 Desktop
12. Install Archive Applications
By default Linux can easily handle tar files, but to extend the amount of different archive files you can use on your Ubuntu system (zip, tar.gz, zip, 7zip rar etc) install the following packages by running the command below:
$ sudo apt-get install unace unrar zip unzip p7zip-full p7zip-rar sharutils rar uudeview mpack arj cabextract file-roller
13. Install Chat Applications
What’s a desktop operating system if you can’t use it for chat? There are many different chat applications for Ubuntu and here are some of the most famous ones:
- Pidgin
- Skype
- Xchat
- Telegram
- aMSN
- Viber
Most of these are easily installable from the Ubuntu Software Center. If you don’t like too much clicking, you can use these commands:
$ sudo apt-get install pidgin $ sudo apt-get install skype $ sudo apt-get install xchat $ sudo apt-get install amsn $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/telegram -y $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install telegram
To install, you will need to download and install the Viber package as shown in the following article.:
Install Viber in Ubuntu
14. Install a Torrent Client
Ubuntu comes with “Transmission” which is a great torrent client, but it lacks a good interface and is not that practical. Instead you can install qbittorent which has a more modern look and is much easier to use.
To install qbittorent, run the following command:
$ sudo apt-get install qbittorrent
Install qbittorrent in Ubuntu
15. Install Wine
Wine is a Windows emulator and allows you to run Windows applications on your Ubuntu system. Unfortunately not all apps are supported and some might be buggy, but at the end you will be able to do the job.
Installing wine can be performed by running:
$ sudo apt-get install wine winetricks
16. Install Steam
Steam is a multiplayer platform developed by Valve. It provides many different games on different platforms including Linux. You can choose from great variety of different games and play with friends locally or online.
To install Steam, simply go to Ubuntu Software Center and look for “Steam“:
17. Install DropBox
DropBox is a cloud storage service where you can keep your files, photos or documents. It can be easily integrated with your Ubuntu system by installing the desktop client. For that purpose simply go to the following article and follow the instruction as stated in the article to install Dropbox on your Ubuntu.
When the installation finishes, you will be able to find the application in Unity Dash -> DropBox.
18. Install Compiz
Adding some extra visual effects can be great for your Ubuntu Desktop. Compiz provides different awesome desktop effects for your desktop. The installation is fairly easy. Open a terminal and run the following command
$ sudo apt-get install compiz compizconfig-settings-manager compiz-plugins
19. Install SystemBack
Creating system backups is vital. That way you can always restore your system to an earlier working state in case of disaster. That’s why you can install tool such as SystemBack to create backup of your Ubuntu system.
To do this, run the following commands in terminal:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nemh/systemback $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install systemback
20 Try different Desktop Environments
Ubuntu is not only limited to Unity. It can be used with different desktop environments such as cinnamon, mate, GNOME and others. While there are Ubuntu releases with those IDE’s pre-installed, you can try them within one Ubuntu installation.
To install cinnamon you can use the following command executed in a terminal:
$ sudo apt-get install cinnamon-desktop-environment
Installing GNOME can be completed with:
$ sudo apt-get install gnome-shell ubuntu-gnome-desktop
And finally MATE can be added with:
$ sudo apt-get install ubuntu-mate-desktop
21. Install Youtube-dl
Youtube-dl is a small command line tool that can help you download videos from YouTube. It can be easily installed via:
$ sudo apt-get install youtube-dl
An extensive guide how to install and use this tool can be found in our article here.
22. Adjust Privacy Settings
While the Unity Dash is great for finding different things on your OS, there might be some information you may not want to see. For example weather results, wikipedia links or different amazon products. You can adjust that, by going to “System Settings” -> “Security and Privacy“.
In there you can:
- Disable online features in the Unity Dash
- Choose which folders and files appear in searches
- Turn off automatic error reporting
23. Enable extra repositories
You can add some extra repositories for even more cool stuff. For that purpose enable the “Canonical Partners” repos via Software & Updates -> Other Software.
24. Setup a Printer
To use your printer with Ubuntu, you will need to setup the printer first. This is rather easy task. Simply follow these steps:
- Make sure printer is on
- Connect the printer to your computer with the appropriate cables. You might be asked to install additional drivers if the system founds one
- You will be notified once the driver installation is complete
In case the printer is not automatically found:
- Go to Unity Dash and search for “printers“.
- Click “Add” and select the printer from the list of available devices
- Click “Forward” and wait while the system searches for drivers
- You can customize the printer’s name, description and location. When you are ready, click “Apply“
- Try printing a test page to see if the printer works fine.
25. Enable Workspaces
With Ubuntu Unity Desktop you can use more than one workspaces. Workspaces can improve your productivity….significantly! To enable workspaces in Ubuntu, open Unity Dash -> System Settings -> Apperance.
26. Install JAVA
JAVA is a programming language and many programs and websites won’t work properly unless you have it installed. To install JAVA in Ubuntu 15.10 run the following command:
$ sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jdk
27. Install laptop tools
If you are using Ubuntu on a laptop, you can install additional tweak tools to improve your laptops battery and power consumption. These tools can improve your battery life and add some cool new features. To install laptop tools, run the following command in a terminal:
$ sudo apt-get install laptop-mode-tools
Conclusion
So there you have it folks. You just saw that even in a good operating system such as Ubuntu 15.10 there is still room from improvements. I hope you liked the article and that it helped you improve your Ubuntu desktop experience.
I tried doing a fresh install of Ubuntu and while I finished the install and even got so far as installing Chrome, media codecs, etc, When I turned my PC off and went to use it the next day,
I received an error where my monitor could not be found. I have tried all sorts of ways to fix this, but still, nothing works. I don’t know what to do as I wiped the drive and tried another install…to the same end. How do I fix this and use my system again?
will some body help me…my ubunto software updater not updating any software
Are you conected to internet?
Press “cntl + alt + T” and type “sudo apt-get update” Insert your password and press enter. Once this finishs enter “sudo apt-get upgrade”, your password again and enter. You can also do “sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade” but I don’t recommend it, it doesnt always work.
wtf? all this article is about install all the closed source software
The #11 Spotify advice is VERY bad from a security perspective.
You should never recommend for people to put an old encryption library with known vulnerabilities on their system. The better solution is to pull Spotify from their “testing” repos. Spotify team already made the change to use correct libgcrypt in that version.
Just change the one line in your instructions to this:
$ echo deb http://repository.spotify.com testing non-free | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/spotify.list
And delete that entire 2nd part advising people to download the old lib11. Cheers.
Thanks for very well article .
i think that i need SystemBack .
articles like this will help to people that GNU/Linux is now very better from few years ago and it can be replacement for windows .
Sadly, the “move window controls from left side to right side” no longer functions in the Unity Tweak Tools. Ubuntu has set that bug to “wontfix”, forcing your unity desktop to be a Mac instead of a, you know, real computer :)
Thanks so much great article.
Clean Install from downloaded and checked iso.
Software Centre must also be called from command line with admin privileges.
Unity Tweak Tool will not install & run without incomprehensible errors.
Hello Cushie,
The software center always asked for privileges when performing operations with it. You don’t need to load it with from the command line. Instead, you can use Unity Dash.
As for the Unity Tweak Tool, what kind of errors did you receive?
Step 28. Reinstall Ubuntu 15.10 to get rid of all the cruft you just put on your machine.
Hello Artuhr,
The idea behind this tutorial is to show what you can do to add more functionality to your Ubuntu 15.10 installation. It’s not necessary to use all that software. You can pick the one that you really need to use.
Hi Marin,
First, I want to apologize for leaving that obnoxious comment. I appreciate that you are trying to be helpful and I appreciate that it takes a lot of work to put together an article for publication. Partly, it’s me lashing out because I have seen a lot of similar “Top 10 Things to Do…” none of which I find very useful. That’s a personal problem and has nothing to do with you. I’m sure there are some people who read your article will learn something from it.
Having said that, I do want to offer a bit of criticism that I hope can be received as constructive. If what you say is true, then the headline for this article is misleading. “27 thing TO do …” implies that you should do all of them. Like you said in your comment, “27 things YOU CAN do …” would be a better headline for this article.
What makes that headline worse is that, if we take #10 for example, you list applications without explaining what they are used for. If this article is meant for newbies, then I think that at least a word or two, or better yet a link to the project, would serve them better. Otherwise it reads as if they need to download everything to get “support for media files”, which is very vague.
tl;dr I don’t like this article, but I don’t want to be a dick about it.
Thank you for the feedback Arthur. When you put it that way, indeed the subject may seem misleading to a newbie user. I don’t mind being criticized for my work and point has been taken :) Furthermore thank you for taking the time to go through the article and express your opinion. I encourage all readers to do that!
I will have a word with our editor and see if we can improve the quality of the article, per your recommendation.
Regards,
Marin Todorov
Actually It’s better to link users to the below libraries for libgcrypt11 instead of your own link.
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/primary/+files/libgcrypt11_1.5.3-2ubuntu4.2_amd64.deb
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/primary/+files/libgcrypt11_1.5.3-2ubuntu4.2_i386.deb
Thank you Mehran, you helped me in pushing Spotify working. I suggest to change the link as Mehran says