I’m one of those people that tries to use the best tools to do the job at hand. Linux or Windows, both are great in their own respect, both have strengths, both have downsides. This post isn’t about comparing both operating systems, plenty of opinions around for that. Today I want to share the first tip for Linux as I have used it as my daily driver for a couple of years now.

I’m a vivid Ubuntu Desktop user…. Currently on 22.04. And yes, I know, it has it flaws, but for me it simply works, well for the most part. When I install Ubuntu, I usually don’t do the full installation, but go with the minimal install, just to have a bit more control over what I can configure or install. So afterwards there is still a few tweaks that I need to do, easy stuff but a great boost for the whole desktop experience.

Install System Updates

Easy starter, update the system, like always do this first. Open a terminal and enter:

sudo apt update -y && sudo apt full-upgrade -y
Bash

Always reboot afterwards, it’s quick and avoids potential problems.

Install Ubuntu extra’s

Ubuntu extra’s include additional codecs for video display, fonts and such. Never leave home without it! When you first install Ubuntu, these extra’s aren’t installed because of licensing restrictions, but it’s an easy fix. In the terminal enter these commands and install the binaries.

sudo add-apt-repository multiverse
sudo apt update
sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras -y
Bash

The part of the latter command “DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive” enables all the default options not covered by the “-y” parameter at the end.

Uncomplicated Firewall

Per default, Ubuntu minimal installation doesn’t include a host based firewall, but it’s available in the online repository. Just remember that after installation, you will still need to activate the firewall functionality. Open the Firewall configuration and toggle the status switch to on. It will block inbound traffic but allow all traffic going out.

sudo apt install gufw -y
Bash

Preload apps before they start

When applications start the binary file is read and the code is executed and stored in memory for future use. When you close the application the memory the application used is cleared, or at least it’s supposed to do that. From a performance perspective this is not very effective as reads from disk and executing code is time consuming. It would be more efficient to load the minimal pages of memory upfront, as for the most part, the same data is put into memory anyway? You can actually enable this functionality with preloading. Use the following command to install the service. I might take a few launces of the application before you notice a reduced load time. For those of you on Windows, this technology is called prefetching and has the same goal of making application load faster.

sudo apt install preload -y
Bash

Thumbnails of videos

Per default, when you install Ubuntu in a minimal setup, video files don’t have a thumbnail preview available. It’s an easy fix though.

sudo apt install ffmpegthumbnailer -y
Bash

This will automatically generate thumbnail preview of the local video files.

I hope this top 5 will help you experience Ubuntu in a more fun and reliable way. As always, if you have any questions, shoot me an e-mail.