Transcript of 10 To-Dos after installing Linux Mint | Tutorial for Beginners

In this video, I'm going to show you 10 todos after the installation of Linux Mint. With this welcome to Linux, my name is John and I have a fresh Linux Mint installation. Here we see a new welcome screen. You will see some first steps you could do. You can get back to the window anytime by clicking on your menu on the left bottom side, then searching here for welcome screen. But for now, let us just disable this dialogue at startup and just close down this window. The first thing we should all do is going to our update manager. You could open the update manager by clicking on the shield here on this taskbar or just search for update manager in your menu. Then we are greeted by the update manager. We just hit okay and then we see there's a new version of the update manager available. We say apply the update and then select continue. We type in our password. After installing the updates of the update manager, we could if you want switch to a local faster mirror if you want, but otherwise the default Linux mid mirror is also fast enough. But if you want to get more speed off your computer, just hit yes here. Type in your password here. We could now click on each source here, main and bass, and then select a faster mirror here. This is up to you. I leave it as the default now. Otherwise, we can now decide if we want to do updates manually on our Linux Mint or if we want to let them happen automatically. And I highly recommend you to let them happen automatically because there are multiple updates every week appearing on this update manager. So um for your security and also for your convenience use I recommend you selecting edit here then select preferences and then here in preferences select the automation and then we could select here apply updates automatically. I type in my password and I also activate all the other things. then your system keeps itself clean and you get also other updates for flatp packs which is a newer um program technology and also for your extensions of your cinnamon desktop which is your graphical desktop you see here from now on the updates are happening automatically but there's one thing you need to care about if you want to shut down your computer and you don't see the restart and the shutdown button please wait for a few minutes because then there are updates happening in the background and only shut down your computer if it is really advised here and if this is available. This is very important otherwise your computer might not start again so easily but if that happens you can also fix it if you want I could also upload a video about this how to fix this specific case. Let us come to another point which might be very important for you and this is additional drivers. We head down to our menu and search for additional drivers or driver manager it is called. And now Linux Mint is looking for drivers. But these are only additional drivers because almost all drivers are just right built into the Linux kernel. And on the most systems you don't need any additional driver. There might be some driver changes useful. If you're using an Nvidia card then you will see here a recommended Nvidia driver. This I could highly recommend you if you really want to use the 3D acceleration then this proprietary Nvidia driver will be almost necessary. This is it for the driver manager. Nothing more to do for me. Otherwise just select this hit install and then select reboot if this is available afterwards. There's also some other tool we might need to activate and which makes it a bit more secure for other applications and of course for you and this is enabling the firewall. So I just search for firewall configuration here. Here we have it and we open this up. We type in our password and inside here there's a very easy thing we can do. We could start here our firewall. Now every incoming transaction will be blocked by default. So please keep in mind that this blocks all traffic from the outside. But sometimes your applications you install on your computer are communicating to the outside and this the firewall isn't blocking and I highly recommend you not to also deny the outgoing things because otherwise you can't really do anything afterwards on your computer. There are some rules you could apply here. If you want to get much more detailed in the networking with your computer for the rest, this is fully okay. But if you want to get more detailed, then there are some other tools like IP snitch for example. This is one of the tools I could recommend you for such a case. But normally you don't want to do that. Now let us come to the software manager here. Let's open up the software manager. We could just open it up here. This is your so-called play store maybe but for Linux. After some time we see our software manager up here and we see many applications which we could just install with one click for example VLC, Dropbox and so on virtual box and there is one tool I recommend and this is gear lever it is called. Let's have a look here. It is um this is an application which is managing app images. App images are kind of portable Linux apps. Very very cool, very neat. And if you ever step on the app image, I highly recommend you this app. I also highly recommend you just to install it. You won't recognize it at any point until you step over an app image. We will install an app image very very soon. What I also can recommend you installing a second web browser. For example, what I can recommend is the browser Chromium. We have two different options. For example, the ungoole chromium or the normal Chromium. I'm going with the normal Chromium here. So just select Chromium here and then select install here. Then you are getting Google Chrome but in a opensource way. And this is much more suitable if you want to join web meetings and have more complicated websites running um than this. Chromium web browser is a very very good alternative to Firefox and also to Google Chrome. But Chromium doesn't play DRM content. So for some video players this isn't suitable YouTube and such things are working quite fine. But if you want to play for example Disney Plus or Netflix then this won't work. then you could go with Firefox or if you want to stay to the original you could also install Google Chrome. So we just search for it and here we have it and we could download it. For that we need the DEB Debian Ubuntu package um for Chrome for Linux men. So you could accept and install it. Just download it, click on it, hit install package and then everything's fine. But I'm sticking to Chromium here. This is for my opinion one of the best browsers we ever had. And um this is also my daily uh browser right now. And I would say let us download a very cool app which is in best with the app image format and this is KDN live. This is a video editor. If you want one then this is great. We are also using Kaden live for cutting our videos. So I select download here. I highly recommend you the app image of Kaden live. So this is the portable Linux format. So just download it here. After it has been downloaded, we could just now single click on it. Um for that you have to have gear lever installed and um here we have this gear lever program which is just managing our app images. I select unlock here and then I can select move to the app menu. Very very cool. We now could close this window here. And now our system is also capable of handling app images. And if I'm searching for K life, perfect. Here we have it. This is just a portable app. We just now integrated fully into our Linux system. And the app image base is also growing a lot. Also, there are some other technologies in Linux Mint integrated. the normal system package manager for example also for chromium and um also the flash pack base um which is also just available in the software manager it's just fine you are now very prepared for almost all Linux apps out there one next point I highly recommend you if if you opened up library office very very good tool in my opinion on my Linux men version this icon tool set isn't right so what I can recommend you is going to tools then options then view and here we select the theme and we want only collibra then I hit apply and then everything's fine and what I also could recommend you for library office is heading to view then user interface and then I select tapped mode here we have it apply to all I select and then we have a very similar way how to handle files and document files um like on Microsoft 365 for example. But if you want to stick with Microsoft formats then there is for example softmaker office which are supporting the doc x format very very good but this is proprietary software but also working great with Linux. Other option would be only office and this is completely open source. So this could also be an alternative to library office if you have to deal with Microsoft formats but otherwise library office is a great free office suite I'm also using all the day. If I open up library office again then I want to introduce you to a very cool feature in Linux Mint. So I open up the menu and search for hot corners. Then we can enable one hot corner on the left top here. And then I select show all windows here. And now if I head over um with to the top with my mouse then we see here all open windows. We can now switch between and we can even close some windows just by hitting the middle mouse button or the mouse button on your mouse wheel. And then yeah, you could also very fast close some windows you still had opened. Very very cool feature. Um I highly recommend you this. Then we head over to the sound settings. Here I select the sound settings on my volume speaker settings here. Otherwise you could also go to sound settings via the menu. And here we come to sounds. I highly recommend you just to turn the sounds off if you don't have any bling and something like this on your Linux PC. So for me, I'm not wanting this. So I just muted these things. But yeah, if you want, just go ahead with these. Also, another point I'm always doing, it's just a very small feature, but it makes a big different changing the default desktop background. Linux men comes with great desktop backgrounds just right out of the box. Hit right click on your desktop. Then hit change desktop background. And here we could search for some wallpapers for example like here Wilma. And here you see many many cool things also wallpapers. This gives your Linux Mint just a very cool touch. Of course you could also choose your own pictures. It's completely up to you. So now another thing I'm doing on my Linux Mint machine is adding weather information. So I right click my panel and select applets here. Then inside applets I had download. Then we could add additional y mini programs for our panel here. And there is the app called weather. Great app. Very easy. I just hit download here. Select manage. Select weather here. Select plus. And then we see weather information just right on my location. Very easy. highly recommend it. Also, I could highly recommend is to show the date on your clock here. Just leftclick this one, select date and time settings, and then here I could select display the date. And then we have always set our date here. Another thing we could do is open up the system reports menu. And this is this small exclamation mark here on your panel. So, I left click this one. Otherwise, you could open system reports just right through your menu. And here we see set up the system restore utility time shift. Honestly, I'm not recommending time shift for an automatic purpose. If you want to store some system snapshot of your specific system, then this is okay. But please do not use it for cloning your system. This won't work. So, this is only for a backup solution if you really messed up your system. And if you have the disk space available. So for the normal user, I would not highly recommend time shift. But if you want to use it, then select launch time shift here. Um I type in my password. Then we select the snapshot type. This is okay. I'm selecting our sync. And then it's estimating our system size. This takes a moment. Now we see our snapshot location. But please have in mind that you only should use time shift if you have this dis space. This could take up up to 100 GB on production systems. Please be aware of it. So I hit next here. And then we can select another snapshot level for automatic snapshots. These I'm highly recommend you not to do on your daily basis because in our Linux support we are getting more Linux user requests that time shift is messing up their disk space that they use time shift wrong and so on. So, I only highly recommend it if you want to upgrade to a newer version or if you want to do a breaking system change on your Linux distribution and you want to have a backup to go back, then this is fine. Not for an kind of daily use. So, I highly recommend you turn off daily. If you want, do monthly if you want, but I'm not recommending it on an automatic basis because on many systems, especially with very small disk space, I'm not recommending automated snapshots at all. So, I hit next here. Then we leave everything unchanged here. Hit next and finish. Here we have it. And if you want now to use time shift, for example, if you are um doing some great system changes and you want to have a backup of your system, not of your personal files, only of your system, then you could, if you want, use creating and restoring snapshots. But this only works on your own Linux Mint machine. You can't transfer snapshots to other Linux installations. Now, we don't have any problems anymore on our system reports. if you have so just enable them or just execute them and this is fine. This is it for system reports and another point I could highly recommend you is the night mode which comes new in Linux Mint22.1. This is very easy. It turns your screen a bit more red and also turns it automatically a bit more red if the sun goes down on your location. Um this is automatically working. Very very cool. Yeah, you don't see anything on your video here because yeah, this is only for the screen. I'm seeing it now a bit more red. If you want to make your PC a bit more eye friendly, so to say. So, this is it for this and now I give you an extra tip and this is installing Linux assistant. Linux assistant is an app programmed by me. It's completely open source and free and is a daily helper for a Linux distribution and does many things. we had already done completely automatically. So I just select download here. We need the DEP package here and then hit on this step file here. Perfect. We opening the package. I'm installing it. I type in my password and then this is installing very fast. Now I could just open up Linux assistant. Um, this is a very great daily helper with many functionalities your system distribution does not come with. Also, it's a great search for all your folders or recently used files and has some very neat things like for example security check. Um, I just authenticate myself and it is analyzing system security. Now, it wants to help you stay more secure. And here we see we are almost doing everything right but we have 385 packages which uh should be updated. This is because this is a very old Linux min2.1 machine and we uh only enabled automatic updates some moments ago. So this takes a bit time and if I go back here after a few hours then these updates should be applied and there should also be a green check mark or otherwise we could also just fix it right here. Now I type in my password and now it is doing the update and of course it's not doing any magic. you could always display the commands which it is um running in the background and um so this is it for Linux assistant I would say and this is also it for the whole video. If you found this video helpful please leave a like and subscribe to this YouTube channel because here on YouTube we are releasing every week new stuff about Linux and open source and I personally wish you a pleasant start with your Linux distribution and see you next time. Bye-bye.