Cinnamon Control Panel

Things To Do After Installing Linux Mint 20

Linux Mint is easily one of the best Linux distributions out there and especially considering the features of Linux Mint 20, I’m sure you will agree with that.

In case you missed our coverage, Linux Mint 20 is finally available to download.

Of course, if you’ve been using Linux Mint for a while, you probably know what’s best for you. But, for new users, there are a few things that you need to do after installing Linux Mint 20 to make your experience better than ever.

Recommended things to do after installing Linux Mint 20

In this article, I’m going to list some of them for to help you improve your Linux Mint 20 experience.

1. Perform a System Update

Linux Mint 20 System Update

The first thing you should check right after installation is — system updates using the update manager as shown in the image above.

Why? Because you need to build the local cache of available software. It is also a good idea to update all the software updates.

If you prefer to use the terminal, simply type the following command to perform a system update:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

2. Use Timeshift to Create System Snapshots

Create system snapshot in Linux Mint

It’s always useful have system snapshots if you want to quickly restore your system state after an accidental change or maybe after a bad update.

Hence, it’s super important to configure and create system snapshots using Timeshift if you want the ability to have a backup of your system state from time to time.

You can follow our detailed guide on using Timeshift, if you didn’t know already.

3. Install Codecs

To make sure that you don’t have issues with playing a MP4 video file or any other file formats of media, you might want to install the media codecs to make sure that most of the media file formats work on your system.

You can just search for “mint-meta-codecs” on your software center or simply type in the following command in the terminal to install it:

sudo apt install mint-meta-codecs

4. Install Useful Software

Even though you have a bunch of useful pre-installed applications on Linux Mint 20, you probably need to install some essential apps that do not come baked in.

You can simply utilize the software manager or the synaptic package manager to find and install software that you need.

For starters, you can follow our list of essential Linux apps if you want to explore a variety of tools.

Here’s a list of my favorite software that I’d want you to try:

5. Customize the Themes and Icons

Linux Mint 20 Theme

Of course, this isn’t something technically essential unless you want to change the look and feel of Linux Mint 20.

But, it’s very easy to change the theme and icons in Linux Mint 20 without installing anything extra.

You get the option to customize the look in the welcome screen itself. In either case, you just need to head on to “Themes” and start customizing.

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Handbrake on Ubuntu Sytem

HandBrake 1.3.3 Open-Source Video Converter

Open-source and cross-platform HandBrake 1.3.3 video converter have been released today with several improvements and bug fixes.

This release improves support for MKV files by fixing an issue that made ISO 639-2/B language codes not to be set correctly, which affected Hebrew, Indonesian, Japanese, and Yiddish languages, and improves Intel QSV memory footprint and H.265 memory buffer size as needed by newer Intel Media SDK.

HandBrake 1.3.3 also adds better support for SSA (SubStation Alpha) subtitles by fixing a handling issue of overlapping imported SSA subtitles and improving support for out-of-order SSA subtitles. Also improved is Flatpak support, especially the building efficiency of the Intel QSV Flatpak plugin.

This release comes with support for the latest FFmpeg 4.2.3 open-source and cross-platform multimedia framework, which is needed for decoding and filters, as well as a new patch for improving the cross-compilation of the libdav1d AV1 decoding library included in FFmpeg 4.2 using GCC 10.x or later.

Among other noteworthy changes, HandBrake 1.3.3 improves support for video sources where the pixel format can’t be identified in a timely way, implements logging to identify where hardware support is disabled, and fixes an issue where full-range video files were identified as limited range after conversion when using filters.

Read More

 

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Install Manage Flatpak Apps

Install & Manage Flatpak Applications

Flatpak is the new way to install and run applications on Linux. Unlike distribution maintained applications, flatpak is a great way to deploy Linux applications without worrying about “which” Linux distro specifically.

You might have realized almost all Linux distros provide the same software but differing versions. One such example is, a distro comes bundled with the latest version of LibreOffice (let’s say v6.0.3) and another distro comes bundled with LibreOffice but not the latest (let’s say v5.2.7). Flatpak is here to eradicate that issue.

​But alas there’s this situation when the computer doesn’t belong to you; you’re on a standard user account, and you encounter a situation in which the computer asks administrative password to install the program. Great news! Flatpak applications can be installed for a standard user account also called per-user mode and not system-wide. Read on below how you can achieve that.

Browsing Flathub

Head over to this given site flathub.org, you’ll see the home page cluttered with popular apps and some editor’s choice apps. Take your time and browse around it, you might even find apps worth trying. But for now, let’s assume LibreOffice is the choice.

Install Flatpak from Flathub

browse flathub applications

Click on Browse the apps button to get to the categories page. Click on Productivity and then choose LibreOffice. Scroll down, you’ll be shown the command on how to install it on your computer. Copy that command and paste it on your terminal program, then append “–user” at the end of the prompt before hitting Enter key. So the actual command would be:
flatpak install flathub org.libreoffice.LibreOffice –user
Once installed you can launch it and check the “About LibreOffice” from the program menu bar to see the program info. You’ll notice “Flatpak version”  on the dialog box.

install libreoffice flatpak

How To Uninstall Flatpak

Suppose the flatpak app you installed is no longer needed and it’s time to uninstall the app. It’s simple and easy, remember the above command we used to install LibreOffice? Let’s assume we wish to remove LibreOffice from the computer, the below command would uninstall it:
flatpak uninstall org.libreoffice.LibreOffice –user

So the actual syntax for uninstalling any flatpak app is:

flatpak uninstall <app name> –user

The disadvantage with installing and uninstalling any flatpak app is their very long weird application names. And in case you forget what the name for the application was you installed a long time ago, you could execute the command below to see the list of currently installed flatpak applications on your standard user account:

flatpak list –user

Conclusion

Remember to always append –user when executing flatpak command on the terminal program. Otherwise, you’d end up trying to install an app as system-wide (or uninstall it), which requires the administrative password. The only downside for installing an app as per-user mode is the installed app won’t be available on other standard user accounts i.e., you’d have to install it manually for every other user accounts. But that’s a bad practice, instead asks your admin to install the app as system-wide. Hope this article has been helpful and in case you run into issues, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below.

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Flatpak

New Flatpak Linux App Sandboxing Release Makes Installations and Updates Faster

Flatpak, the open-source Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework formerly XDG-App, received a new major update that brings lots of new options and commands, as well as various other improvements.

Flatpak 0.11.8 is now the most advanced version of the universal binary format used to make the distribution of Linux apps a breeze across multiple Linux-based operating systems. It adds a new “–allow=bluetooth” permission to allow the use of AF_BLUETOOTH sockets and tab-completion for the zsh (Z shell) UNIX shell.

It also introduces a new and handy “flatpak repair” command that allows users to check and repair Flatpak installations and introduces new “-all” and “–unused” arguments to the “flatpak uninstall” command, allowing users to remove everything along with the remaining runtimes.

Also new in Flatpak 0.11.8 release are the “–show-location,” “–show-runtime,” and “–show-sdk” options to the “flatpak info” command, as well as the “–show-runtime” and “–show-sdk” options to the “flatpak remote-info” command. Additionally, the framework now sends a new “Flatpak-Upgrade-From” HTTP header during upgrades.

P2P operations now work offline, faster installations and updates

Among other noteworthy changes implemented in Flatpak 0.11.8, we can mention that P2P operations now work offline, Flatpak now makes use of p11-kit-server, if it’s installed on the host OS, to forward the host certificate trust store to the sandboxed application, and defaults new Flatpak installations to bare-user-only repos for compatibility with file systems that do not support xattrs.

To make it easier for application developers to implement installation and updates in frontends, Flatpak 0.11.8 introduces a new transaction API in the libflatpak library. This release also adds an extra layer of optimizations to Flatpak installations and updates, especially for pruning and triggering operations, making them a lot faster than in previous releases of the sandboxing framework.

Last but not least, the “flatpak uninstall” command has been updated to no longer allow users to remove a runtime if it’s required by an installed application, adds a workaround for a hang that might occur on some hosts during app startup, and makes the “flatpak info,” “flatpak list,” “flatpak search,” and “flatpak remotes” commands work correctly on hosts that don’t include /var/lib/flatpak.

Flatpak 0.11.8 requires bubblewrap version 0.2.1 for system-bwrap, and respects multiple extension versions match during automatic downloading of extensions. Watch out the software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution for this release in the coming days and update as soon as it’s available for installation. Alternatively, you can download the sources and compile it yourself.

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Flatpak Now Updates Apps

Alex Larsson released at the end of last week a new stable update of the Flatpak 0.10 Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework (formerly XDG-App) for GNU/Linux distributions.

Bringing a month’s worth of improvements, Flatpak 0.10.2 is out with support for OSTree 2017.14, which is required for building the new release. An interesting feature of Flatpak 0.10.2 is the ability of the “flatpak update” command to update apps from both system and user installations by default.

In addition, all Flatpak remote-* commands now automatically decide by default if they need to use either the –system or –user arguments, based on the given remote name. The “flatpak remote-ls” command has been updated as well to list the content of all remotes when no remote is given.

Flatpak 0.10.2 also makes the “flatpak update” to be less noisy when updating appstream information, and updates the “flatpak install” command to support the –reinstall argument for uninstalling previously installed versions of apps and letting users pass absolute pathnames for remote names.

“flatpak install now allows you to pass an absolute pathname as remote name, which will create a temporary remote and install from that. The remote will be removed when the app is uninstalled. This is very useful during development and testing,” reads the GitHub release notes.

flatpak override gets some new features too

The “flatpak override” command received some improvements as well in the Flatpak 0.10.2 release, being able to override globally with no argument and to support the –nofilesystem properly, which can be used for hiding certain directories, even those with Home access, for all Flatpak apps (e.g. flatpak override –nofilesystem=~/.ssh).

Lastly, Flatpak 0.10.2 addresses a regression that breaks xdg-user-dirs and theme selection for KDE apps, and Flatpak is now capable of creating CLI (command-line interface) wrappers for all installed apps, allowing users to start Flatpak apps by their application ID when adding /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin or ~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/bin to their PATH.

Flatpak 0.10.2 is available for download right now from its GitHub releases page as a source tarball if you fancy compiling it yourself on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, and it should soon make its way into the stable software repositories of various Linux-based operating system, so make sure you update to this version at your earliest convenience.

 

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