UPDATED: Mar 20, 2018 - Ubuntu Gnome 16.04

Ubuntu is fantastic, stable and I've truly been enjoying it. For my friends and family, here is a cheatsheet for getting your system up and running.

Get Ubuntu Gnome

The default Unity interface sucks.. So be sure to download Ubuntu Gnome 16/04, burn it to a CD/thumb drive and install it side-by-side with windows.

The Basics

Ubuntu Restricted Extra's makes all rich media work, vlc will play anything and gimp is your open source photoshop and some other goodies you'll need.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras vlc gimp alacarte

No need to worry about ssd trim anymore. We've got these out of the box. :)

Ditch Firefox for Chrome

Google Chrome can be downloaded from google or installed from the command line like so.

cd ~/Downloads
wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

We can't live without our hangouts plugin, an absolute must have!

And we'll need java, since it runs billions of devices

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer

If you get a message complaining, be sure to run the fix command that the message instructs you to run... then re-run the commands above.

Customize

You can only install gnome extensions in firefox. I highly recomend browsing to these in firefox and installing them:

• insensitive-message-tray
• Taskbar
• todo-list
• wallpaper slideshow

If you're like me you get tired of the animation when you bring up the applications menu. Disable it with this:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations false

Programmer stuff

Install and setup git

sudo apt-get install git
git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global push.default simple

Sublime Text 3 is a great all-purpose editor for programmers, also installable via the command line with this:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/sublime-text-3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sublime-text-installer

And make sure you get your package manager

Setup your ssh-key for source control sites like github and bitbucket

ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "your_email@example.com"
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

then copy-n-paste the output into your account settings on github or bitbucket

Ruby, Rails & Tmux

Don't miss out on my other blog posts that walk you through installing Ruby & Rails and Tmux.

And That's All

You've got ubuntu + things it should have come with anyway.

Enjoy!