Setting up Pop OS - My first Linux experience

Luis Felipe Santos do Nascimento — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 01:15:37 +0000

Hey! In this article I'm going to walk through my process while setting up Pop!_OS on my new laptop. In addition to that, I'll comment about the user experience, as this is my first time with Linux.

Device

Recently, I bought a Lenovo IdeaPad s145 for study and work as a dev.

Component	Configuration
Processor	Intel Core i5-1035G1
Memory	8 GB RAM
Storage	256 GB SSD
Graphics	Intel UHD Graphics (integrated)

As my old laptop was almost unusable, I'm pretty happy with these configurations.

Installing

To install, I've accessed the Pop!_OS website and downloaded the ISO (version 20.10).

Then, I've installed Etcher to create the bootable flash drive.

Great! After that, I've rebooted my laptop and clicked on F2, in my case, to reach the BIOS and set up my flash drive to boot (might be confusing in the first time).

Finally, I've booted the device and boom! Here it is:

The installation process was amazing! Extremely intuitive and informative.

Testing

There it was! My beautiful Linux distro installed and working on my new laptop, this was so much easier than I expected.
But, unfortunately, my touchpad just wasn't working at all, so I had to start a journey thought the amazing world of internet, searching for solutions. In this journey, I've tried:

Reboot (obviously)
Search for drivers on Lenovo's website
Run tons of scripts from Stack Overflow (classic)
...everything

And nothing worked. That's it, my touchpad is not so important, is it?

Well, the version I've installed (20.10) was not LTS (Long Time Support), so, after some hours trying to solve that issue, I had to repeat the whole installation process with 20.04 LTS version of Pop. After doing that, nothing changes. T.T

Here we go again trying to do more research. I've reached to this forum topic (Brazilian Portuguese) and was able to fix this!

Basically, I had to change the /etc/default/grub file (which apparently was not there in 20.10 version) to make my touchpad work again.
To be honest, maybe switch versions would not be necessary to solve this issue, but I really don't know exactly what was going on. Anyway, I know it's working now! :)

Setting up

Brave

The first thing I've done was download Brave Browser and sync it with my old device. Once I did that, all my favorites, extensions and browsing data was recovered, that was awesome!

I choose Brave as my browser because of the fastness, the built-in ad-blocker, and because it is Chromium-based, which brings the possibility to have all the extensions made for Chrome, and to have the amazing Dev Toolkit.

I was not able to download brave directly from Pop!_Shop, is not a big deal, but would be cool to have this for default.

Visual Studio Code

After that, I've downloaded VS Code from the Pop!_Shop, and synchronized it with my GitHub account - you can know more how it works here - such as the browser, it was a wonderful experience to have my theme, my configurations and my extensions easily.

I use VS Code to really everything I code, I love how it is flexible and expandable using every kind of extensions.

WhatsApp & Telegram

For WhatsApp, there's no way to have the Desktop application on Linux, my solution was to add the WhatsApp Web shortcut to my desktop as a Web App, which work really like the official Desktop App, since the desktop version for WhatsApp is just a mirror of your phone. For Telegram, I've just searched to it from the Pop!_Shop and download it easily.

Telegram is useful to me for basic chatting about work, and with friends as well. WhatsApp is the most-used chatting app in my country, so I use it to get in touch with my family and friend on the daily-basis.

Terminal

The GNOME-based terminal from Pop!_OS, feel just right to me. The ability to customize it by default, without any plug-in is wonderful. Also, the terminal flow of Linux feels great! (I came from CMD)

Typora

I've got this from the Pop!_Shop, and I've been using this from a long time. It is a markdown editor which supports tons of themes and built-in engines for text-based diagrams - such as mermaid. It is really great and useful, I frequently use this to do school stuff and write all kind of things in an organized way.

There's so many other apps I got, such as Clip it for clipboard management - alternative for Win+V on Windows (which is really great) - GNOME Pomodoro which is just the best experience with a Pomodoro App I ever had, Slack, Steam, etc.

Conclusion

All the workflow of GNOME with Pop!_OS is really great and productive, the adaptation was almost instantaneous when I set my mind to treat the OS as a new thing, and stop trying to use it just like I've been using Windows.

It was pretty satisfying to figure out that things like Git, Python and even Node are just there from default.

Everything is been great so far!

That is my first article in DEV Community and in the English language (Brazilian Portuguese is my mother tongue), so feel free to bring me tips to get better :)
Also, share your own favorite apps, configurations and tools!

DEV Community: Luis Felipe Santos do Nascimento