Linux Mint Setup Guide

A Comprehensive Guide to Setup Linux Mint with the (subjectively) best softwares

Note: If you have come across this document and want to add another useful application, please comment it below.

Installation

1. Download the ISO file from https://linuxmint.com/download.php by checking which country is closest to you. Alternatively, if you are already on a linux system, you can go to the Software Sources section and click on the Main under the Mirror section. Let it be for a while and the mirrors will line up in a decreasing order of download speed. I would suggest downloading the file using an internet download manager since they are about 2 GB in size. 

2. Disable fast startup in windows (read it in a tutorial somewhere that it is advisable to do this so as to not break anything. Do not know how true it is)

3. Follow the rest of this tutorial. It is about Linux Mint 18 but the steps for installation are the same anyway. 

4. Once installed, go through the welcome dialogue box and do all the things mentioned there. One of the most important is to change the mirror links so as to get the fastest mirror and then install the latest updates before you add any new packages. 

Applications

eXtreme Download Manager (XDM)

This is a free internet download manager for linux and it works just fine. Make sure you download this first as some of the files for the next packages will be huge and this will save quite a lot of time when downloading them for example Android Studio.

Download the tarball source from SourceForge, unzip it and install the script.

> wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/xdman/files/xdm-2018-x64.tar.xz

> tar -xvzf xdm-2018-x64.tar.xz

> sudo ./install.sh

Android Studio

Download the tarball from https://developer.android.com/studio/. 

Install it using the section from the installation page of Android Studio for Linux.

1. Unpack the .zip file you downloaded to an appropriate location for your applications, such as within /usr/local/ for your user profile, or /opt/ for shared users.

   1. If you're using a 64-bit version of Linux, make sure you first install the required libraries for 64-bit machines.

Required libraries for 64-bit machines 

> sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 libncurses5:i386 libstdc++6:i386 lib32z1 libbz2-1.0:i386

2. To launch Android Studio, open a terminal, navigate to the android-studio/bin/ directory, and execute studio.sh.

Albert Launcher

It is the best alternative I found for Linux at least. I have tried a few but this one just clicks the best. 

https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert 

We will be using Debian based package managers and installing on Linux Mint 19.1 which is a derivative of Ubuntu 18.04, and hence we add that repository accordingly. Following are the instructions corresponding to it from this link.

Importing the key file: 

> curl https://build.opensuse.org/projects/home:manuelschneid3r/public_key | sudo apt-key add -

Adding the repository

> sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/manuelschneid3r/xUbuntu_18.04/ /' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/home:manuelschneid3r.list"

> sudo apt-get update

> sudo apt-get install albert

Bitwarden

Download the AppImage for Linux from https://bitwarden.com/#download

Make it executable and execute it

> chmod a+x Bitwarden-1.14.0-x86_64.AppImage

> ./Bitwarden-1.14.0-x86_64.AppImage

Read more about AppImage here. 

BleachBit

Download it from here.

Install the debian file by dpkg.

> sudo dpkg -i bleachbit_2.2_all_ubuntu1804.deb

KDE Connect

> sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/indicator-kdeconnect

> sudo apt update

> sudo apt install kdeconnect indicator-kdeconnect

Redshift

While Redshift comes preinstalled, the configuration part is necessary for it to work as you want it. Follow the blog for assistance as it is mostly a command line tool and supports little control in the GUI. 

https://www.maketecheasier.com/protect-eyes-redshift-linux/ 

Other Applications

  • CopyQ
  • Evince Document Viewer
  • Megasync
  • Plank
  • Okular
  • El Capitan Cursor 
  • Spotify
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Pandoc

Location: Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India

Comments

  1. verysadmoviereviewJanuary 21, 2021 at 10:48 PM

    If anyone's lurking, add terminator for multi-terminals in one window (https://terminator-gtk3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). Also notice that keyboard shortcuts are fully mappable to any of the terminal commands (Mint and Ubuntu are the ones I've used). And all big shit apps have their own terminal commands like 'firefox', 'firefox -private-window', 'code' for vscode, 'terminator' for terminator etc. So you can go ahead and map these commands to custom keyboard shortcuts, and voila, your own keyboard shortcuts to all you favourite apps!

    ReplyDelete

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