Ubuntu on Javier Orozco | Observer

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS: Security, AI, Gaming and Kernel 7.0 | A New Era

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Also available on Odysee: https://odysee.com/@javierorozco.observer:6/Ubuntu26.04:1

On the channel I already covered the ethical, purist approach to free software with the Trisquel 12 release. Now it is time for the industry heavyweight.

On April 23, 2026, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, codenamed “Resolute Raccoon”, was released. I know that every two years a new LTS comes out and every two years someone says “this is the most important one in history”, but this time I am going to argue why that claim carries more weight than ever.

This edition brings changes that had been years in the making: the definitive move to Wayland, core tools rewritten in Rust for memory safety, CUDA and ROCm directly in the official repositories with no external repositories, and a 7.0 kernel that natively integrates artificial intelligence ecosystems.

This is not a maintenance update. It is a change of era. If you manage servers, deploy infrastructure, game on Linux, or simply want to squeeze the most out of your hardware without depending on Windows, here I break down what this release really brings and what each change means.

Installation and TPM encryption

Installing the system is quite intuitive and easy to understand. At the start, the usual: choose a language, keyboard layout, internet connection, installation type, extended selection for more default applications, proprietary drivers and codecs which are disabled by default, partitioning, and the most important part, encryption, which as I said in the previous article is something everyone should always enable, and under no circumstances or pretext should you use a disk or operating system without encryption. In this edition they have added hardware-backed protection with the TPM chip, and to try it out I used it this way in my installation.

Basic details such as username, machine name, password, and the option to require the password at login, which I also always recommend enabling, especially with TPM, since the device boots automatically. Then we have timezone selection and a summary to confirm the installation; once completed, we simply reboot.

The desktop: GNOME 50 and the definitive farewell to X.org

On boot we find a welcome wizard. The first thing it asks is whether we want to enable location services and telemetry to report errors or usage statistics. Both are anonymous, and Canonical has proven over the years to be a very ethical company, so this is left as each person’s individual choice. Then we have the choice between light and dark themes and highlight colors.

As always, the first thing I recommend is installing the updates; there are not many, since this edition came out just a few hours ago:

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sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install fastfetch

Let us start with what most people notice first: the desktop. Ubuntu 26.04 ships with GNOME 50 and marks a historic milestone: it is the first Ubuntu LTS with no X or X.org session available in GNOME. Wayland is now the absolute king of the GNOME desktop. If you have old applications developed for X11, do not worry: XWayland is still there as a compatibility layer and in most cases you will not notice the difference.

But the benefits of Wayland are already undeniable. If you have a high-refresh-rate monitor, VRR or variable refresh rate, also called G-Sync and FreeSync, can be enabled on supported displays. Per-monitor fractional scaling is now production-worthy. And the desktop flows without tearing, that is, without desynchronization, even under heavy load and at high refresh rates.

The settings center covers the essentials quickly and concisely: the blue light or night light filter, wired networks, Wi-Fi, VPN and proxies, Bluetooth adapters, audio devices for both output and input and system sounds, power profiles, multitasking and screen edges, appearance and desktop customization, application management, permissions and notifications, dash search configuration, online accounts, and local file sharing and media streaming.

The new default applications

GNOME 50 is not just the shell. The default application ecosystem changes quite a bit:

Showtime as the video player. More modern, better system integration, and the option to install missing proprietary codecs if needed.

Resources replaces the old System Monitor. This one is especially interesting: it not only shows CPU and RAM, it also tracks GPU usage, hardware clock frequencies, and NPU (if you have one) and groups processes by application instead of listing them individually. It is written in Rust with GTK4. It is what the system monitor should have been long ago.

Ptyxis is the new default terminal. What sets it apart is native support for managing containers with Podman, Toolbox, and Distrobox. As an example, I installed Fedora inside Ubuntu using Distrobox; yes, just as it sounds. That deserves a separate article, so I will not go deeper into it here, but the process is quite simple, and in the new terminal we always have access to all the containers we have listed: Ubuntu and Fedora living together on the same system. The new terminal also has session restore to recover your tabs and working directory locations when reopening. If you work with containers every day, this is a real quality-of-life change.

Loupe is the new image viewer, also developed in Rust. Papers is the new PDF viewer, based on the same code as the previous one but partially rewritten in Rust with GTK4.

Visual changes

Visually, the dock no longer has transparency; it is completely opaque. Folder icons are now colorful. Notifications are grouped by application, ending the visual mess of having 40 individual notifications.

The App Center now fully manages system .deb packages —install, update, uninstall— in addition to snaps. More cohesion, less need to go to the terminal for basic operations. As an example, I installed a YouTube Music client this way.

You may have noticed that two new search providers were added to the dash: there are App Center results and direct access to web searches in Firefox. Small details, but useful.

NVIDIA and Wayland

If you use NVIDIA, historically the headache of Wayland on GNU/Linux, there are no more excuses: the proprietary 595.x series drivers are the standard in this release, Wayland support is complete, and the freeze issue when waking the machine from suspend is fixed. Versions 535, 550, 560, 570, 575, 580, and 590 are also available.

There is also a new telemetry panel —Ubuntu Insights— to opt in or out of sending anonymous metrics to Canonical. Important: it is completely opt-in. Nobody sends your data without your explicit consent, and the controls are accessible from the welcome wizard.

The notable absence

The “Software & Updates” application —which many used to manage PPAs, repositories, and drivers— no longer comes installed by default. Canonical has not given a fully clear reason for this, and there is debate in the community. But it is still available in the repositories, and its departure from the base system is striking and worth mentioning:

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sudo apt install software-properties-gtk

Security in its DNA: the Rust revolution

Here is where things get serious. As someone who works in cybersecurity, seeing this in a mainstream distribution that is the parent of so many others is music to my ears.

Ubuntu 26.04 is the first LTS to aggressively embrace Rust, the programming language that eliminates at compile time entire classes of vulnerabilities that have plagued C software for decades: buffer overflows, use-after-free, and memory race conditions.

sudo-rs

You will notice it immediately in the terminal: sudo has been replaced by sudo-rs, the reimplementation in Rust. The most visible change is cosmetic but symbolic: you now see asterisks as you type your password. But what matters is underneath: the code that runs privileged operations on your system is no longer written in C.

The original sudo is still available as sudo.ws if you need specific features that sudo-rs does not cover yet.

rust-coreutils (uutils)

Even deeper: the coreutils —the most fundamental tools of the system, ls, cat, base64, head, and dozens more— are now rust-coreutils by default, the implementation of the GNU utils in Rust.

For most users this is transparent. But there is an important technical detail worth clarifying: cp, mv, and rm are still the GNU versions in this release, because there are unresolved bugs in the Rust implementations. If you need to switch back to GNU coreutils for everything, you can, and if you want to go back to Rust, you can too:

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sudo apt install coreutils-from-gnu
sudo apt install coreutils-from-uutils

There are also new kernel components written in Rust. This is not just Ubuntu; it is part of the Linux kernel project’s effort, but Ubuntu 26.04 brings it to LTS-user mainstream for the first time. As a curiosity, rolling-release distributions such as Arch and openSUSE are still on the 6.x branch.

Preventing memory vulnerabilities at the very foundation of the operating system raises the defensive posture of millions of installations. The Rust Foundation celebrated this publicly, noting that Canonical is raising security for millions of users in production.

TPM-backed FDE: serious disk encryption

Hardware TPM-backed full-disk encryption leaves its experimental phase in this release. It is the option we saw in the installer, and it is production-ready.

What does this mean in practice? The encryption keys are tied to your motherboard’s TPM chip. Unlike traditional LUKS where you type a password on every boot, here the disk unlocks automatically when the TPM verifies that the system has not been tampered with, that is, that the hardware is the same, the bootloader was not altered, and there is nothing suspicious. If someone physically removes the disk and connects it to another machine, they cannot access the data. And if you want an extra layer, you can add a PIN.

Against physical-access attacks, this raises the attacker’s cost significantly.

Post-quantum cryptography

One last point that few people notice but that is strategically important: OpenSSL in this release includes support for post-quantum algorithms: ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA.

Why does it matter now? Because quantum computers, once powerful enough, will be able to break the RSA and ECC cryptography that protects practically all of today’s digital infrastructure. Preparing the ecosystem for this transition before it becomes urgent —and not after— is exactly what needs to be done. Ubuntu 26.04 starts laying the groundwork.

Kernel 7.0, hardware, and gaming

The engine behind all of this is Linux 7.0. It is the highest version number to reach an Ubuntu LTS in a long time, and it comes loaded.

Intel Panther Lake and NPU support

Kernel 7.0 adds full support for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors, codenamed Panther Lake. This includes optimizations for the integrated Xe3 graphics and for the integrated NPU (Neural Processing Unit). If you are on a modern Intel laptop and want to run local AI inference efficiently without depending on a server, this combination of hardware and kernel starts to make real sense.

AMD and NVIDIA

On AMD, Mesa 26 brings ray tracing with the ACO compiler by default and general performance improvements. GPUs from the RX 6000 series onward benefit directly. For those of us running a Radeon card, there are concrete improvements in rendering performance and compute workloads.

On NVIDIA, as I mentioned before: Wayland works fully, suspend is fixed, and the 595 series drivers are the standard. There are no longer technical reasons to avoid Linux on NVIDIA machines, although there are ethical ones —but that is another topic.

Kernel Livepatch for ARM64

Until this release, Canonical’s Kernel Livepatch —which applies critical security patches directly to the running kernel without rebooting— only worked on x86-64. With Ubuntu 26.04, it comes to ARM64 for the first time.

For organizations with ARM servers, this is huge. Before, a critical kernel security patch meant a reboot with a maintenance window and downtime. Not anymore.

EtherCAT for industrial automation

An addition that goes unnoticed by common users but is significant for specific sectors: the IgH EtherCAT Master module and the Generic Ethernet driver are now integrated directly into the kernel. EtherCAT is a real-time industrial networking protocol with microsecond precision, used in robotics, motion control, and factory automation. Having this in the kernel of an official LTS removes a huge integration burden for engineers in that sector.

Gaming: NTSYNC and the end of the Windows pretext

And we reach the point I know several of you were waiting for.

If you are one of those who spend hours cleaning up Windows —disabling telemetry, bloatware, background processes— or installing trimmed-down builds of dubious origin to avoid losing FPS in the middle of a game, this kernel has something for you.

The kernel ships NTSYNC built into Linux 7.0, which emulates Windows NT kernel synchronization primitives directly. This strongly impacts the performance of Windows games and applications running through Wine and Proton. Titles that depend heavily on inter-thread synchronization see real, measurable performance improvements.

Combined with Wayland, Mesa 26, and well-supported NVIDIA and AMD drivers, gaming on GNU/Linux is no longer “an alternative”. It is a direct threat to Windows’ dominance on the gaming desktop. There are still edge cases where Windows is necessary, but the gap is closing with every release, and this one in particular accelerates that process.

CUDA and ROCm in the repositories: Ubuntu’s AI moment

This is the change that will have the most impact over the coming years for AI and machine learning developers.

For the first time in Ubuntu’s history, NVIDIA CUDA is available directly in the official repositories. Before, installing CUDA meant adding NVIDIA’s repository manually, dealing with versions that could break system dependencies, and resolving driver conflicts. Now it is simply:

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sudo apt install cuda

No external repositories. No surprises.

The same applies to AMD ROCm, AMD’s open-source ecosystem for GPU-accelerated workloads —artificial intelligence, machine learning, HPC—. For those of us with AMD hardware, having ROCm available this cleanly completely changes the equation for experimenting with frameworks like PyTorch or JAX on AMD GPUs.

Why does it matter that they are in the official repos and not in external PPAs? Because the packages go through Canonical’s validation and security chain. Updates are tested to work together with the rest of the system. For organizations deploying this in production, the difference between “it works today and breaks with the next apt upgrade” and “it is validated for this LTS” is fundamental.

AMD’s own vice president of Software highlighted that this allows developers to build and deploy on AMD Radeon and Ryzen GPUs with direct access from the repositories, without friction.

Ubuntu 26.04 is making a very clear positioning statement: it wants to be the reference platform for AI development and deployment. With CUDA + ROCm in the repos, native Intel NPU support in the kernel, and confidential computing for private AI, the argument is solid.

System plumbing: APT and systemd

There are “plumbing” changes that go unnoticed but that for the daily work of sysadmins, programmers, or advanced users are as important as anything else.

APT 3.1: transaction history at last

The package manager moves up to version 3.1 and brings the functionality we all dreamed of: interactive transaction history.

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sudo apt history-list
sudo apt history-info 0
sudo apt history-undo 0
sudo apt history-rollback

apt history-list shows what you installed, when, and what changed. apt history-info 0 details a specific transaction. apt history-undo 0 undoes an installation. And apt history-rollback takes you back to an earlier point of the system.

In production, this is a lifesaver. Did you update a package and something broke? Now you have a clean path to roll back. Tools like dnf and pacman have had something like this for a long time; its arrival in APT is welcome.

apt-key, long deprecated, was also removed. Signature verification now uses gpgv directly. If you have automation scripts that use apt-key, review them.

systemd 259: two important changes

First: support for cgroup v1 (legacy and hybrid) is removed. If you have containers or configurations that depend on legacy cgroups, you need to migrate. This must be reviewed before upgrading production systems.

Second: this is the last LTS with System V script compatibility in systemd. From here on, if you have services with SysV-style init scripts, the clock is ticking to migrate them to native systemd units. It is not urgent today, but the signal is clear.

One extra technical detail: the /tmp directory is now mounted by default as tmpfs in RAM. It reduces SSD wear on servers and improves the performance of temporary operations.

Dracut replaces initramfs-tools

The initial ramdisk system is now Dracut by default, replacing initramfs-tools. It uses systemd in the initial RAM disk and natively supports Bluetooth and NVMe over Fabrics, which offers a faster and more efficient connection between storage and servers, in addition to reducing host CPU utilization by applications. If you have very specific scripts or hooks that depended on initramfs-tools, check compatibility.

Chrony and time synchronization

Chrony replaces systemd-timesyncd as the default time daemon, with support for Network Time Security, NTS for short (authenticated and encrypted time), using Ubuntu’s time servers. For high-availability clusters where precise time synchronization is critical, Chrony is the right choice. On the GNOME desktop we can also add other time zones; in my case, since I casually work with the stock market, I am always interested in adding New York and London times to keep stock exchange opening and closing hours in mind.

amd64v3: opt-in performance for modern hardware

If your CPU is more than a few years old and is 64-bit, it probably supports level 3 microarchitecture, which includes AVX2 —which delivers better performance by accelerating operations in parallel— and other modern instructions. Ubuntu 26.04 offers packages compiled for amd64v3 as an opt-in variant. To enable them:

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echo 'APT::Architecture-Variants "amd64v3";' | sudo tee /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99enable-amd64v3
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Real performance improvements in applications that take advantage of them. No risk: if your hardware does not support it, it simply will not activate.

Cloud, enterprise, and virtualization

For the enterprise and cloud segment, there are several points worth noting.

Confidential Computing

Ubuntu 26.04 supports both Intel TDX and AMD SEV for confidential computing, both as host and guest. Simply put: you can run virtual machines where neither the hypervisor nor the host system can access the VM’s memory. Memory is encrypted at the silicon level.

The most relevant use case is AI workloads on shared infrastructure where the privacy of training or inference data is critical. This is not science fiction: it is infrastructure available today, in a long-supported Ubuntu release.

Authd: cloud authentication without extra infrastructure

Authd, the authentication service with cloud providers, is now in the official Ubuntu repositories. You can authenticate Ubuntu devices with Microsoft Entra ID, Google IAM, or any standard OIDC provider, with no additional infrastructure needed on the network.

For organizations managing fleets of Ubuntu machines that already have centralized identity in Azure or Google, this greatly simplifies onboarding and deployments.

Improved WSL

If for work reasons you are forced to use Windows, Ubuntu’s integration in the Windows Subsystem for Linux improves in this release: better handling of usernames with non-ASCII characters, cloud-init integration, Ubuntu Pro for WSL, and management of multiple machines through Canonical’s Landscape.

Toolchain, flavors, and requirements

Developer toolchain

Ubuntu 26.04 ships a very up-to-date development stack: GCC 15.2, Python 3.14 by default, LLVM 21, Rust 1.93, Golang 1.25, OpenJDK 25 with versions 8, 11, 17, and 21 also available with Java TCK certification.

And an important debut: Zig 0.14.1 is finally in the official Ubuntu repositories. For those who have been following the Zig language as an alternative to C for low-level systems, it is now one apt install away.

Also .NET 10 in the official archive, PHP 8.5 with property hooks and the pipe operator, PostgreSQL 18 with a new I/O subsystem promising up to triple the improvement in disk reads, and MySQL 8.4 LTS, the first official LTS release of MySQL.

Official flavors

If GNOME is not your thing, the flavors are still there. Kubuntu ships with KDE Plasma 6.6. Xubuntu with Xfce 4.20. Lubuntu with LXQt 2.3. There are also Ubuntu Budgie, Cinnamon, Kylin, and Unity, although the latter is not catalogued as LTS and will be released in 2 days.

One absence worth noting: Ubuntu MATE has no 26.04 release. The most direct and similar alternative is Xubuntu.

System requirements

Canonical raised the recommended requirements to 6 GB of RAM and a dual-core 2 GHz CPU. This is not a hard requirement —you can install with 4 GB— but they are being honest about what 2026 workloads demand in practice. The desktop ISO weighs more than 6 GB, so you need a good connection or patience.

When should you upgrade?

The answer depends on your situation.

If you are on Ubuntu 25.10: in the coming days you should see the upgrade notification. You can do it without major risk.

If you are on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS: the direct upgrade is not enabled until July 2026, when Ubuntu 26.04.1, the first point release, comes out. Canonical always follows the same procedure: they wait until post-release bugs are fixed before opening the mass upgrade to LTS users. It is the standard policy and makes a lot of sense.

You can upgrade manually before July if you want, but you take on the risk of bugs that will probably be fixed within weeks.

My recommendation: if it is a production server or a critical work machine, wait for 26.04.1 in July. If it is your personal computer and you want to explore, go ahead, just have a recent backup and free time in case something breaks.

Closing

Ubuntu 26.04 is not a package update. It is a statement of intent.

Wayland as the sole backend in GNOME. Rust in the kernel, in sudo, in the coreutils. CUDA and ROCm in the repos with no external repositories. Kernel 7.0 with 2026 hardware supported from day one. APT with transaction history. Production-ready confidential computing.

And for those of us in the cybersecurity world, seeing the foundation of a mainstream operating system move toward languages with memory-safety guarantees, with hardware-tied disk encryption, with post-quantum cryptography in the default stack, is exactly the direction and standard things should head toward.

This is not a consolidation LTS. It is a transition LTS. And those are the most interesting ones.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS “Resolute Raccoon” is not a simple package update. It is a change of era. In this analysis I focus on what is under the hood: Rust in the kernel and coreutils, production-ready TPM encryption, post-quantum cryptography, CUDA and ROCm in the official repositories, NTSYNC for gaming, APT with transaction rollback, and much more.

Sources and resources

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release notes: https://documentation.ubuntu.com/release-notes/26.04/
Official Canonical announcement: https://canonical.com/blog/canonical-releases-ubuntu-26-04-lts-resolute-raccoon
Release announcement on the community forum: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-26-04-resolute-raccoon-lts-released/80833
Installation images (ISO): https://releases.ubuntu.com/resolute/

Post-installation and configuration of Ubuntu 14.04 without using the terminal

Mon, 06 Jul 2015 12:00:00 +0000

This is not the typical article that you find repeated ad nauseam all over the internet, “What to do after installing Ubuntu?”. This one is more personal: exactly what I do when I install it (although I do all of this from the terminal in less than half the time). Maybe I’m just saving a draft in case I forget something on my next install… Those who know me know that I’m an Arch Linux user and prefer it, but I’ll leave that for another day.

Archive note: the original 2015 screenshots were not preserved; the full text is retained.

To begin with, it should be made clear that this article is not an installation tutorial, so I assume that whoever is reading it knows how to install Ubuntu (which is as easy as clicking next, next and… oh yes, next). I just added this to the article, because when I published it on some media outlets, several people, without reading it, commented things like “Burn the heretic, long live the terminal, use Windows for that” (pathetic). To one of them I replied the following, as an example of the audience an article like this would be aimed at: “Tell that to the 65-year-old lawyer who has spent his whole life working in his profession, busy almost all day and every day, who has no time to learn computer stuff and doesn’t want to memorize commands in a terminal, but who nevertheless wants to use Ubuntu. There are all kinds of users; for those of us who prefer the terminal, there are better distributions like Gentoo and Arch Linux”.

Once Ubuntu is installed, we have the default interface, which in my opinion isn’t as “ugly” as on other distributions — being the most popular GNU/Linux distribution, it doesn’t hurt that its default appearance is a bit pleasant and has some identity compared to the others. The challenge of this article is to do everything without using the terminal.

Updates, language, and basic programs

The first thing I do, obviously, is install the available updates. For that… no, I’m not going to the terminal! I’ll try to avoid it as much as possible (even though it hurts me): I simply click in the upper right corner, on that button that looks like a “wrench”, then I click on “About This Computer” and then on “Install Updates”. It usually asks to restart when that first update finishes.

The next thing I install is the language, and it’s that by default in the installation, even if you activate the network, translations for all programs are not installed. To do that I look for “Language Support”, which with just opening it will ask you if you want to install all the translations; you accept and that’s it.

I take the opportunity to install some programs from the Ubuntu Software Center, such as Synaptic (which I’ll use later to install other things), Gimp (photo editor), Inkscape (vector graphics), VLC (media player) and something important, which is support for compressing and decompressing 7zip (where to use RAR you have to enable/install the non-free module as the original screenshot showed, and click on “Apply Changes”, of course).

Proprietary codecs and partner repositories

Then I install all the proprietary codec support and other utilities needed for multimedia content, among others. To do that I go to Synaptic and search for “ubuntu-restricted-extras” and install them (right click, “Mark for Installation” and “Apply”). I don’t install them from the Software Center because from there you CANNOT accept the EULA for the proprietary Microsoft fonts that come included in the metapackage, and that’s why they aren’t installed. In case you haven’t accepted it and they aren’t installed, they can be installed separately from Synaptic itself; the package name is ttf-mscorefonts-installer.

In the original screenshots you could tell that my desktop already had icons and other customizations installed; I’ll explain all of that here. Now that I have this, I go to the program called “Software & Updates” and in the “Other Software” tab I enable the “Canonical Partners” repository. Once enabled, it’s recommended to open the “Software Updater” so it picks up the changes; this allows installing Skype and other programs directly from the Ubuntu Software Center.

Another thing some people might use is proprietary drivers for graphics cards or other devices. To do that you have to open “Additional Drivers”, select the driver (first option, not the “updates” one) and click on “Apply Changes”.

Skype, Steam, and PlayOnLinux

I install Skype, which I use quite a bit to get in touch with some people. Although Skype Web is in beta and it also works from Outlook, the desktop app, although not very flashy visually, offers a better user experience in my opinion (it’s just that I usually close the browser and cut off all the webapps “unintentionally on purpose”, hahaha). When searching for Skype in the Ubuntu Software Center you have to click at the bottom where it says “Show technical items”; you have to know which one to install, because several packages come up.

After installing it, you can follow the suggestion in the most voted comment, which improves Skype’s appearance (yes, that Javier Orozco who wrote that comment is me; I didn’t expect it to stay there at the top forever). But since what I suggest is through the terminal, there’s no need for that; you can also install the packages “gtk2-engines-murrine:i386” and “gtk2-engines-pixbuf:i386” by searching for them with those exact names right from the Software Center.

I also install Steam, because I have several games purchased, and PlayOnLinux (to install Steam for Windows on Ubuntu). I install both programs from their official pages and not from the Software Center, to have the most recent versions, because besides, the .deb automatically adds the direct repository to stay up to date with updates.

On the PlayOnLinux page it says the following: Ubuntu Precise (and superior) users: You must install the package wine:i386 to get PlayOnLinux working. That’s done by opening the Ubuntu Software Center and typing wine:i386 and installing it.

Once in PlayOnLinux, you just search for Steam in the list of programs available to install; it’s quite easy (next, next and next). Once the process is finished, it’s ready to “launch” every time you open PlayOnLinux; that way you can have both Steam for GNU/Linux and Steam for Windows on your Ubuntu.

Customization with Unity Tweak Tool and Numix

After having everything I use the most installed, I move on to customization. For that I install the “Unity Tweak Tool” from the Ubuntu Software Center; on 14.04 two versions come up, I install the most recent one by selecting it in the dropdown menu.

With this tool you can modify icons, sizes, the theme and many other things; each person will see how they modify it. I leave it as default, the only things I change are theme and icons, and I disable the Amazon web app, nothing else. I then proceed to install Numix, my favorite package.

To do it you have to add the repository; I take the opportunity to also add other repositories for other programs I’ll also use. I then go to “Software & Updates” and in the “Other Software” tab I click on “Add” and type the PPA repositories I’m going to add:

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ppa:numix/ppa
ppa:jd-team/jdownloader
ppa:fyrmir/livewallpaper-daily
ppa:diesch/testing
ppa:sunab/kdenlive-release

In the first repository are the icons and themes I’ll use; in the second, the program JDownloader, which is a download manager I use out of habit and convenience; in the third, the Livewallpapers (watch video); in the fourth, the classic menu for Ubuntu; and in the fifth, Kdenlive, my favorite video editor. Possibly whoever reads this only wants the first, the third and the fourth.

Once I’ve added them, one by one, I click Close; it will automatically ask me to refresh the cache so I can use the repositories (this is necessary for everything to be installable).

Then you have to install the programs from those repositories, using the Ubuntu Software Center or Synaptic, searching for the exact name of the packages. When using the Software Center, they usually appear among the “Technical items”. In this case they would be the Numix Circle icons and the Numix GTK and KDE themes, exact names:

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numix-icon-theme-circle
numix-gtk-theme
numix-kde-theme

The JDownloader (which when installed and updated will possibly suggest updating to version 2), the Livewallpapers, the classic menu and the Kdenlive are searched by these exact names:

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jdownloader
livewallpaper
classicmenu-indicator
kdenlive

For the Livewallpapers you have to install the additional plugins as shown in the image, otherwise it won’t work and/or won’t be configurable. Then you have to open the preferences to configure (important to enable autostart) and the wallpaper itself. Now comes the part where you change the theme and icons to the recently installed ones: for that you have to open Unity Tweak Tool; once open, in Appearance/Theme choose Numix, and in Appearance/Icons choose Numix-Circle. You also have to open the ClassicMenu by searching for its name in the Dash.

Media player and desktop effects

Another thing I do is uninstall the default music player, Rhythmbox, and install Gmusicbrowser, which is my favorite since it brings more options (like viewing the song lyrics) and different appearances (with more than 20 different styles).

To finish, I like to add effects to the desktop, like gooey windows, blurs, fades… writing with fire? All of that… To do that you have to install the Compiz settings; these are the 3 packages that must be installed, either from the Software Center or from Synaptic:

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compizconfig-settings-manager
compiz-plugins
compiz-plugins-extra

Once in the Compiz settings, there’s little I enable, since many things cause problems; so I only enable gooey windows, Motion Blur, Fire Paint, Animations and nothing else (the cube works fine WITHOUT the 3D windows, but I don’t use it). Of the enabled ones, I only configure 2: the first is the Ubuntu Unity Plugin, in which I enable the option that allows minimizing and maximizing windows directly from the Unity panel; for that I go to Ubuntu Unity Plugin > Launcher > Minimize Single Window Applications (Unsupported). The second one I configure is Animations, in which I enable all of them and set everything to random, both for minimizing, closing, etc.

Finally, with the Firepaint I write the name of the distribution with fire and take a screenshot to upload it for the #ViernesDeEscritorio in the Software Libre Para Una Sociedad Libre en Facebook group that I administer, and with that I’m done. THE END