From Noob To Power User With Linux Mint Cinnamon

one of the complaints that I hear from viewers of my channel is that I focused too much on arch linux and tools like vim and Emacs and things that are more focused toward the power users you know tiling window managers stuff like that and some of these viewers that are complaining they're wanting more content that's not necessarily noob content but they want something that's not exactly quote leet hex or power user content either they want something in the middle there's a middle ground there and they're right I maybe I should focus on that sort of stuff more often because I get it that most Linux desktop users use distributions like a boon - or a boon tube based system and I know that you can't go from 0 to 100 miles an hour like that right there steps in between for me myself I didn't just jump from being a brand-new Linux user installing Ubuntu for the first time - a couple of weeks later installing Arch Linux and diving into VM and Emacs and using X monad and things like that note that there again it was a gradual process for me it's gonna be a gradual process for you so today I'm gonna take a very popular Linux distribution a new user Linux distribution Linux Mint and I'm gonna show you guys some subtle ways to tweak Linux Mint just a little bit as you progress from noob to power-user so let me switch over to the desktop here and this is Linux Mint 19.3 this is of course the flagship cinnamon edition of Linux Mint and what I'm gonna show you guys is kind of how I would tweak Linux Mint cinnamon if I had to use it now with kind of the default standard tools I'm not gonna install a bunch of extra stuff you know I'm not gonna install them or Emacs or things like that we're not gonna switch out the window manager we're gonna use cinnamon and we're gonna use most of the built-in tools here in Linux Mint now the first thing on your way to becoming more of a power user if you're actually wanting to learn a little bit about Linux you know go from being brand new to you know knowing a little something about your system you need to be familiar with the terminal now there is a terminal here in these quick launchers here you could also use a key binding built into the Linux Mint ctrl alt T I believe also brings up the terminal I have two terminals because I just hit ctrl alt T let me close one of them if you're serious about becoming you know more of a power user you got to get used to using the keyboard and especially using key bindings to launch programs you use all the time and keep bindings to close programs so the very first thing I think you guys really should consider doing is changing some of the key bindings and adding some extra key bindings so if you go into the Settings panel here and let's scroll down and find keyboard and shortcuts and these are the built-in key bindings that are in Linux Mint but I suggest changing a few things and adding your own stuff as will for example launching a terminal they have it set to the default ctrl alt T it's kind of a standard Linux key binding to launch a terminal for those of you that eventually want to transition to using window managers especially tiling window managers I would suggest getting used to the concept of a mod key a mod key is basically a key that you set on the keyboard to always be the modifier key for all your key bindings most people use the super key so super enter brings up a terminal super P brings up a run prompt super e brings up your text editor super W brings up your web browser you get the idea all the key combinations involved the super key in some way that your modifier key that's the modifier key and most Linux window managers so I would suggest using the super key as much as possible in your key bindings and I will suggest some common ones so I'm gonna pick a new key binding here to launch our terminal and super enter is the most common hot key key binding for launching a terminal in most window managers so just set it to super return and now anytime I hit super enter we get a terminal pop-up now I would like to also be able to close windows without actually having to grab my mouse cuz right now I have to grab the mouse and close the window and that sucks because grabbing the mouse you're got to put my hand on the desk and I'm moving this this is going to hurt your hands use the keyboard as much as possible try to get away from using the mouse I mean have to use the mouse and some programs you have to scroll or you know you're opening and drawing and stuff but most of the programs you use on a daily basis really don't require much mouse interaction and one of the things how many times do you close windows if you're a desktop Linux user all the time right thank you every time you open a program you have to close it and you're always closing it with the mouse stop that it's going to do some damage to your hands eventually so what I would do is I would go up to the windows shortcuts that they have and they have close window here it's set to alt f4 so they did have a key binding to close a window but it's horrible alt and then the function key f4 let's set that to something more sensible and again it should involve the super key and I'm gonna use one that's common in certain tiling window managers like X Mon ed which would be super shift and then C so remember super enter brings up a terminal supership C to close so and super chef C will work on all windows not just the terminal it's just super inter though it brings up specifically the terminal while we're sitting some common key bindings let me see if I go to the general settings and that's not what I want me go to system here's what I want log out control-alt-delete logs out in Linux min I'm gonna set that to something a little more standard for tiling window managers because again again I'm assuming some of you guys will eventually transition to where you will want to maybe try out some tiling window managers and typically to quit those a common key binding would be like super shift Q or quit and if we wanted to try this out right now I could super shift Q and you see I get the the logout prompt here and then I also get the menu coming up because the menu uses super we're gonna get rid of that menu though because that's obviously gonna conflict with some stuff and you don't really want to use this kind of menu system if you're wanting to transition into being more of a power user these kinds of point-and-click menu systems this old-school paradigm kind of sucks it really does this is going to slow you down I'm going to show you some run command launchers that are much more effective and efficient than your standard menu system that's probably built in your to your desktop environment so let's go ahead and get rid of this menu system the first thing I would do though is make sure that you have some of the most common programs you need in to the panel just in case and I do have Firefox a terminal emulator the file manager I'm gonna go ahead and pin the system settings to because we're gonna be using them a lot at least in the next few minutes so now I can close this remember super shift C closes a window and then the next thing I want to do is go down to the menu system I'm gonna right click on it and I'm gonna remove the menu I'm gonna ask me do I really want to do that yes I do and the super key won't always bring up the cinnamon menu now you know the super key can really act as a modifier for all our custom key bindings that we may set so let me super enter to bring up a terminal and can I make this fullscreen if I do super and the up arrow key no that doesn't make it fullscreen but it takes up half the screen super down puts it back in the middle but I can grab it with the mouse for now and if I double click it it should go fullscreen and let me zoom in a little bit this ctrl + zoomin it does what terminal emulator are we using here in Linux Mint they are using the genome terminal what's a fine terminal emulator let's just stick with it let's stick with the default tools for this video so so we get rid of our menu system from the panel I mentioned we need some kind of run launcher you guys know that I look demon you but I know demon use not for everybody it's a sublease utility you have to compile it and patch it you know and there's a middle ground there you don't go straight from your built-in menu system of your desktop environment straight to daemon UI well many people do but if you wanted something kind of in-between row fee so I'm gonna do a sudo apt install row fee and hit enter let me give it my password and row fee is installed to run row fee you could read the man page on row fee if you didn't know anything about row fee but typically row fee is used in this method here rafi - show and then the mode that you want to show there's several built-in modes to Rovi typically the one you're gonna use most of the time is row fee - show run and that is your runt prompt from there you can type any command in that launcher and it should execute it for you you hit escape and the brophy menu goes away if you didn't want to type anything there's some other row fee options though I mean if we could do row fee - show SSH especially you guys that you know SSH and - remote machines often that is a useful command to know we may set it to a key binding a matter of fact we should set all the useful Rafi commands to key bindings and there is also a row fee - show space window and as you can guess it shows you all the open programs on the system so instead of having maybe two alt-tab you know to get all your open windows I don't have one window open right now we could just use row fee for this alt-tab you know brings up this kind of menu here in Linux Mint but let's go back into the system settings and now that we've got row fee installed we need to set that to a key binding so I'm gonna go to custom shortcuts how about add custom shortcut and we need to add this one because it's very important this is how we're gonna launch most of our programs if we don't have a custom key binding already set for it or we don't have a launcher in the panel row fees used for the programs you don't use that often so row fee - show run is the the command let me copy and paste that I'm gonna click Add and then we need to set it to a key binding now it's still assuming that you're eventually gonna move to tiling window managers at some point in the future to avoid confusion later one of the default key bindings for opening a run prompt like D menu or row fee is super P that is often one that is used in other window managers super P is currently used to read attacked and display devices if you continue yeah I do want to reassign that if super P was set to something else you know that's fine I'll just set a different key binding to whatever we replace till later let's see if super P works now super P brings up Ruthie that's exactly what we want other than row fee show run again if you happen to use SSH on a regular basis you may want to go ahead and set a key binding torofi - show SSH let me copy and paste that edit set a key binding what key binding I don't know for SSH super s is that set to something else it is it is currently used to show desk let's we're not gonna use any desk let's when we become power users well we're not gonna use things like desolates and widgets desktop widgets and cockys and things like that we want nothing on our screen so super s now should bring up the SSA trophy and I could set up the window row fee while I'm here so I might as well so that show window now you guys that are used to using something like alt tab or super tab to rotate your windows you could just find that you could do alt tab and it says alt tab is currently used to cycle through your windows what we're replacing the default functionality with the with the row fee menu because why not I mean it's a better way to switch between your windows so now let me super shift C to close this window and I'm going to super P to run row fee and rafi has a built-in program that allows you to select pre-built themes that are already installed in row fee so let me see Brophy theme selector some of these themes look pretty good I mean those are not bad looking themes the one I want and there's a lot of grub box themes I think grub box looks pretty bad here's a color scheme I've used a lot in the past a terminal color scheme called mono Kai and that actually looks pretty good you know in row fee here yeah I'm gonna use that so if I hit alt a it tells me all teh to accept the new theme now super P to bring up brophy yeah I like this theme I like this thing like me escape you know what if we're gonna use the Monaco theme for OFI I say we pimp out the entire desktop in the monetizing let's really make it rice worthy unless in let's make it something worthy of going and posting over on our slash UNIX porn that's what we want to do so we've got Rafi looking pretty good yeah I like Rafi let's go ahead and do something to the terminal so I'm gonna super enter to bring up this terminal and let's see if we can get a mana Chi theme installed here on the terminal if I do a super and a left arrow yeah I can get the terminal to take up half the screen let me launch Firefox then I'm gonna super right arrow to put Firefox there because we're gonna need to do a search here I'm gonna do good gnome terminal mono kai because somebody already had as a theme out there for us oh my god are they really using Yahoo search in Linux Mint well somebody should file a bug report immediately and you know what I refuse to I'll go to Google any day before I use Yahoo that is just crazy all right so good Omer gnomonic I the second one it's the one I'm gonna use it's Allison chill it's the guys username or girl username over on github and he's got Monica - kinome - terminal and to install it let's see if he's got some installation instructions this is how you become a power user guys right you go to github you find stuff and you install it and you know what the instructions are right here it basically tells you if you're on a no boon - and our bun tube based system there is a dependency decomp - CLI let me zoom you in here in the terminal so you can see this so sudo apt install decomp - CLI and was it already installed it might have already been here so we didn't even need it and the next thing we need to do is get clone the repository me zoom in here in Firefox so you guys can see the instructions so we need to get clone this repository so I'm gonna highlight it with the mouse I'm gonna middle click it with the mouse and then middle click in the terminal it says get is not installed on the system sudo apt install yet you definitely won't get on the system if you're kind of transition to the power user you're gonna be using a git clone all the time to pull down other people's scripts and programs and config files all right so we got get on the system so let's run the previous command before it so if I arrow key up twice there's the git clone now it should work okay now we need to CD into mono Kai - genome - terminal because if I do it LS you will see there is that repository that we just did the git clone on so let's CD into that can I do it LS to see what's in it there is a script called install sh to run that typically to run a shell script you can do the period and then slash and then the name of the script so install dot SH hit enter you need to create a default a new default profile to continue okay yes please select a genome terminal profile mana Kai okay that's the one I'm gonna go with so I'll just choose one are you sure you want to overwrite the selected profile yes all right now let me super shift C to close that terminal and I had another terminal opened earlier let me super shift C to close that one and if I super enter yeah do we get a different color scheme here or is it the same one I think it's a different one I go to edit and to preferences let me just double check make sure this is the correct color scheme yeah I recognise these colors see these colors down here it says million scheme custom this is Monica now the one thing why kind of looked weird to me is because the terminal is transparent it's got like a 50% opacity and that's why I didn't recognize the background color I don't want transparency in my terminal you know a terminal really should be solid in color if you're gonna be using it all the time it just makes reading the text a lot better I mean that just looks cleaner and without having the wallpaper bleed through I know one screenshot you often see a lot of transparency but really for your eyes for sake of you know your eyes I suggest just using a solid color background for everything here if I right-click in the genome terminal and you get this right-click menu and go to preferences and this is where we can set the Preferences for the profile we created which we called Monica or the script we ran earlier calls Monica and from here we can change the font by default is set to Mono space regular I'm not sure what the default mono space is did they have the aboon to font-family because again we want to use things that are already on the system where possible and a boon to mono is a fantastic terminal font so let's set that to a boon to mono regular 13 or for my eyes I'm gonna change that a little bit one thing you never need in a terminal you really don't need a scrollbar and you don't need the menu here at the top so let's see if there's ways where we can get rid of that if I go to general show menu bar and we don't need that let's get rid of that and is there a way to get rid of the scroll bar somewhere other scrolling scroll bar show scroll bar turn that off scroll on keystroke okay all right we set that so super shift see to close a super enter to bring up a new terminal that is almost perfect the only thing I would change from here if I right-click and go back into preferences as I don't like the default size when I do super enter the size of the terminal that comes up is a little small because typically I want to immediately run something and that's a little small you know if I had something with a lot of output I would rather it start out quite a bit bigger so I'm gonna make the initial size instead of 80 by 24 I'm gonna do 120 by 40 let's make it a little bigger all right and now super enter it brings up a more properly sized terminal at least in my opinion so I'm good with that so we can super ship see to close now let me super shift C and close Firefox or actually I close the terminal and me close Firefox to let me bring back a terminal though because I need another terminal open and if i zoom in with super shift plus sign that's just the standard default key binding to zoom yen in the genome terminal super then the minus sign zooms out matter of fact I zoom in a little bit too much let me zoom back out that really became huge I'm gonna do a sudo apt install neo Fitch we're gonna be using the terminal a lot we need to make our terminal have a little more pizzazz a little more bling if we run Neil fetch by typing the command Neil Fitch this is Neil Fitch really neat right really cool now what we want is every time we launch the terminal we want Neil fetch to launch unfortunately it doesn't happen automatically but it's very simple to get this to happen automatically what we need to do is we need to open our bash RC so what we need is our text editor on the system there is a graphical text editor on the system if you wanted to use it so if we did a super P to bring up rafi I believe they're using zid XE d yep this is our text editor and if you go to fall open go to your home directory right click because it's a hidden file show hidden files and what we want to do is open up our bash RC in zid and all you really need to do just scroll down to the very end of the bash RC sword write the word neo fetch and then save and close it close your terminal now open up a new terminal not bad right now already we're on our way to becoming a little bit more of a power user here in Linux Mint now let me super and the left arrow key to put the terminal there and I want to bring back up zid so super P for row fee and then type Z and I'm gonna put zid on the right-hand pane there and I'm gonna go back and open a recent file the bash RC we're actually gonna play with this just a little bit because you know what I don't like in our default bash shell here in the next minute LS is the standard LS I never want LS just to be LS because I want all the hidden files and hidden directories to show typically I want L us to at least be LS dot l a h or long format all files including the hidden ones and then H for human readable numbers that's the LS I would want if I was gonna use the LS command so I would go in here and there is already a alias for LS in the batch RC they're using LS space - - color equals Auto really doesn't do much for us I would change that to LS space - lah and I could save that and now let's open up a new terminal because we have to restart Bosch now when I do an LS it is LS - lah super P I mean launch Zed again because I accidentally closed it let me get the bass horsey back up now while LS - lah is okay it could be more colourful it could have some more pizazz what I would do is I would simply just replace LS there are some programs out there that do LS and a more sexy sort of way and one of my favorites is ex8 and to install exa if it's in your system repositories it would be of course sudo apt install exa but I don't know if it's here let's see if it is it's not I didn't think it would be but it is installable through this package manager called cargo so you can run cargo install exa if cargo was installed on the system it's not soulless sudo app install cargo and Y for yes to confirm that we want cargo to install cargo is another package manager it is for the rust programming language and exa is a rest program alright cargo is installed now we can run cargo install exa I should also zoom in and said I'm not exactly sure what the key binding to zoom in and zid is I go to view control + equals so yeah that's very similar to the terminal alright and exa is finished installing it says be sure to add your home directory dot cargo slash bin to the path so you can actually run the exa binary what this means is typically to run exa you type exe you know than just the name of the program but that's actually not going to work because you would actually have to type the full path to it which would be you know in your home directory slash cargo slash bin slash exa you know the full path to where the EXA binary and then EXA actually runs and what you need to do is add the dot cargo slash bin to your path how you do that well you do this in the bash RC file which we already have open what I would do is I'm gonna put this at the top and I'm gonna type path equals and then do a double quote and then what you want to do is the dollar symbol home that's basically a alias for your home directory in my case slash home slash DT but you know it'll know your home directory and then we're gonna do slash and then we're gonna do dot cargo slash bin because that's the directory we want to add to the path now right behind that you want to do the dollar symbol and then the opening braces the curly braces and then the word path and : + : dollar symbol and then opening curly braces and path and the closing curly braces twice and then the closing double quotes basically what that the line is saying is we're changing our path we're saying hey we're taking the existing paths when you know where all the binaries are on the system user bin slash bin and everything like that dot local slash bin were just a pre pending dot cargo slash bin to the past so it will be recognized as a directory that has binaries on the system I'm gonna save that I'm gonna go back to this terminal I'm going to close it let's launch a new terminal and let me zoom in a little bit and instead of having to type the full path to where exe is on the system I can now type just exa does that make sense I hope it does but that's not very sexy either that's basically like a basic LS command you know so exa does have some flags how you check out the flags you could do EXA space dash dash help and it will tell you all the flags and the ones I like to use I like to use EXA space - al space dash - color equals always space and then - - group directories first and that's my EXA you guys seen me here in that a million times now what I would do is I would take this and I would make an alias so we never have to type that very long command again and what I would do is find that LS alias that we did before right here get rid of that and paste that EXA command in save me close the terminal bring up a new terminal and now when we run LS what really runs is exa with all those flags we gave it that is already a much sexier terminal with the neo phage and every time you run LS you know you're really getting a much prettier LS let me move the terminal back over to the left now one thing that is bugging me is the terminal has this nice Monaco theme if I do Super Bee row fee has this nice Manik I color scheme zid is this blinding white color scheme is there a monic i color scheme out there for zid well there probably is I'm gonna do super P to launch row fee I want to start typing Firefox and once Firefox is the last thing in the list I can just hit enter and let's do a Google search you know I'll do the custom Google search right here in the mint page instead of doing the search up here which defaults to Yahoo you know we'll get the linux mint guys a little money by using the google search engine here on their page and what i want to search for is z is actually a fork originally of g edit the old genome text editor and the themes and the plugins for G edit also work in zid so if I do G edit and then Monica because that's we're gonna search for Monica theme or G at it because it's gonna work just fine and see it as will it looks like there is one that's very first result Monica theme for G edit and let's click on it as a nice screenshot it looks very pretty where do we get it we get it from this guy's github alright and this is it it's just this this one file here so what I would do is I would copy this file somebody just gonna highlight the whole document right click copy I'm gonna go back over here let's create a new tab here in zid let's paste what we copied and then let's save this document so I'm gonna do a save as and I'm just gonna save it here in the home directory I'm gonna call it did Manik I got XML that needs to have the XML extension because it's an XML file you don't add the proper engine then you may not actually get this to work but then I'm gonna go into edit then I'm gonna go into preferences here in zid I'm gonna go to theme there's some built-in themes monic I was not one of the options but remember we got our own Monaco theme yeah already that looks really good in the XML document here looks good how does bash look yeah the bash RC looks really good too let me close out Firefox here kinda like in the terminal we really don't need all this extra stuff here so eventually what you want to do learning's it has learned some of the default key bindings to open new tabs and saving files and replacing search and replace and things like that what you eventually want to do is go into view I believe yep view I would turn off the toolbar I would turn off the status bar which is the bottom part here you don't need any of that information I tell you what line you're on but honestly I would probably try to find some other plug-in to give me line numbers actually in the document itself you know you want just a clean view especially in a terminal or in a text editor you want a very clean view because if you're actually in here doing some work programming or doing some creative writing the less distractions the better you want a distraction-free experience now let me do the super P again and open up Firefox one thing I don't like though is the Firefox theme it's not gonna make sense unless we have Firefox as Monica as we'll so I'm gonna go into this little hamburger menu here and I'm gonna go to Firefox add-ons does somebody have a monic I clean for Firefox 104 results we'll use the first one now that looks good only 12 users install this at your own risk so it's a VM for me so I don't mind it I'm gonna go ahead and edit let's see what happens yeah I already like it it did change the colors let's go to just some random web page I go to google.com but you see the the theme inside Firefox the tabs and the menu system all look good if you really wanted to get creative you could try to do some custom CSS for web page you go to all the time and accidentally invoked some of the key bindings in my host machine all right so I've restarted the computer and I like in the way everything is kind of turned out I like our terminal already we actually should have created a launcher for zid you know what let's launch it right here we'll take care of that problem I'll just launch it from the terminal because I just want it to appear at the bottom here and I'm gonna pin to panel now if we're gonna keep with the maadha kai theme let's go ahead and see if I can find a monic I GT K theme do you think there's one out there there might be there's gotta be there's too many people out there that use the mana Kai theme for somebody not to have created a gtk thing for it so mana Kai gtk theme and spell it right but it still found what we were looking for all right so somebody has this on github etk theme using mana kai dark yeah yeah alright to install it you clone this repository into your theme folder so let's super enter to bring up a terminal let's go ahead and get clone this repository and I need that link so I'm gonna copy that I'm gonna paste it in our terminal and I'm gonna get cloned that repository now this is in our home directory so we actually need that gtk theme in the directory on our system where the themes actually are supposed to go which I believe is in user shear themes what I would do is I would do a move than the directory that we just got from github it's mono kai gtk so we're we're gonna move it to we're gonna move it to / user / share / themes and it says permission denied so we need sudo privileges to do this because user share themes is a protected directory so run it with sudo all right if I CD into / user / share / themes and do an LS somewhere in our themes here we should see the Monica directory that we just sent there yeah so let's see if we can change the gtk themes gonna hit the system settings button there and where are the themes that's right here under appearance all right not exactly sure and cinnamon how to change themes I don't use cinnamon that often but if I go to window borders monic I gtk is an option I go to icons I'll just leave the minty icons cuz we didn't do it icon theme but buttons is there a monarch I gtk button theme yep let's change that yeah already I'm liking this a lot mouse pointer is fine a desktop is there a monarch I desktop theme yeah there is monika gtk awesome close out Firefox here and let me close the terminal and let's open up I don't know our file browser and see how we like the Monaco theme and does that fit with our terminal and our text editor I think so already is this is so much better than what we were presented with out of the box now for our file browser I hate these big icons and I want as much information on the screen as possible we definitely always want to see our hidden files and directories it doesn't make sense to have that stuff hidden and then I always want to list view one thing that bothers me is this panel is kind of hideous it's way too big right you want to have as much screen real estate as possible so what I'm going to do is can I move the panel move it I'm gonna move it to the top I think that'd be a better position for what we're doing and then I'm gonna go into panel settings and let's see what I can do here so the left zone I'm assuming is all of this here allow them to determine the font size yeah I guess that's fine colored icon size though 16-point oh yeah I like that let's set the panel height to something more appropriate 24 pixels kind of what works for me what let's do the same thing for the centered zone and the right zone yeah I like that the only thing that's missing now really we need wallpaper we need a wallpaper to fit with our monarch I design I don't like the icons on the desktop can we get rid of that I may have to go back in the system settings I hit desktop here yeah icons let's set that to no desktop icons all right now let me super P to bring up Rafi launch Firefox I'm gonna do mono eye wallpaper I wanted the image tab here in Google well I was trying to help the MIT guys out but you know what let me just go to google.com let me get a proper google.com here Monica wallpaper and click the images here and just looking around oh that's a nice one it's hosted over on imager right click you that image what I like that you save that image and I'm gonna just save it in pictures for now I'm gonna rename it so I know exactly what it is Monica wallpaper right then if I right-click on it again I'm this time I'm gonna set as desktop background all right close Firefox you know what this is already becoming a pretty damn sexy desktop if I do say so myself yeah I could use this I absolutely could use this bring up a terminal you use your hotkeys you know bring up Rafi I probably should have set zid to a hotkey let's open up something in Zed and make sure it still looks all sexy looks great LS of course still is EXA our graphical applications look good our graphical file manager the pneumonic igt k theme looks good of course you guys if you really when you want to branch out a little further I said we wouldn't really install too many extra programs on the system if you didn't want to use the nemo file manager you're gonna spend some time in the terminal anyway you may want to use something like Ranger it's a simple sudo apt install Ranger then once you have Ranger installed you can just type Ranger here in the terminal and you get a file manager it's pretty easy to navigate tell you if you want your hidden files the very first thing you should do in Ranger is type z'h to let Ranger know you always want to see your hidden files and directories thank you to quit out of Ranger so yeah there's just a little bit of what I would do with something like Linux Mint in the cinnamon desktop environment or any of the big traditional distributions with their big traditional desktop environments you know these days that's typically how I would would live in something like if I had to live in good Nome you know I'm gonna have all my programs hotkey that I use all the time anyway I'm gonna make sure that I can open and close programs with hotkeys I'm gonna make sure that I have a run launcher like ro fiord e menu or something like that on the system and really once you start you know playing with the desktop environment tweaking it to your needs in this sort of way really what we've done is you're almost to the point now where you've made cinnamon in this case almost irrelevant because you're making the desktop environment basically yours we've customized it with these key bindings and everything at some point you may want to really branch out into something configurable like standalone window managers so floating window managers like open box or fluxbox or JWM or tiling window managers which i've covered a million tiling window managers on the channel this was a fun video to do it was fun to get into linux mint and play around especially with tools I don't play around with much trying to theme things like the genome terminal and the Z text editor and the cinnamon desktop environment you know this this was a nice change of pace so I really appreciate you guys that kind of pushed me you know to do something like this and before I go I need to thank Michael Mitchell Gabe hello Nate Archie T 5:30 Chris Chuck DJ Donny Dylan George Lee request Omri Paul Robb Sean and Willie these guys they're the producers of the show they're my highest herb patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode you just watched wouldn't have been possible the show's also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen all these fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen this is my supporters over on patreon because this channel is sponsored by you guys the community you'd like to sponsor the channel please consider doing so you'll find distro to be over on patreon our I guess peace

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Keywords: linux mint, switched to linux, linux mint cinnamon, linux mint tutorial for beginners, linux mint 19.3, linux mint 2020, linux mint 19.3 cinnamon, linux mint cinnamon vs mate vs xfce, cinnamon desktop customization, linux, gnu linux, distrotube, power user, keybindings, theming linux mint, linux noobs, learning linux, linux mint terminal, xed text editor, command launcher, rofi, dmenu, ranger file manager, terminal color, terminal color schemes, how to

Id: TKX29fJ8U2Y

Length: 39min 44sec (2384 seconds)

Published: Mon May 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I don't like the assumption that Linux mint is for noobs and that if you're a power user, the end of your evolution comes at i3 + Arch. Sometimes, people just want to use their computer and get work done. (I could not watch the video after the first few minutes).

[u/BobsYourUnc]

I have tried a number of window manager's and I have come to the conclusion that tiling window managers are just not for me. The most I tile is 50% left, 25% upper right, 25% lower right. Or, 50% left with 50% right. Cinnamon handles this just fine out of the box.

I also do not see a need to change all of the key bindings to match a window manager. Or remove the Menu. Installing rofi is fine (I prefer ulauncher, myself, which looks and works great in Cinnamon). Moving the bar to the top is fine, too.

However, I don't think any of this makes one a power user. Maybe an i3 power user. I am not saying that the video is bad. I just think it is mistitled. A better title would be "How to transition from Cinnamon DE to i3WM." Or, "How to Rice Cinnamon to Look Like a Window Manager."

When I think linux power user (which I am not), I think about operating and maintaining the system via the terminal. Not with a bunch of TUI or ncurses apps, but via linux commands and bash scripts.

Linux Mint has a terminal. It has all of the basic linux commands that any other linux distro has. The repos, package manager, and release cycle is the only real difference. So you can do anything in linux mint that you can do in any other distro.

With a title such as that, I would have preferred a primer on operating and maintaining linux through the cli. Not just sudo apt install update or sudo apt upgrade, but everyday useful commands:

• connecting to wifi and or network status
• adding/removing users
• handy cron jobs
• helpful logs and tips to grep them
• creating system backups
• etc

[u/waytoogo]

Linux Mint is made for people that are used to windows. The first thing this guy does is change keyboard shortcuts from the default that match windows to something different. Why??? alt-f4 is so easy to close a window with one hand, but he changes it so you need both hands to close a window. dumb as hell. I could not watch it any more after that.

[u/pastaMac]

I guess becoming a power user involves installing the Monokai theme in every available application :) Looks like Derek's feelings towards Linux Mint have mellowed over the past year.

[u/omarnsy]

Some people Love LM and they don’t want to change it for the stability so, DT just telling them and I’m one of them that LM can do more than you think. That’s the whole idea.