Linux Mint Tips & Tricks

foreign [Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers.com this time I'm going to share some tips and tricks for users of Linux Mint for many years this popular Linux distro has been the first operating system I've booted every morning and so I thought I'd share my experience note that some of the things I'm going to show you are very specific to Linux Mint whilst others will work in many other Linux distros and I'll point out where this is the case as we go through so let's go and get started right here we are in Linux Mint specifically Linux Mint 21 cinnamon Edition which means we have the cinnamon desktop which is the most popular desktop for Linux Mint and the one I would recommend and this is what it looks like after a clean install but I prefer it to look like this so let's go back to the clean install and look at customization options if we want to scale the whole display we can go to preferences and display and you can see we've got various fractional scaling options available one two five one fifty Etc we could apply one of those like this and it obviously makes things bigger although I'm going to come out of that because as in both windows and many other Linux distros using system-wide scaling can be problematic with some applications in Linux Mint we also have internet preferences accessibility where we can change the text size by using a large text like that but I don't use this either because I like to have maximum control so what I do is to go to preferences and I go down here to font selection like that and here we can set the size face and weight of individual font elements and I normally do something like 12 for the main default font and the 14 for Maya window title font like that and I also set a text scaling factor of normally about 1.5 I'm going to set 1.6 here just so we can see things more clearly on video and if we go back to the menu you'll see things are a bit bigger although it's worth pointing out changes like this only really settle down after a reboot next I'm going to go to preferences again and go to Mouse and touchpad which is a down there I'm going to make the mouse actually visible on the screen to normal human eyes even bigger than that I think perhaps probably uh maybe even a bit more that's that's a bit better I can actually see that Mouse pointer that's always very handy and then now I'm going to go down to What's called the panel in the looks the taskbar and windows right click here and go to a panel settings and guess what I'm going to change the panel height to be as high as it can be and I'm also going to change some of the icon sizes you'll see down here we've got two different ways to change icon sizes the colored icons are being scaled for us if we want to we can set those ourselves but I find the default sorts them out very nicely but the symbolic icons can be a bit bigger I'm going to go across to the right Zone the ones down here and just put those up a little bit to about maybe 38 that to be look so okay next we'll right click the desktop and change a desktop background and this look in pictures I've got my standard expanded computers one there there we are and then finally here I note if we click the desktop again and go to customize we can change the desktop icon size a rather small up here we could set that to a larger as you can see but in fact I'm not going to do that because I know once we've restarted the system things will sort themselves out so let's just do a reboot and here we are back again with the icons are very different sides to what they were before the reboot and the menu will also have now sorted itself out so I would very much recommend when you're doing these sort of setup changes do reboot occasionally to see exactly what things are going to look like but uh for me at least we've now got some much better display settings now one of the things I really like about Linux Mint is the menu and the menu we're looking at here is the menu you get in any Linux distro using the cinnamon desktop so for example if you happen to be using Debian with their cinnamon desktop what I'm about to say will apply over there as well and in this menu if we go across to an item for example the calculator and I right click you'll see we have a number of options we can add it to the panel like that it appears on the panel at the bottom we don't want it there we can right click and get rid of it and we can also add an item to the desktop so we just right click and we go add to desktop and many operating systems these days don't make it easy to add things for desktop don't know why but they don't it's very easy here in the next Min and again we're going to get rid of something we just selected and delete we can also add items here if we wish to as you probably saw two favorites which is the part of the menu over here so if we go to a calculator and add to favorites it'll now be across here and if you want to get rid of things over in the favorites you can't right click them here what you do is you go back to the particular item here calculator bring up the right click menu and then remove from favorites and lo and behold it will have gone something else to point out is that for some menu items we've got even more functionality so for example if we go to office and leave it office writer and right click we can also create a new document which is a rather handy we're going to create a new document directly from the menu the other thing to point out is that the menu is configurable if we go down to the menu and right click we can go to look configure which brings up this panel here and to put it over there and select menu and then bring up the menu so you can see what's going on and there's quite a few options we can change the size of icons we can turn icons on and off so for example we could turn off the category icons like that I do it correctly and if we now go back again there's no icons in our categories I'm going to put them back I like those category icons but it means we've got control we can also change the height of the menu here if you don't like how high it is automatically you can just select a fixed height like that 550 is the default setting which is a bit shorter or we can go back to how it was and it comes out like that as you can see there's also here a control for enabling Auto scrolling which is on by default I didn't discover this work for years if I go across to the menu here look and this go down it will automatically scroll I'm not clicking anything or holding anything it just works like that I wish I discovered that years before I actually do and finally we have a menu editor so you don't like the weather menu is configured you can change it you can add categories you can add two categories you can take things away from categories this really is very handy we have the same level of control of the menu here under Lux mint cinnamon Edition as we used to have in Windows 7. foreign next a tip for Linux users who need to share documents with Windows systems and here if we just go to the menu and go to office and open up LibreOffice writer like that I've got a document here which was created on a Windows system there it is and it looks like this but if we go across to a Windows system here we are we can see it looks slightly different particularly down here with the comic Sam's font let's go back to Linux Mint yes it's it's very different and in fact for all the fonts here you can see at the top here it's actually showing them in the metallics because the font isn't actually available one is being substituted so what we can do here is to install on this Linux system some standard Microsoft truetype fonts there's several ways we can do this one is to go down to the menu and go to the software manager and then to search for Ms core fonts something like that that will bring up this installer here which we could then install however I'm going to use the terminal to do this installation because I've sometimes had problems with the MS core fonts installer available in the software manager so here I've got a terminal open where I've already entered the command sudo apt install ttf Ms core fonts installer so if we just press enter on that and it'll ask for the password I have on this system there we go do we want to install the fonts I enter Y and enter and it now asks me to accept the license agreement and the way we do that is to use the Tab Key here I just press tab there to get the OK highlighted I can now press enter and then it gives me the option to accept the license agreement I'm just going to use the arrow to get across and enter and there we are our fonts are being installed and there we are it's finished so we can just close that down and if we go back to a Libra office go back to LibreOffice writer and bring in our document very very exciting and uh yes it now looks correct we've got the MS core fonts installed here on our system and indeed we can see if we just select one of the bits of text here we look at the top the dollar is not being substituted it is installed now the other thing I want to point out in this context is that if you have true type fonts on a Windows system which you have purchased or otherwise licensed it's very easy to copy them across to Linux so let's go back to our Windows system well I've gone to the C drive as you can see and to Windows and if we scroll down in Windows we get to the fonts folder and we can open that up here is our fonts folder as you can see and I've gone through periods of my life and I've purchased loads and loads and loads of fonts I always forget which ones are actually part of Windows and which ones I've actually purchased but some of these here are ones I'm sure I've actually purchased yes for example Cooper black and copper plate Gothic or font Drive member purchasing in the past and so I'm going to select these and if I just do a right click and I do a copy I've got a USB drive plugged in here let's just bring it up there it is and we'll paste them across over to there like that and if we now just eject that drive take it out go back across to Linux Mint and plug the drive in there we go and there are fonts and to install these fonts all we have to do is to click on them it comes up as you can see we click on install and there we are that font is installed I'll just do the others so as you can see it's very easy to install fonts on a Linux system if you have them on Windows although I'll stress again you should only do this for fonts you know you have a license for and if you want to see all the fonts installed here in Linux minute we can go to the menu and you'll notice earlier we went to font selection in preferences which is a down here there we are and that is to set the font on the system that is not for fonts itself if we want to look at all fonts let's just type in fonts we want fonts there and here are all the fonts on our system which should now include comic sound as we installed earlier and indeed also Cooper black and copper plate Gothic foreign staying with maintaining compatibility with the world of Microsoft that many of us do have to remain compatible with something I find very useful here in Linux Mint is using Microsoft Office web apps now I know we do have here LibreOffice as all the parts of it as we can see and that works perfectly well but it's not entirely compatible with Microsoft Office but if you go to a Microsoft Office web apps which are free to use we have online versions of word excel and PowerPoint and these work very well indeed as usual I have to redact things you're not allowed to see but I've got a basic text document over here just to show you that the online version of word is very good these days I think many people think back to what it was when it first started it's moved on a great deal you know we can even right click and access all kinds of options the sort of things we get in the full version of the package you can do a lot of the things you want to do in Microsoft Word very well in the online version and you do have absolute Fidelity absolute compatibility with the version you've been running on a Windows machine so if you are a Linux spin user or indeed a Linux user more broadly it's well worth thinking about using the Microsoft 365 office web apps foreign I thought we should now talk about time shift which is a utility in Linux Mint which can take snapshots of the system so if you have a problem you can refer to an earlier state and the next event will prompt you to set up time shift when you first installed it but you might not have done that and if you haven't I'll therefore show you what you would do I haven't set it up on this test system you just need to go to Administration and then go down to time shift like that and put in your password and here we are in time shift and as you can see there are no snapshots available on this system I haven't run this yet and if we wanted to we can simply go and click on create to manually create a snapshot which we could return to if we have problems in the future however if you want to set up scheduled snapshots which is probably a good idea we can run the wizard that would have run after first installing Linux Mint so guess what we just click on the wizard like that here we are we'll take the default option of our sync as we can see at the top like that and click on next and now it's asking where we want to save our snapshot I'm going to use a drive Linux mentors installed on which is this SSD here this SSD at the top has got Windows on it we're on a dual boot computer at the moment so we'll stick with the Linux drive here and click on next and now we just need to select the frequency of our snapshots so for example we wanted to have a weekly snapshot we want to keep three of them we could just do things like this and click on next where as you can see it asks about user home directories let's just pull out a bit like that where we can see by default it's not going to save the files in the home directory this is simply about keeping a backup a snapshot of all the system and program files which I think for most people is what you want to do so we can click on next again there we are everything is complete and we'll now click on finish time shift is now active and it'll be creating snapshots at selected intervals but let's just force it to create one now so we've got one just in case I'll click on create like that and there we are it's finished we now have a snapshot available to which if necessary we could restore this system next I thought I'd say a few words about GPU about Graphics drivers and these days the Linux kernel contains all the graphics drivers you need if you have AMD or onboard Intel graphics and if you have Nvidia Graphics Hardware then after installing the looks mint you should have been prompted to switch to a proprietary in-video driver and you might be thinking what if I didn't switch to a proprietary Nvidia driver after installing Linux Mint well do not panic you can always go to Administration and go to driver manager like this which will request our password there we go it's now looking for Hardware drivers and there we are we can now see on this system we are using the recommended proprietary Nvidia driver if we weren't what would be ticked here would be the box down this second option to use the open source in video driver and so if this is selected on your system you can choose to switch to one of proprietary NVIDIA drivers and indeed you might come to this screen and discover there's a more recent Nvidia Drive available than the one you're using so you can change to that for example if you were currently on 525 you might want to change to 535 this said I would strongly caution do not change your Nvidia graphics driver until you've made a snapshot of your system using timeshift as we were just looking at and I'd also advise a general policy of letting sleeping dogs lie if you find that your graphics are working fine on your system do not change your graphics driver for example I'm currently using hearing video driver 535 which works fine on this system but I know many people have had problems with that and that have been better to stick with it Nvidia driver 525 and if you want more information about Graphics drivers on Linux systems and also about setting up a printer in Linux then it's all covered in my previous video Linux Survival Guide number three Linux Mint is a fantastic Linux distro particularly for those migrating from Windows and I hope that what I've covered in this video will help to make Linux Mint even more accessible and enjoyable to use but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed but you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed Please Subscribe and I hope to talk to you again very soon thank you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 180,000

Keywords: Linux Mint, Linux tutorial, Linux Mint tutorial, desktop setting, desktop scaling, scaling, MS fonts, MS core fonts, Linux Windows fonts, NVIDIA, Linux Mint NVIDIA, Timeshift, Linux Mint timeshift, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, Cinnanon Desktop, Linux Mint Cinnamon

Id: HKCowLHiQ8o

Length: 17min 58sec (1078 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 15 2023