Pop!_OS Complete Beginners Guide (Covers 20.10 and earlier)

[Music] hello and welcome back to learn linux tv in today's video i wanted to create a desktop guide for pop os it's one of my favorite distributions that'll help new users get onboarded onto popos we're going to talk about some considerations things that you should think about before you install pop os i'll actually walk you through the installation process and then later in the video i will show you how to use it there's time codes down below for each individual section so you can go straight to the content that you want to see depending on where you are in the process and hopefully this is going to be a video that will be a great resource for new users to get set up on pop os but before we get into that i wanted to take a moment to mention my sponsor for this video lenode lenode has been doing cloud computing since 2003 which is actually before amazon web services was even a thing on the node's platform you can get your server up and running in minutes and they include all of the 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now and if you go to ubuntuserverbook.com you can order your copy if you already have a copy if you've read it then i would really appreciate it it would really help me out if you left a review somewhere that would be awesome so with all of that out of the way let's go ahead and get started with popos on your laptop or desktop so we're almost ready to go ahead and install popos now if you already have popos installed then you can skip this section and look at the description below in the description i have time codes for each of the sections and then you could just go to whatever section matches where you are this section here is going to show you how to set up bootable media that you can use to basically install pop os on a computer that doesn't already have it so here i have a windows installation because i know a lot of you out there are actually coming from windows so i wanted to show the process of creating the bootable media in windows which is going to match the situation for quite a few of you so what you'll do is open up a web browser and i have firefox installed right here and then what we want to do is download pop os and to do that you can just type pop.system76.com and that will take you to this page right here we can click on download and then now we have some options generally speaking there's usually two versions of popos available at any one time there's going to be the current version which is going to be selected by default and then there's also the long support version lts version like you see right here which is often going to be an older version sometimes an older version might be more appropriate for an enterprise scenario when you want a tried and true longer supported version for workstations and things like that and it really doesn't matter which one you go along with because they're both great and you probably won't notice a difference much between them so if you don't have a preference just go with the latest version that is available and at the time of this recording the latest version is currently popos 2010 the first digit is the year and the second digit is the month most of the time a new version of pop os will be released every october and april of every year so we can see that this one came out in april of 2020 and this one came out in october of 2020 so once you have selected your version then you have another decision to make you can download the standard release or the nvidia version the nvidia version is for those of you that have an nvidia video card on your system if you have an amd or intel card basically a video card that is not nvidia then you can just go ahead and install the regular version but for those of you that have an nvidia card this version right here is customized to basically put greater emphasis on nvidia and the settings that are related to making the gaming experience more appropriate now this laptop right here actually has an nvidia card if you don't actually know how to tell then at least on windows you can go down here to where the start menu is you can right click on that and then you can go to device manager and then underneath display adapters if you have an nvidia card listed here then you should go with the nvidia version if you don't then just download the normal version so since i do have an nvidia card here on this laptop then i definitely should download the nvidia version so that's what i'll do so when you click on it you can save the file it's going to be an iso file if you didn't already know an iso file is basically a clone in file format of a cd or dvd nowadays we really don't use cds or dvds anymore but the format is still the same what we're actually going to use is use a flash drive to create bootable media but we're still going to use the same file format because the file format has not changed so i'll save the file now that's downloading and then the next thing we need is a way to create bootable media from the iso image so you'll need a flash drive preferably at least four gigabytes make sure that you don't have anything on that flash drive already because we're going to completely wipe it out if you don't already have a preferred tool to create bootable media then you can just download something called usb imager so i'm going to just type it here in the search usb imager all one word when you press enter it should bring you to a get lab page and that's the first result right here just make sure that it is from this git lab page i will have links in the description below so you can just click on that even easier and then i like this tool here because it's actually available for pretty much every operating system so regardless of whether you are running mac os windows another flavor of linux you can use the same tool to create your bootable media and since i'm running on windows currently i'm going to download the windows version which is right here but again if you are running a different operating system then just choose the appropriate version for you so i'll click here for the windows version i'll save the file and essentially we should have two files downloaded usb imager is already done that's a very small file so that should be the first one to finish and this popos install image is quite a bit bigger so it might take a little bit of time to get that downloaded it's almost done and now it is done so i'm going to click here to open the location where these files are actually stored shouldn't need the browser anymore and you can see we have the two files here so i will extract usb imager and now it's extracted so what i'm going to do now is insert my flash drive and i've done that and then what we can do is open up usb imager we double click on the utility to open it up and we get this little nag screen here you know windows doesn't know what file this is or doesn't recognize it but we do want to run this so i'll click more info and then run anyway i'll say yes and the utility is open shouldn't need these windows anymore so basically what we need to do is find the iso image that we've downloaded of pop os so if i go up a few levels here i basically just need to go to the downloads directory and here is the iso file i will open it now in my case it automatically selected the flash drive right here now in windows sometimes you do have to go here to disk management and actually play around with this because if there's any partitions here already it could be a problem it's a windows issue but if all goes according to plan we should be able to fill in the path of the iso image right here again we just went here and then we selected that and then as soon as i've deleted all the partitions on the flash drive which you probably won't have to do unless you've already used it for a different linux distribution then it showed up right here so i will click right and what that's going to do is actually write that iso image to the flash drive which will get it prepared for use and then what we can do is use it to boot into pop os so now we have bootable media ready to go that we can use to install pop os but before we do that in the next section what i'm going to do is show you how to test popos to make sure that it's compatible with your computer first before you install it i'll see you there [Music] at this point you should have installation media ready to go that we can use to install pop os on our computer so the next step is to go ahead and boot your computer from that flash drive press whatever key combination is specific for your computer to access the boot menu then you select the flash drive as the item to boot from and if all goes well you should see a screen similar to this and this screen right here is actually the installer for pop os but we're not going to install it in this particular section we'll take care of that in the next section because we want to make sure that everything is compatible before we actually replace our current operating system on this particular screen we're setting our language and mine is defaulting to english and that's what i'm going to leave mine on but if your primary language is something else then feel free to select that here and i'm going to just choose the default for this as well and for this and also for this so this is the screen where we can actually choose to perform an installation but we're not going to do that like i mentioned we want to make sure that everything is compatible before we install it so what we're going to do is try demo mode that's this button right here and that essentially just closes the installer now at this point we are actually using pop os even though we haven't installed it if you were to shut down your computer remove the flash drive and then start it back up then your existing operating system would then start as if nothing has changed because well nothing has changed yet to shut down for example you just go over here to the upper right corner drop this down click here to power off and then power off again and then that will shut down the computer but anyway what we want to do right now is just test everything to make sure that our computer is compatible with pop os before we install it we certainly don't want to remove our current operating system until we know for sure that popos is going to work with our hardware and popos has what's quite possibly the best hardware support of most distributions out there so there's a very good chance that it is compatible with your computer but we just want to make sure and even though popos is made by system 76 which is a company that makes their own computers cop os is actually compatible with non-system 76 computers as well and a good example of that is the footage that you're seeing right now this footage is being recorded from a thinkpad x1 extreme so again it doesn't matter if system 76 made your hardware there's a very good chance that it'll work with your computer so what should you do to make sure that popos does work with your computer so what i'm going to do right now is give you some tests that you can run on your end to verify compatibility now the first thing that you should do is connect to wi-fi by doing so you'll have a chance to see whether or not your wi-fi card is compatible with pop os and even if your computer doesn't have a wi-fi card for example a desktop with an ethernet card you basically want to make sure that you do have internet access that's very important so on the upper right hand corner we could drop this down here and right here we see wi-fi not connected so i haven't connected to wi-fi yet but on your end you might see ethernet connected for example and if that's the case then you can skip this step in regards to wi-fi though we can click right here where it says wi-fi not connected we can select our network and then choose it from the list now if you don't see any networks here then that could mean that your wi-fi card is disabled a lot of laptops have a hardware switch where you can actually toggle the wi-fi cart on and off so if you don't see any wi-fi networks here or it's telling you that it's disabled just make sure that you didn't accidentally disable your wi-fi card if you don't even have an option to connect to wi-fi then that probably means your wi-fi card isn't supported but here we can see that mine is because not only do i have a wi-fi option it's also showing me the networks that are in my area in my case not only do i have a wi-fi option i also see a list of networks here everything looks good so far so i'll click on my wireless network which is this one right here and i'll click connect and then i just simply type in the password and then we just keep our eye up here and the wi-fi icon did appear and it's solid so so far so good and then the next thing we can do is open up a web browser so if we click on activities we have firefox right here so we can click on that and then what we can do is connect to any website to make sure that our connection is actually working so as we can see here my website loaded so i know that my internet connection is actually working now one thing to keep in mind is that popos might run slower off the flash drive than it would when you install it so if the responsiveness is actually lagging behind a bit don't worry perhaps you have a slow flash drive for example but anyway so far so good on my end now another thing that i recommend you do on your side is play a video that will make sure that you don't have choppy playback performance it also gives you an opportunity to make sure that your audio card works as well if you intend to use multiple displays i highly recommend that you connect those displays and make sure that those work as well if you have a usb printer for example plug that in too basically test all of the hardware that you would like to have working on pop os while we're using live mode like we're doing here and that'll give you a chance to make sure that pop os is going to work with your hardware and assuming that everything is fine you've tested your internet your audio your video card with multiple displays if you do have multiple displays or whatever else you plan on using then you should be good to go because in the next section we're going to walk through an actual installation what we're going to do is replace the current operating system with pop os but before you move on to the next section though i highly recommend that you make an image of your computer before you install pop popos and also back up your data as well because what we're going to do is wipe the entire drive and set up pop os as the only operating system on the computer so when you're ready to proceed we'll move on to the next section [Music] once you've started your computer with the pop os installation media you should see a screen similar to this the first screen here is just basically asking you for your language so what you would do is just choose whichever one yours is from this list if yours is not the default of english i'll leave that as the default and click select and then i'll choose the default here as well for united states of america because that is where i am and then here we get to choose the keyboard layout on my end it's defaulting to english us but you could actually type in the box right here to test out the keyboard layout to make sure that all the special keys if there are any work just fine and then i will choose default for the english us keyboard type and then we have this screen right here now in this video i am going to do a clean install which means i am going to wipe out the hard drive and everything on it so i am hoping by now you have already backed up anything on your computer that is important in this section we are doing a clean install and the second button gives you access to advanced options when it comes to creating partitions on your hard drive but i'll leave that up to you guys if that's something that you want to do that's beyond the scope of this video so i'll do a clean install and then we get to choose the hard drive that we would like to install popos onto as you can see here i only have one hard drive on this laptop so i'll go ahead and select that one and then i will click erase and install at this screen we are optionally choosing to enable encryption which is full disk encryption which gives you encryption at rest what that means is if someone steals your laptop or your device and then they try to get access to your files for example they take the hard drive out of your computer or they boot your computer with a linux live cd or live media then if it's encrypted they will not be able to access the content on that drive without the password whether or not you set up encryption on your end is completely up to you if you are going to save some very confidential files on your computer then you should definitely encrypt it if you are going to be using your computer at a business for example you use it for your job then you should definitely encrypt the hard drive because it's often the case that when you use a laptop for work you'll probably have some personally identifiable information on that laptop for you or for clients maybe some important company schematics and blueprints things like that so if you are storing anything like that that i highly recommend you click choose password which will actually set up encryption you'll be asked for the password and then you can go ahead and continue so if that matches your use case then you would click choose password and then you could just put in a password here and by adding a password you are actually setting up full disk encryption and you will be prompted for this password when you start up your computer so make sure you remember this there is no way to recover this password at all whatsoever so if you forget it then you literally have to reinstall everything now in my end i'm going to click don't encrypt because this is just a demo but i wanted to show you what that looks like so at this point popos is installing on this laptop it's going to take a few minutes how long it takes depends on how fast your computer is so what i'm going to do is just fast forward through the whole process so as you can see right here the process is complete popos is installed on the computer and now we can click restart device to restart it into our new installation so after your computer restarts into your new pop os installation you should see a welcome screen that looks like this and what this screen is going to do is give you a chance to customize your installation to get it ready for use so i'll click next earlier in this section we set up the keyboard layout while we were installing pop os that was for the installer and now we are setting the keyboard layout for our actual installation what we'll be using going forward so i'll leave mine as the default so at this screen you could choose to enable location services which defaults to on as you can see here and what this option allows you to do is utilize applications that are able to use your geographic location such as a map application or something like that if you intend to use an application like that or you think you might you could go ahead and leave this enabled if not you could turn this off it's up to you now here we are going to choose our location on the map which will set our time zone and it is defaulting to the right time zone in my case as you can see here it shows new york but what i'm going to do is just get this little closer to michigan i'm actually closer to detroit than i am to new york so you can basically click on this map wherever you are geographically and that will set your clock accordingly then on this screen we have a handful of online accounts that we can choose to utilize if we'd like such as having your online calendar contacts documents and things like that synchronized to your computer from one of those services now i'm going to skip this but if you do have any of the accounts that you see listed right here i recommend you give it a try and log in so that way you will have features available from that service on your pop os installation on this screen we are actually going to set our username for the primary user on our computer so i'll put in my name and i like to simplify the username down to just my first name but i'll leave it up to you to decide on the format for your username it doesn't really matter all that much for most things anyway so i'll click next and then here we will set our password for our primary user account and we will use this password to log into the computer if you chose to set up full disk encryption earlier in the video then that password was to unlock the hard drive and this password is used to log into the computer so essentially if you choose to enable encryption you will need to enter two passwords to access your computer but what i'll do is just type the password in right now you just type whatever the password is that you'd like to use and then next we should be all done we can click start using pop os so now we are running popos the installation was a complete success as you can see here we have a freshly installed popos installation ready to go in the next section i'm going to show you how to actually use the pop os desktop to make sure that you are completely familiar with it so let's go ahead and continue along [Music] in this section of the video i'm going to show you guys around the user interface of pop os and show you how to navigate the graphical user environment now when it comes to desktop linux distributions basically distributions that are intended for use on laptops or desktops there's more than a handful of different desktop environments available and to beginners it might seem a bit overwhelming that there's different choices for the user interface but that's actually a great thing because if you don't like the user interface of a desktop distribution then you can simply choose to use a different one you don't have to write off linux in general as an option you can use because you could simply find a desktop environment that fits your needs and caters to your style of using your computer popos uses gnome as the desktop environment of choice and that's what we're going to go over in this section now one thing to keep in mind though is that the developers of pop os they actually make quite a few customizations to gnome so the implementation of the gnome desktop in pop os is going to give you a completely different experience out of the box than you get in any other distribution of linux that also uses gnome as the primary user interface but anyway let's go ahead and explore the user interface in pop os and take a look around now first of all the user interface doesn't look like all that much because we essentially just have a wallpaper here and then we have a black bar a panel here at the top so yeah the desktop does look a bit empty doesn't it but the gnome desktop actually wants to stay out of the way as much as possible so that whatever application you are running is the front and center the most important thing on the screen so the gnome desktop isn't trying to have too much going on when you aren't running an actual application up here at the top panel we have the current date and time and if we click on that we will see a history of notifications every now and then there might be a notification that might appear such as an alert that shows you that there's updates available or something like that if you are syncing to any calendar services you'll actually see calendar related events and notifications here on the right hand side separate from the notifications on the left and you can also turn on do not disturb mode as well if you would rather not see any notifications at all maybe you are doing something where you don't want a notification to appear for example maybe you're like me and you're recording a video and you don't want notifications to appear while you're recording then you might actually click on this button right here to enable do not disturb mode and that's especially useful if you are having a meeting with someone and you don't want an email message alert or something like that to show for everyone in the meeting room to see but basically it gives you the ability to disable or enable alerts that are shown on the screen regardless of whether or not you have do not disturb mode enabled you will still see notifications in this section right here the difference is you just won't see them on the screen but you're always able to go back and see a history of notifications that would have appeared in this area right here if you didn't have do not disturb mode enabled so i'll just go ahead and undo that for now then here on the right hand side we have a system menu that gives you access to controls such as brightness volume bluetooth devices and you also get an option right here if you expand this to suspend restart power off or log out you can lock your screen if you're stepping away to get some coffee or something like that you can click on settings right here to bring up the settings utility which will default to bring you to whatever area inside settings you are on the last time you had it open as you can see here i was actually customizing my display for anyone else it's probably going to start up here at wi-fi or network but you get the idea you could click up here and go to settings to access this settings window here if you need to change the settings on your computer and then similarly if you expand your wi-fi here you can select a network if you are not already connected to one and that will show you all of the wi-fi networks that are in your general vicinity and then you can also turn off wireless as well if you want to be off the grid if you have bluetooth devices you can go to bluetooth settings which will actually bring you to the same settings app i was already in and it's going to search for bluetooth devices that you might have that are waiting to be paired if you have any they should show up here and then you can connect to them for example bluetooth speakers and since we're here we may as well have a look around at the settings and see some examples of some of the things that you can configure i've already shown displays that was what was on the screen when this first came up and we have for example fractional scaling which allows you to enlarge the screen similar to how we have here it's on 200 percent this is a very high resolution 4k display i can go to three or four hundred percent if i need to but if i enable this option here it's going to allow me to choose percentages in between these and as you can see here there might be some trade-offs so only do that if you need to but just keep that in mind that is a possibility you can click here to change the resolution of your display and i actually have dual monitors set up one monitor is essentially a screen recorder but if you have multiple displays you can choose to join the displays have a single display or mirror them as i'm doing here but i'm not going to touch that because if i do that might interrupt the recording so i have to leave that alone we also have online accounts and i'm going over these in no particular order if you decided not to set up an online account at the beginning you can actually go here to online accounts and get another opportunity to do that maybe you didn't remember your google password or something and now that you remembered it you want to go ahead and add it you can click on that and add it maybe facebook and so on you can add whatever accounts you happen to use here in this menu to benefit from things like calendar syncing contact syncing and things like that if you go to appearance what we can do is we could change the wallpaper this is the default if we scroll down here we have some other wallpapers available as well so maybe if i like this one i can switch over to that or that one you get the idea you can click add picture if you have a picture file that you would like to be the wallpaper you can click on that and it'll give you the opportunity to browse through your file system find that picture file and then add it as the background i don't have any right now so i'll just leave that as it is and then here on the appearance tab it's defaulting to dark mode if i click on light mode you can see that the colors of the window change immediately i'm going to leave it on dark mode but you could basically choose whichever one you prefer here you get some options for sound so if you have a microphone or something like that you can choose the input level here if you would like to record something you also get a selection of output devices if you would like to have a different device handle output maybe you want to select hdmi so that way you can have the sound go through a television or a monitor that has speakers or something like that you get the idea also we have power settings here this is especially important if you are on a laptop and right here i'm basically seeing that i have a battery indicator for my wireless mouse it's it's about halfway as you can see here so if i needed to change my battery i would notice that by seeing that the bar is very low here my battery on my laptop is fully charged we can adjust the screen brightness keyboard brightness if we have a backlit keyboard which i do we could crank that up we can enable or disable the option to dim the screen when inactive i don't actually like that blank screen i'm going to say never because i'm recording a video automatic suspend is off but you can basically choose to enable this if you want your computer to suspend if it's not being used after a certain amount of time and there's other options here that are pretty self-explanatory under applications there's going to be some settings that are application specific so for example if i click on firefox we get some options for which types of files that application opens and most of the time you won't actually find all of the application settings here in this section a lot of this has to do with privacy and settings like that but we do have some options for notifications so for example if you don't want to activate do not disturb mode but you would prefer not to see notifications from a particular application then you can actually disable notifications for that application by just selecting the application and toggling this option right here we also have some options for extensions then we have other options as we can see when we click on a different option here we get different choices we have settings for mouse and touchpad we can actually increase the sensitivity of the mouse we can enable natural scrolling which i actually prefer so i'm going to leave that enabled and i'll enable it there as well so you can actually crank up the touchpad speed here and then we have a firmware option if there's any firmware updates you can go ahead and install those here if you need any of these accessibility features to help you use your computer better then you can turn this on and you can choose individual options here to meet your needs i'll leave it up to you if that's something that you need you should probably turn the settings on that will help you then for printers it's already installed my printer so if your printer is on the network and it is supported you should already find it on the list you can click the add printer button but whether or not this is successful depends on whether or not the printer that you want to add supports linux they're all different i always make sure to research linux compatibility first before i buy a printer and i recommend you do the same but if you just so happen to have a printer that is supported and it is on the network then it should be shown here if it's a usb printer then it should also be installed automatically if it's supported if it's not installed automatically that probably means that it's not supported but you could check the manufacturer's website to be sure maybe they have a utility or some kind of software available for linux that you can install to basically make that printer able to work now that's it when it comes to settings but when it comes to applications how do we launch applications so we know how to configure the desktop but how do we use it well if i click on activities that brings up the activities overview and there's some interesting things that we can see here first of all on the left-hand side we have a list of favorite applications i didn't choose any of these apps to be a favorite these are actually pre-installed as favorites if you want to get rid of one for example if you want to get rid of the terminal you can right click on it and click here to remove it from the list of favorites and then it goes away and these are not all of the applications that i have installed now down here the verb it shows show applications if i click on that i get a list of the applications that are installed on the computer and we can see some interesting things here first of all we have a web browser we have firefox that's the default web browser and i can also press the super also known as windows key on the keyboard to go back to the activities overview then back to applications i can launch another one so i've installed steam i've installed that separately so that's why that's there but anyway i can launch another application for example in the office section i could launch libreoffice writer which is a word processor that's really awesome i've actually written my books with this actual word processor right here libreoffice writer works perfectly well and now that's running now if you press the super key then what you will see is that the activities overview will show all of the applications that are open so if i click here to bring up the file manager now i have three and then if i open up popshop it's a little small there so you can resize just by grabbing the edge there but now i have a bunch of applications open here but i have a lot going on what i like to do is split my tasks accordingly to whatever project i'm working on maybe i have a web browser going because i'm doing some research and then in libreoffice i'm taking some notes and here this is a little out of place because this pop shop app right here is used for installing new applications which really doesn't have anything to do with doing research like i have with these two apps down here hypothetically so what i could do is move it to a different workspace now notice i have this here highlighted in orange that means that i'm on that workspace right now if i click here and then press the super key to go off of the activities overview i have an empty desktop again if i press super and then go back to the previous workspace and super again to get off of activities now i am back on this workspace with all of these applications so what this workspace system allows us to do is separate our workloads accordingly so for example i could drag popshop over here onto this empty desktop drop it and now it's running there and if i want let's say firefox to be above popshop what i could do is drag it over but in between the two you can see how a dot appeared there in between and drop it and then it creates a new workspace there and that makes it easy for me to have the applications running in the order i want them to be in in the workspace list here now if i was to go here to firefox i can close it by just you know clicking on it and clicking the close button but right from activities overview i can highlight any window and this close option will appear right here which is just another way of closing an application i can click on that and it goes away now watch what happens when i click off of this workspace the workspace goes away this is known as dynamic workspaces and we always have at least one empty workspace so if i close all of my apps and then i'll close this one as well now we just have this one but if i open up any application it automatically created a new empty workspace so we always have an empty workspace available at all times and if i go ahead and switch to that one and then open an app on that workspace notice a third one was created so we always have an empty one and this allows us to switch between applications very easily but we don't have to go to the activities overview in order to do this you can actually hold control and then the super key and then press up to go up a workspace and while holding those keys we can go down to go to a workspace that is in that direction so we can use this to basically navigate between the workspaces without even having to go to activities now another thing that we can do is organize our application so as we add new apps to our linux system then we might want to categorize this better because this list here can get quite long actually it's going to split it into different sections so what we could do is actually categorize these apps by just holding down the left mouse button on one of them and then that allows us to rearrange things so i can move this around a bit but if i drop an application onto another one it's going to create a group and it tries as best as it can to automatically name the group as it's done here but you could change that to whatever you'd like for example browsers and that's fine too and then you can actually drag that around as well as you can see so you get some customization options here for how to organize your list of applications and that's pretty cool i can even drop the terminal app onto settings if i'd like and then i could name this one for example utilities so as you can see you have some options here for how to customize this list so one thing that you can also do is avoid this list altogether for example maybe you have an app that's very important this is just a file manager no surprise here which you know is okay but let's just pretend that this is a very important app and you are writing some code and you don't want to switch away from this application and lose your train of thought but when you click on activities and then go here you are basically taken right away from whatever you are working on well what you can do is actually access the application launcher to give you the ability to launch an application without even accessing activities at all so if you hold down the super key and then press forward slash it brings up this application launcher right here and you can start typing the name of an application that you have installed for example i can start typing steam and before i finish typing the word steam it already narrowed the list down to steam as you can see right here it's actually there on the list i could press enter and as you can see that application has appeared and then if i want to launch another one it's just a matter of holding down the super key again and forward slash just like we did before now firefox is already on the list right here now the thing is i could start typing firefox and then i'll narrow it down i can press the up and down arrows to highlight the application i want to run if the application is already running for example files it's going to highlight that and if i press enter it's going to switch to that application not open a new one but if i highlight a new application maybe i started typing a phrase or something that narrowed the list down to that application or i just chose it from the list i could press enter here and in this case it's already running i forgot that i had it running but what it allowed me to do was actually be taken right to that application it was already running so it's not going to open a new one if i go back here to the menu and i want to open an application that is not open then i can start typing the name of the application and it shows in the list and what you will notice is that applications that are currently open have two squares on the left hand side and then if i start typing the name of an application that is not running for example i'll start typing pop pop shop is not currently running as you can see here has a gear icon here so i can start that application by actually highlighting it and pressing enter the terminal app is open if i highlight it it actually highlights the app itself and even if the app wasn't on our current workspace we would know that it's running because we have the two squares here on the left hand side so now that i've clicked on pop shop here it is and i'm able to use it now another thing that we can do is activate tiling mode what i really like about tiling mode is that it helps you better keep track of the applications that are running now right now i have several applications running here i have applications behind pop shop so if i wanted to find out what applications are running i can press the super key on the keyboard and there they are but what tiling mode allows us to do is never have any wasted space on the screen so i'll turn it on and immediately it organized all of the applications here as you can see and brought them all front and center if i close one of them it's going to automatically resize the applications that are on the screen to make sure that they are all present if i open a new one now just right click on here to do a new window it's going to open that in a new section right here as you can see so this is known as tiling mode and you can turn it on or off by simply turning it on or off right here now another thing that you can do is use what's called tab stacks and here's why i like this now this display right here the resolution isn't ultra wide so it doesn't actually allow me all that much real estate at least horizontally so in order to use tiling on a screen that's not ultra wide what i could do is just go to any window just click on whatever one i'd like to be the main window in a stack and then i can hold the super key and press s and you can immediately see that an orange bar appeared up here at the top and then i could drag a window on top of it and now i have two tabs so basically the tab stacks feature allows more than one application to share the same location on the screen so you could still make use of tiling and what makes this even more useful is that you can have all of the applications that are related share the same tab stack so for example you could be working on a project in one window and taking notes for that project in another window but you can make them share the same tab stack so that way related applications are together which makes more logical sense now there's all kinds of keyboard shortcuts that are available as well to get some of them right here i can click view all and get a list of all of the keyboard shortcuts that are available it's beyond the scope of this video for me to show you all of them but i highly recommend that you take a look at these because keyboard shortcuts on the gnome desktop allow you to use gnome more efficiently so i highly recommend that you check this out for example we can see here that super enter enters adjustment mode so if i do that hold down super and press enter you can see that this entire window turned orange and i could actually press the right arrow to move it out of the tab stack and even change its position on the screen as well by just using the up and down arrows and that's really useful because i don't even need to reach for the mouse and then whenever i move that window where i want it to be i press enter again and then it basically finalizes the move and then also in that mode again super enter i can hold down shift then use the arrow keys to basically resize the windows again without even reaching for the mouse so i will leave it up to you to explore the keyboard shortcuts here and just have some fun these keyboard shortcuts will make using the desktop even easier and i highly recommend you do that now there's all kinds of things that we can learn about the gnome desktop about the user interface here i've only begun to scratch the surface but i think what i've shown you is more than enough to get you started with using gnome launching applications switching between workspaces the application launcher tiling mode moving windows around there's all kinds of things that we could do here to customize the environment move things around so you know what just take some time and experiment with this and then you'll be used to the workflow and you'll be able to fully take advantage of the user interface in pop os [Music] so in this section what i'm going to do is show you around the pre-installed applications that come with popos now popos includes pretty much everything you need to get started using your computer for example there's a file manager a web browser even an entire office suite that you can use which is awesome so let's go ahead and have a look at some of these if we go up here to activities and then we go down here to show applications we'll see all of the applications that are pre-installed now google chrome chromium and steam are not pre-installed i already installed those as i was experimenting and recording other sections of this video so you can go ahead and ignore those in the same with slack basically these four right here were not included but what is included for example is firefox which is the web browser of choice and if you have used firefox on any other operating system you know what to expect it's pretty much the same thing you just basically type the address of a website you want to go to and then there you go for example here's my website for the channel so if you have ever used a web browser before especially firefox then you pretty much know what to expect here there's nothing out of the ordinary go ahead and close this in addition to that i mentioned that we have an entire office suite we have libreoffice writer installed by default so i'll bring that up and if you have ever used microsoft word or any other office suite or even libreoffice on a different operating system then you know what to expect it's a word processor it allows you to type things create documents basically the things that you would expect to use a word processor for and it's every bit as good as microsoft office some people out there might think that it's not as good but it actually is i have written all five of my professionally published books with libreoffice and i have had no problems whatsoever even when other people on the publishing team are sharing documents in the microsoft office format it works just fine for me so the way that i see it since i was able to write books with libreoffice then there's no reason why you can't be productive on that as well and it's really great that it's included by default in fact most distributions actually include libreoffice since it is a free office suite it is free to be included in other distributions so you will find libreoffice common on most of the linux distributions out there and popos is no exception now other applications that we have pre-installed here for example we have geary which is the default email client so i'm not going to go through the entire process here but if you want to go ahead and add an account then you could do that here for example gmail which will then show your emails in geary and gary is essentially an email client if you've ever used an email client before then you basically know what to expect an alternative is thunderbird if you want to try a different one but geary is the one that is included by default in addition have weather so if i click on that which might require location services to be enabled that's something that came up at the very beginning when we first signed in you can see the current weather so no surprise there under system we have a few things of note we have system monitor so we can see the resource usage on our computer so for example we can see how much disk space we have available cpu percentages here memory as well and then we get a list of processes that are running on our system so that's pretty basic but very useful if you are running the nvidia version of papa west then you will have an nvidia x server app here that gives you information about your gpu so if you are monitoring your thermals on your gpu for example you can see the information here and get some other information there but i'll let you explore that if you have an nvidia card and then also we have popshop which i also have on the menu right here that is the application that is used to install other applications essentially however i have a different section in this video where i am going to discuss that so if you want to check out how to use popshop to add additional software to your installation then you can check out that section in this same video but other than that you basically get the idea once you install applications they will appear right here for example we even have a text editor and then we also have a calculator we have all kinds of cool things installed by default but i'll leave it up to you to explore these things but i've shown you most of those that are noteworthy as you can see we have a web browser we have utilities like a calculator an email client we have basically everything we need to get productive right away [Music] so in this section what i'm going to do is show you how to add new software to your pop os installation i've already shown you the default applications that come with popos but i think it's time that we go ahead and add some additional applications to our installation so we can extend the functionality even further and for that we will open up the pop shop application which is actually right here on the left hand side the icon represents a rocket ship so if we click on that we will have this window open up and now you'll notice right here that there is something spinning that just means that it's checking in and synchronizing so generally speaking you probably want to wait until that goes away before you go ahead and install anything but it's gone so let's work through some examples now here on the main page we see some applications that are very popular these are not all of the applications that are available to us these are just some of those that are the most installed and what i'm going to do right now is just install steam because steam is awesome and i think steam is something that you should definitely install if you are into games because there's quite a few games available for the linux platform and this is a good app to have if you are a gamer for sure now right here we have a selection that is currently set to pop os and then it shows deb now if you don't know what that means and you don't really care about the inner workings of a linux distribution then you really don't have to pay any attention to that at all because basically what we want to do is click the install button because that's what's going to get this application on our system now if you are curious you can see we have two options right here we have the deb option that i mentioned just now then we also have something called a flat pack flat pack applications are universal applications for linux which means a developer that designs an application can make that application available in the flat pack format and then they only have to basically create one version of that app and then any linux distribution that supports flat packs would then be able to have that application be available to their users so even though we have a bunch of linux distributions out there flat pack just allows developers to export their application just one time and then basically the majority of linux distributions out there would then have access to it which is pretty cool i'm going to leave this as the default because if you don't have a specific reason to choose otherwise you may as well just leave it as the default one thing to keep in mind is that flat pack versions of applications are generally more up-to-date than the ones that are available in the deb format but for steam that doesn't matter because steam will update itself anyway as soon as you launch it so i'll click install and i'm just putting in the same password that i used to log in with and now steam is downloading and it's already installing and it's done now that we have that installed if i access the activities overview and then go to applications we now have steam on the list of available applications it wasn't there before if i click on it the font size is really small because steam isn't really fully updated for super high resolution displays so if you ever see small text like this in the future then you'll know why so we'll ignore that but basically what it's doing is it's actually updating itself and that actually is done outside of the linux application environment and it's basically just downloading the newest version of itself from the steam servers most applications don't do this but steam is basically its own individual thing with its own individual quirks and after steam updates and everything it really shouldn't be this slow to launch it's just the first time does take a bit and then it does take a bit of time anytime they release a new version but then after that's all caught up it should actually open up pretty quick and here it is now i'm not going to sign into steam right now i just wanted to show you how to install an application and i've done that now we can click back to home and there are of course other applications that are available that you can go ahead and install slack is a very popular application especially for those of you that use linux professionally so what i can do is click the install button just like always as you can see it's downloading and i'll click the home button here to go back yet again and these are the popular applications like i've mentioned but if we scroll down we get some categories here so if you have a specific application that you would like to install and you have a general idea which category it should fall into for example maybe it's an internet browser that you want to install and then you can scroll through the list there's actually quite a few here so for example if you wanted to install the chromium web browser which is the open source browser that google chrome is based on you can simply install that like we would anything else by simply clicking the install button on the right hand side and then you can just repeat this process for whatever applications you would like to have installed you can just click the home button to go back and then on the install tab up here you will actually get a list of all of the applications that you have installed and this list will include applications that actually shipped with pop os so i didn't actually install all of these here most of these were pre-installed for example libreoffice in addition if you have updates i have a separate section in this video that talks about how to keep pop os up to date then you will actually have an update button in here if any of these applications have a newer version available so just keep your eye on that now every now and then there might be applications that are not available here in popshop which is the name of this application the majority of the applications that you would want to install on a linux desktop are available here but if i was to search for google chrome for example we could basically see that nothing has shown up for google chrome itself which is sad because a lot of people want to have google chrome but never fear google chrome is actually easy to install so what i will do is open up a web browser and if i do a search for google chrome we have this link right here for google chrome we just make sure that it is actually a google link so we don't download the wrong thing but it is and then we get this download chrome button right here and the cool thing about this is that this google chrome installation page right here will automatically detect the fact that you are running on a linux distribution and when you click the download chrome button here it's actually going to default to the correct thing which is a dev file and even though it says debian ubuntu pop os is based on debian ubuntu so it's actually fine we'll click accept and install and then right here it wants to download this dub file we can leave the default to open with eddie eddie is an application that basically helps us install things from the internet so i will click ok and then install then my same login password as normal and then i should put the password in correctly and we can see that google chrome is now installing on our computer it's downloading right now it's setting everything up and according to this it's actually done so if i access the activities overview and then go to show applications we actually see google chrome right here on the list and then you could choose to make it the default browser on your popos system if you'd like i'm not going to do that because i actually prefer firefox and then i will also uncheck this box to send statistics over to google i think they have enough of my information as it is and then i'll click ok and now we have google chrome so if this is your preferred browser well now you have it installed but anyway now you have just learned how to install applications on pop os i hope that was helpful and now we can go ahead and move on to the next section [Music] so in this section what i'm going to do is show you how to update your popos desktop the popos developers are constantly adding new features fixing bugs implementing security fixes and things like that so the updates that are available are very important so it's a good idea to make sure that you keep everything up to date as you use your computer you might see a notification appear at the top of the screen that will tell you that there are updates available if you missed that notification then you can click up here at the top center of the bar and then you'll see any notifications on the list here at the left that you may have missed if you didn't actually activate the alert in time and you can see here i have an alert that says there are updates available so i will click on that and when you do that that opens up the pop shop as i've discussed in a previous section popshop is basically your go-to for installing applications in addition to that it's also the go to when it comes to updating things as well because on this tab where it shows all of your installed applications you will also get a list of applications that have updates available and as you can see here there's actually several so what i'm going to do is click the update all button now before you do that you might see something spinning on the top bar and that just means that it's still in the process of checking for updates so if you see that animation just give it a minute and wait for that to go away and then you should be good to go and then you can click update all to make sure that everything is up to date next it's going to ask for your password this is the same password that you use to log into your computer with so i will add that right here and then as you can see it is currently installing updates and depending on how long it's been since the last time you've updated this can take some time if this is a brand new installation then it's going to need to get caught up with all of the updates that were released since the installation media was published so i will let this continue and then i'll be right back and you know that was pretty quick all of the updates have been installed and are ready to go now also here i have an option to install the nvidia driver this particular laptop has an nvidia gpu for gaming which is pretty cool but i actually installed popos with the intel version when i should have chose the nvidia version for this particular computer but that's okay because i can click the install button right here to install the nvidia driver which i'm going to do right now i may as well and this is especially good for those of you that may have started with an intel computer maybe something that you've custom built and then maybe later on you've added an nvidia card to your computer so you don't have to reinstall pop os if you add a new video card to your computer later on then you could click this install button to make sure that you have the appropriate driver for that video card now when it comes to amd video cards there really shouldn't be anything that you have to do to get this going so this is only for those of you that are adding an nvidia card or you have an nvidia card on your computer as you can see it's downloading the nvidia driver right now so i will give this a minute to install and then i'll be right back so that's all set and since i've installed the nvidia driver and i have also installed all of the updates as well it's a good idea to reboot to make sure that we are utilizing all of the updates so i'll click up here in the upper right hand corner and then where it says power off log out i'll click on restart and i've gone ahead and rebooted the computer and it's all set and ready to go we have all the latest updates and that's awesome so just make sure you keep an eye on that and that you install any updates that are made available as they become available and that'll make sure that you stay up to date on all of the new features as well as bug and security fixes and now we can go ahead and move on to the next section [Music] so now you have your very own popos installation you know how to use it you know how to add new software and you are well on your way to being a pro linux user but there's some additional tweaks that i would like to show you and the thing about linux in general is that there's no shortage of tweaks because you get more customization on this platform than any other so i'm going to show you some of my favorite tweaks although this does not constitute a full list just my favorites if you go on google and just search for linux customizations or anything like that you'll find a lot more but let's go through some of my favorites the first tweak that i'll go over is one that some may argue is a bit essential and this is about adding a feature back to the gnome desktop that was recently removed from the gnome desktop and there's a blog post about why this was done but i'm referring to tray icons that used to show up here at the top on this bar now we do see some icons already we see an indicator here for the battery the volume and the wi-fi signal right here if we click on that it brings up the system menu then we also have this icon here which we can use to enable or disable tiling mode but these aren't actually application icons or tray icons as they are historically known these are just icons that are part of the gnome desktop this tiling menu here is actually not normally part of gnome it's a customization from the developers of popos but if you recall a lot of applications will sometimes have their icon here for you to click on and by default gnome doesn't actually have that capability thankfully though it is very easy to add back so what we'll do is open up activities and then we'll go to applications and then we'll find the terminal app because we need to execute a few commands and this is going to be done in the terminal because it is an advanced tweak that is actually outside the normal scope of basic users but again i would argue that this is somewhat of an essential tweak so what we need to do is install a package so i'll just type out the command and this is somewhat of a long command so i'll let you pause the screen to make sure that you jot this down accordingly it's basically just one line but because of the font size it wrapped to the second line but basically what we're doing is we are updating the package database and we are installing a package called gnome shell extension app indicator now going through software management via the command line is beyond the scope of this video but here's the command right here so i went ahead and typed that out for you so all you have to do is jot that down into your terminal and then press enter and then you can type in the password that you used to log into your computer with and in my case it's already installed which is great but maybe for you it might not have been so what we'll do next is type gnome hyphen shell hyphen extension hyphen and then prefs just like that i'll press enter and then if we scroll down a bit ubuntu app indicators is already enabled so if this is already enabled you're good to go you have tray icon support i don't actually have any applications installed that would utilize this but if you do have this enabled then you don't have to worry if you do install an application at some point that does utilize tray icons then you will be able to see those tray icons so let's move on to another tweak shall we i'll go ahead and close out of everything here and for this what we are going to do is open up a web browser so with the browser open you can go to extensions.gnome.org in order to use this particular site there's actually a browser extension that we will need to install first we have the option to do so right here i'll make the font size a bit bigger here so you can see it better and where it says click here to install browser extension we will do that and click continue to installation and then add and we should be good to go sometimes you have to restart the browser other times not but let's see what happens now what we can do on this website extensions.gnome.org is install add-ons to gnome that will actually enable additional functionality now before we continue i do want to caution you you shouldn't install extensions unless you really need them because the more extensions you have installed the greater the risk for instability now there's no problem at all for having a small handful of extensions but when people complain about instability in gnome usually it comes down to having a bunch of extensions that are saturating memory and just basically ruining system performance but again installing a handful of extensions should not be a problem just only install the ones that you think you will definitely benefit from and don't think of this as an opportunity to install everything that you like from the list you will regret it but you should definitely look at the ones that i'm about to show you because i feel like the functionality they will give you is definitely worth having so first of all let's take a look at dash to dock this is by far the most popular gnome extension of all and whenever people are talking about the gnome desktop they will very often bring up dash to dock because again it's very popular so to install it we should be able to simply click on this button right here and then click install and that's it now i'm going to switch to a different workspace here so we can see it in action so i'll open a new window with a file manager icon here just to give you an example it opened in full screen there so let me go ahead and make that smaller you can see immediately what the dash to dock extension has done it's added this panel here to the left a lot of people like this especially people that have used ubuntu which has something like this by default now previously when we clicked on activities here we had that same bar here in the activities overview but what this extension is actually doing is making it visible all the time so you don't have to be in activities to see it you can actually just be well pretty much anywhere now this panel here shows you all the applications that are open again it's the same one that we see here there's no difference it's just that now it's always visible we also have if we right click right here dash to dock settings and that actually allows us to customize this quite a bit and we can customize this beyond what we were able to do before so for example we could change the icon size and crank it all the way up to the maximum if we want to or we could probably just lower this down to a very small number if we want to fit a bunch of icons there but we could customize this as we see fit and we can enable or disable intelligent autohide it's enabled by default so if i have this window right here and i just drag it over here getting closer getting closer and it gets out of the way if i make it full screen it gets out of the way and all i did was double click up here to make that full screen intelligent auto hide will make sure this panel is not in the way of any applications if i disable it you'll see the difference right away it stays there so i'm going to keep that on if we go to appearance we could choose to use the built-in theme if we want the same theme as the rest of the desktop i'll just leave that disabled you can customize the color the transparency and things like that and then we can customize the launchers i'll let you play around with the settings here but i think this extension is really awesome but anyway i will leave it up to you to just search around here and see if there's any other extensions that you want to install and maybe give a few other ones a try again don't go crazy don't install a bunch just install the ones that you think will add significant value to your workflow and as you go through the list maybe you will find an extension or two that adds some features to your gnome experience that will greatly enhance your workflow but i'll leave that up to you to go ahead and explore this list nowadays popos is my number one choice for desktop linux it makes everything easy especially getting set up for gaming and i just love this distribution the attention to detail is awesome and hopefully you like it too let me know your thoughts about pop os in the comments down below but if nothing else i hope this video was helpful in getting you set up on this awesome distribution if you like this video please click that like button because that lets youtube know that you want to see more linux content just like this and also make sure to subscribe if you haven't already done so because i have some awesome content coming very soon until next time thanks for watching [Music] [Music] you

Channel: LearnLinuxTV

Views: 92,001

Keywords: Linux, Tutorial, Review, Howto, Guide, Distribution, Distro, Learn Linux, operating system, os, open-source, open source, gnu/linux, LearnLinuxTV, LearnLinux.tv, linode, pop os, pop!_os, pop_os, system76, ubuntu, desktop, laptop, linux guide, pop guide, pop os for beginners, pop!_os for beginners, complete guide, pop os linux, linux desktop, pop os install, pop os shell, pop _os, pop! os, full review, linux distro, pop os linux 2020, linux desktop pc, pop os review 2020, pop os gaming

Id: 3Rcxjx3H9jo

Length: 78min 11sec (4691 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DevilMayCryBabyXXX]

This dude is awesome, he'll teach you how to install other distros (like Arch) as well as foreshadow the future of various distros (eg, currently servers + ubuntu).

He REALLY (to which I agree with) doesn't like what Ubuntu(native) is doing with SNAPs. He also discusses how Pop!_OS is in no way inclined to piggy-back off Ubuntu if things go south (ie, Privacy issues largely do to SNAPs). He has a pretty close relationship with the peeps from System76 (ie, Pop!_OS); to which System76 informed him they would likely transfer to Debian if things progress in the wrong direction with Ubuntu.

​

There's articles discussing how Pop!_OS is a better variant of Ubuntu as System76 adapts ea release with Pop!_OS to handle current issues with the release and provide any Improvements//Removals to enhance the performance of their distro.

[u/RSC0106]

full course?

[u/tpasi]

Love Jay. He makes great tutorials.

[u/derpOmattic]

SWEET! <that.