Pop!_OS - FULL Beginners Guide (updated for 21.04)

this guide for popos is brought to you by shells.com shells is a virtual desktop solution that allows you to have your very own desktop computer in the cloud once you set up your account you'll be able to access your virtual desktop through your web browser or via their mobile and desktop apps [Music] shells offer some great distributions too such as ubuntu mangero mint opensuse mx and others and they work directly with the community and distro developers to make their service seamless in fact they also offer windows and android desktops as well so you could test out apps for other platforms without wasting valuable ram by running a virtual machine they have 20 operating system options available and counting and pricing is simple shells offers transparent cost effective pricing and key features such as automatic backups are included once you set up your account you can get your very own cloud desktop running in less than five minutes no one does it faster and you can upgrade at any time to get more power in seconds definitely check out shells.com via the url on the screen which is also linked in the description below shells is awesome [Music] hello again everyone and welcome back to learn linux tv in today's video i am going to give you guys an updated guide on popos now i already had a guide on popos on this channel but so much has changed in version 2104 especially with the cosmic desktop that i figured it was time to update the guide and bring it current to the new version in this video i'll teach you everything that you'll need to know to get started with popos i'll walk you through the installation process i'll show you around the desktop how to install and remove applications and much more also i'm going to have time codes down below in the description so if you want to start with a specific section you can do that so let's go ahead and dive into pop os [Music] so what we're going to do in this section is set up our installation media for pop os so that way we can get it installed i'm recording this footage from a windows pc as you can see right here i decided to capture this footage from windows because i figured that quite a few of you are coming from windows so perhaps this environment will look more familiar to you now i've already inserted my flash drive i think pretty much any flash drive that sold today will be just fine usb 3 is preferred and i would say over two gigabytes should be fine but it really shouldn't matter all that much because we're not going to be using all that much space now when you insert your flash drive you might actually see a message that looks like this in my case i've already been using this flash drive to install linux distribution so windows doesn't really recognize the linux format when it comes to flash drives so it throws up this message because it really doesn't know what to do if you do see this message i recommend that you click cancel you can right click the start button you can go to disk management like you see right here and then here you find your flash drive now before we go any further the process of creating installation media for any linux distribution will wipe out everything on your flash drive so if you have anything important on your flash drive you will definitely need to back that up first before you continue so what i'm going to do is right click this partition right here and i know this is my flash drive there's no question it's the only other disk i have anyway so i'm going to right click on it and then delete the volume [Music] so i'm going to minimize this for now hopefully we won't need that again the next thing we're going to do is download pop os so what i'll do is open up a browser and in the address bar we can navigate to pop.system76 and that brings us right here to the official website we'll click download and we have two options here we have an nvidia version and then we have the standard version also take a look at the system requirements you can see that right here your system will need at least 2 gigs of ram 16 gigabytes of storage and a 64-bit processor so if you have an older computer from 10 years ago well you probably don't have a strong enough computer for this don't get me wrong popos runs great on every computer i've tried it on but just adjust your expectations accordingly if you have a computer that belongs in a museum then unfortunately this might not be the distribution for you now as far as which of these two versions you should download if your computer has an nvidia gpu inside then you'll definitely want to download this version right here for all other computers basically any computer that does not have an nvidia card you'll want to go with this one now the computer that i'm going to be installing popos onto that actually has an nvidia card so i'm going to download this one it's an iso file and if you're curious an iso file is essentially an image of a cd-rom or dvd but even though it's a cd or dvd image file we'll actually use this right here to create a flash drive so i'm going to save the file so it looks like my download is finished and we can see the entire file right here as of the time i'm recording this video the current version of pop os is 21.04 but even if there's a new version this process should work just fine the next thing that we're going to need is to download usb imager and that's the tool of choice that we're going to use to set up the installation media so i'm going to click on this link right here and i'll have a link to this down in the description below so don't worry about going to the wrong site but i like usb imager because they have a version available for pretty much every operating system as you can see we have a windows version we have a version for mac os ubuntu a generic linux version raspberry pi and so on so pretty much everything worth using for the most part is on this list so i'm going to click on this version right here for windows let's save it and it's a very small file as you can see it's 166 kilobytes so it downloads pretty quickly so here in the downloads directory we have both of the files right here we have usb imager and we have the image file for popos itself so what i'm going to do is extract this right here and inside this folder and inside this folder we have usb imager usb imager is not specific to pop os at all you could use this to create installation media for any distribution of linux that is deployed via an iso image so just keep that in mind i'll double click on it now usb imager is safe we're going to run it anyway so the first thing we're going to do is select the image that we want to write to the flash drive and in our case it's this one right here and then here we're going to select the flash drive that we want to write the image to and for me the only option in the list is the flash drive itself just make sure you are choosing the correct flash drive because again whichever flash drive you choose is going to be wiped out completely when you set up linux installation media for any distribution you are dedicating that flash drive to that iso image wiping out everything on it so i'll click on it and then i'll click the right button right here i like to leave the verify button checked just to make sure that everything is okay let's go ahead and write it and it's going to take several minutes for this process to finish i'll let it continue and then i'll be right back all right as you can see the process is complete we have successfully written the popos iso image to the flash drive so at this point what we're going to do is eject the flash drive from the computer and then you insert it into whichever computer you want to try out popos on and then we'll continue and in the next section in particular what we're going to do is test out compatibility before we install popos that's always a good idea so i'll see you in that section all right so what we're going to do in this section is test out compatibility with our hardware before we install pop os that's very important but the first thing that we'll need to do is boot our computer with the installation media that we created in the previous section and what you're seeing right here is the boot menu for my laptop in case you're curious i am using a thinkpad x1 extreme gen 1. that's what i'll be installing popos onto i don't use virtual machines on my channel unless i tell you guys otherwise i'll be installing popos on actual hardware and you will see it for yourself so what i'm going to do as it shows here is press f12 that allows me to select a temporary boot device i'm going to choose the flash drive it might be labeled as something else for you but it's right here in my case it's listed as usb hdd i'll press enter so right here what you are seeing is pop os this is actually pop os it's running right now no i didn't skip ahead and install it it hasn't even been installed yet what you are seeing is live mode live mode means the entire linux distribution is running off the flash drive basically it's treating the flash drive as if it was the hard drive and technically well it is a hard drive now i don't recommend that you actually go ahead and install popos just yet right here on the screen we have the installer but we're going to ignore it for now before we replace our current operating system we want to definitely make sure that our replacement operating system this distribution of linux right here pop os is compatible with our hardware you should absolutely never i repeat never install a linux distribution on your computer until you have first identified that it is compatible with your hardware so how do you do that well it's easy we're running popos in live mode so the best way to find out if it's compatible is to play around with it and take it for a test drive the first thing that i recommend you check is whether or not you have an internet connection in my case i'm using a laptop and it has a wi-fi card if i had a wi-fi connection that was active i would have an icon for it up here at the top right corner but i don't so i'm going to click on the top right corner right here it confirms that i'm not connected so click on that i'll select a network and in my case it's this one right here so i'm going to click on it and then i'll click connect i'll type in my super secret password for my wi-fi connection so as you can see the wi-fi icon lit up i am connected so far so good if that's not enough let's make sure we're connected let's go to a website so as you can see the website for learnlinux tv is on the screen right now so we know it's working in addition you should also make sure that any other piece of hardware that you want to use is also compatible with your computer under pop os so if you have a webcam make sure you connect it test it out ensure that it works if you have a printer a scanner maybe you want to use more than one display plug in your external display if you have one make sure that works and if everything goes according to plan you should be okay to go ahead and install pop os but what if you ran into a problem and something wasn't working maybe you went to connect to wi-fi and it didn't even give you the option to connect to wi-fi maybe your external display isn't working when you plug it in if any of those things are the case you can go ahead and go to community.learnlinux.tv we'll try to help you out just make sure you tell us which computer model you have your hardware for example what kind of wi-fi card you have the gpu things like that the more information you give us the better we can help you out system 76 also runs a chat room if you want live real-time support maybe somebody there can help you out but one of the things that you might want to take a look at if you go to settings which is this icon right here and then scroll down we have about right here that'll give you some information about your computer if you i don't know maybe forgot what type of hardware you actually have for example right here it's going to tell you what the gpu is you know what the cpu is so that's a good place to start but another thing that you can do if you run into a compatibility problem is run the lspci command normally you don't even need to use the command line in pop os but this is just a quick shortcut i'll make the font size a lot bigger here if you execute the lspci command as you see right there it's going to give you a list of hardware components that are inside your computer one per line the text is wrapped here it'll probably look a lot better on your end but this will give you model numbers of individual pieces of hardware for example if i had a problem with ethernet if i plugged in an ethernet cable and i didn't get an ip address or didn't detect a connection at all this is my ethernet card model right here if you're having a problem with any piece of hardware you can go through the output here find out what exact type of hardware you have the model number and you could do a quick google search on compatibility but on my end everything is compatible and i know everything is compatible because this is the laptop that i use on pretty much every video this is my studio laptop and pretty much every distribution of linux that you have seen on my channel that i've reviewed i've done so from this computer so i know it's compatible i'm ready to continue if everything has worked out for you so far you can go ahead and join me into the next section which is where we're going to actually install pop os [Music] in the previous section we tested compatibility with popos so at this point you should be reasonably confident that it's going to work on your hardware if nothing else at least test out wi-fi make sure that works and if it does we can continue now what you see on the screen right now is the pop os installer if for some reason this window here gets closed you can get back to the installer by clicking on this icon down here on the panel so on the first screen right here we're going to choose our language in my case it defaults to english if your primary language is something else go ahead and choose that but i'll click select to continue so here i'm going to choose united states again if you need to choose something else in your case go ahead and do so and then here we're choosing our keyboard layout i'll leave mine at the default you could choose whatever you'd like if yours is something different in addition you could test out your keyboard by typing something into the text box down here so if you want to test it out feel free to do so i'll click select and i'm going to choose the default keyboard layout for this again go ahead and go through the others if you want to choose something else and now we have a decision to make i already have popos installed on this particular computer and that's why i have this banner right here it's asking me if i want to unlock encrypted storage and that just means that i have an encrypted installation already on this hard drive on your end you probably won't see this but if you set up a linux distribution previously and you decided to encrypt it you might see this banner now in this video what i'm going to do is i'm going to essentially wipe out my entire hard drive we're going to do a full install on your end you definitely want to make sure that you have backed up all of your important files before you continue because everything on the hard drive i repeat everything is going to be wiped out we also have a button right here to try demo mode in the previous section we went ahead and tested compatibility and what this button is going to do is it's going to actually close the installer it'll give us a chance to play around with the distribution on our hardware and that's a good idea if you haven't already done that but i'm going to continue i'm going to choose clean install and now it's asking us which hard drive we want to install popos onto i'll choose this one right here it's my only option anyway and then i'll click erase and install i'll type in my full name and for the username i like to simplify that actually so i just use my first name you could type whatever username you want or you could just keep the default it's up to you i'll click next and now what i'm going to do is choose a password for my user and you definitely want to make sure that you remember what you type here because if you forget it then you won't be able to get into your system at all click next and this next screen right here is giving us the option to encrypt our hard drive and i recommend that you do that just like with any other operating system that offers full disk encryption pop os gives you encryption at rest that means if somebody was to power on your computer if they don't have the password they can't even boot your computer and they also can't take your hard drive out of your computer put it in another computer and read the data once you unlock the computer and boot it up then everything is essentially unencrypted this just gives you an added layer of protection if your device gets stolen or something like that and if you work at a company you should absolutely encrypt your hard drive for sure because you definitely don't want company secrets to leak out so if you're using popos in the enterprise definitely encrypt it to encrypt it you can click set password but what i'm going to do is just simplify it and check this box right here and that's going to make the encryption password the same as my user password if you want the encryption password to be different you can click the set password button right here it's lit up when you don't have this checked and that will allow you to choose a dedicated password for your encryption so i'll click encrypt and now popos is installing i'm going to let it finish and then i'll be right back all right so at this point our installation is complete in the next section i'm going to teach you all about navigating the desktop how to change settings launch applications customize things it's going to be a lot of fun so what i'll do is restart the device and i'll see you in the next section [Music] in this section i'm going to teach you guys how to use the cosmic desktop that's the branding that popos uses for their desktop environment but first i've encrypted the hard drive when i installed popos and i'm going to need to enter the password right here in order to unencrypt it and allow it to boot so as you can see i've logged in to pop os i have the desktop on my screen right now and the first thing that appears is this welcome screen and what this welcome screen will do is help us set up our initial popos experience so let's go ahead and get to it so i'm going to click next to get started now during the installation process it asked us to customize the keyboard layout but that was for the installation process itself at this point any settings that we choose are for our actual installation so i'll leave mine at the default and at this point it's giving us the option to customize the dock that we see at the bottom of the screen right here in particular you could choose whether or not we want the dock at all so if i choose no dock it goes away and a lot of people like myself we prefer to have no dock at all down here at the bottom in my personal opinion you lose a little bit of screen real estate with that however some people really enjoy having a dock so they might want to leave this at the default which is this right here but there's also an alternative as well we have this option right here which is going to help us shrink the dock horizontally so it's not taking up all of the bottom of the screen as you see here so just go ahead and choose whichever of these options you prefer i'm going to leave it at the default and click next and now it's giving us an option to configure the top bar which is this up here so we have a workspaces button an applications button and we could toggle each one of those on or off as we see fit for the date and time right here you can put it all the way on the right we can move it to the left i'll keep it in the center as you see here and at this point it's just going to give us some helpful tips and what this screen is telling us is that if we press the super key which is also known as the windows logo key it brings up the application launcher and the application launcher is pretty cool you can use it to easily launch applications we'll talk more about that a bit later but all you have to do is just start typing and i didn't even finish typing the word firefox it already narrowed the list down to firefox right here i'll click on it and then we have firefox it's telling me that it can't connect because i don't have a wi-fi connection i did set up wi-fi near the beginning of the video but i didn't even have popos installed yet at that time and i did that just to test out wi-fi and make sure that it works but now what i'm going to do is connect to wi-fi and now i have a connection we know that because the wi-fi icon up here is lit up and as you can see i have a connection and we will revisit firefox a little bit later but now we know that the application launcher allows us to launch applications easily which i will be talking more about later anyway i'll click next and here on this screen it's letting us know about mouse gestures as of papa west 2104 there's support for gestures which means that we can scroll in certain directions with a certain number of fingers on the touch pad and that'll have various effects it tells us about the individual gestures that we can do right here so for example if i place four fingers on the touchpad and swipe left that brings up the workspace overview we'll talk more about the workspace overview in just a moment now if we do the same thing but we swipe four fingers to the right instead it gives us a list of applications that we have installed then four fingers down four fingers up that allows us to switch workspaces we'll talk about launching applications and workspaces very shortly but at this point just keep in mind that we have support for gestures that's pretty cool by default location services are disabled and that's something that you might want to consider enabling if you plan to use something like no maps or any application that uses your location for example gps coordinates and things like that if that's something that you plan on using you can turn this on i'm going to leave it disabled for now and at this point we'll actually choose our location on the map and that'll help us choose our time zone and that's a good thing because if you were to look at the date and time right here at the top of the screen you would be under the impression that i am recording this on july 9th at 1 48 pm now it is true i am recording this on july 9th however it's not 1 48 p.m so i'll definitely need to set my time zone so i'm going to click right about here and maybe i need to click a little bit over to the right i'm somewhat close to detroit within a few hours either way that gives me the correct time zone and you'll notice right here that the time has updated this is the correct time so far so good so basically on your end you just click wherever you are on the map it'll set your location in your time zone i'll click next and on this screen right here we have several different services that you can sign into if you have an account on any one of these services feel free to go ahead and sign in that'll give you integration for things like email online calendar contacts and things like that so if you have an account on one of these you can go ahead and set it up now i'm going to skip this because i don't have any accounts that i want to use with popos at this time so i'm going to skip that and now we're all set and ready to start using popos now before i give you guys an overview of the desktop the first thing that we should do is make sure that everything is up to date and that's true of every operating system the first time you install it make sure you install every patch that's available because a lot of those patches are security updates and we definitely want those now down here we have pop shop i'll click on that and i'll cover pop shop in a separate section but for right now we can click on installed we have a number by it is telling us that we have some operating system updates here so i'm going to click update all and that's going to take some time to complete so i'll let it finish and then i'll be right back so all the updates are installed it tells me right now that we no longer have any components that are available with updates so we're up to date so let's go ahead and talk about the cosmic desktop that's what you see on your screen right now that's what popos calls their desktop environment actually the desktop environment for pop os is the gnome desktop environment but they add a bunch of tweaks on top of dome to make it their own for example we have a panel down here and gnome normally doesn't even have a panel at all you can easily add a panel to any gnome installation on a linux distribution by simply adding the extension and extensions give you the ability to extend the gnome experience even further but popos has already done that for us by including a dock right here we also have a workspaces button an applications button these are normally combined under one menu in most gnome installations they've separated this and then we have our control center up here so let's go through the individual components in more detail so that we can understand everything better now the first thing that i'm going to do is launch an application so i'll click on applications right here and that brings up the applications menu all the applications that you have installed will show up here if you have more applications installed than will fit on this screen then you'll have a few dots on the right hand side that'll give you different pages you can click on so basically applications will extend to additional pages as needed as soon as you start installing apps what i'm going to do is click on firefox that's the browser of choice for papa west probably the first thing that people will click on anyway and if you've ever used a web browser before then you know exactly what to expect here firefox on pop os is the same firefox that you might have used on windows or mac os you can just type the name of the website you want to go to so i'll go to mine right here and here we have the official website for learn linux tv now there's multiple ways to launch applications on pop os so to launch firefox just now i went to applications and then i clicked on it the icon was right here but i didn't have to do that we have an icon down here on the panel as well and now we have firefox again so application icons down here at the bottom we'll talk about the panel in just a moment but if there is an icon for an app you can launch it just by clicking on it in addition and i briefly touched on this earlier we have the application launcher for pop os that we can access by hitting the super key aka the windows logo key and in this box you can start typing the name of the application that you want to run and you don't even have to finish typing it because the list will be narrowed down as you type so already it's putting firefox at the top of the list because it's the closest match when it comes to what i typed right here in this box now you can launch an application by holding control and pressing the number that's associated with the application in the results or you can simply click on it that works too and here's firefox yet again but you get the idea personally i like to use the application launcher because i find it to be a faster way to launch applications so that's pretty much become muscle memory for me but you can launch applications however you want now another thing that you can do is you can actually sort the application icons that you see here into groups so for example i could drag the terminal icon into system and now we have the terminal icon right there and you can also create a new group by simply dragging one icon on top of another so for example this is the email client that we have by default and pop os and calendar is often associated with email usually if you use one you use the other anyway so i could just drag that on top of that icon right there and it tells me that it's an unnamed folder that's okay i can name it whatever i'd like i'll just name it office stuff probably not the most creative name for it but you get the idea and you can customize this any way you'd like i'll leave that up to you to explore if that's something that you want to do but now you have all the details on how to launch applications in popos another application that i think you should be familiar with is the files app you have an icon for it right here and as with every other operating system this is a file manager we can use it to well manage files so if you've downloaded files you'll find them here in the downloads directory we have a place for videos music pictures and things like that so on your end you can begin copying your files over to pop os in the designated folders and you can use this app to browse your files accordingly another app that we have here that you might want to check out is settings i'm going to spend some time with this right here because you might want to customize a few things and the settings app is the tool of choice for customizing pretty much everything when it comes to your desktop experience i can't go through everything here though there's just a bunch of options but what i will do is show you guys a few of the things that are the most commonly used right here i'm on the wi-fi section so if you want to i don't know change your wi-fi password maybe delete a wi-fi network from your list you could do that all from right here now the network section right here this is for wired networking i don't have an ethernet cable plugged in right now so there's nothing that i can do but if you are using a system with an ethernet jack and you want to use a wired ethernet connection then this is the menu right here where you would go to do that so here we have bluetooth and if you do have a bluetooth adapter in your computer then this right here is going to allow you to set up your bluetooth devices maybe you have a bluetooth headset in my case i have a chromecast that's near me it's giving me the option to use that so this is where you would go to pair bluetooth devices now the desktop section that i just clicked on which was right here that brings up several additional sections and these sections all have to do with customizing your desktop experience i mentioned earlier that the super key launches the application launcher that was this right here in previous versions of pop os and other distributions of linux the super key used to bring up workspaces so if i was to click right here and then press the super key you can see that it no longer brings up the application launcher instead it brought up the workspaces screen and i'll be showing you workspaces here momentarily but another thing we can do is map the super key to the application screen itself but if you want a full screen application menu when you hit the super key then you can choose that option as for me i'm going to leave that on as default of launching the launcher when you press the super key so here we have an option to enable the hot corner what that allows you to do is move the mouse cursor into the top left corner of the screen to get to workspaces which i feel is a bit redundant because if your mouse cursor is already about right here anyway you might as well click on it so i'm going to disable that so just like we saw when we went through the welcome screen we have the ability to turn on or turn off the workspaces and applications buttons so if you prefer not to have one or the other you could turn them off right here on my end i'll usually disable the applications button because i have the application launcher anyway but you can choose accordingly whatever your preference is and right here we have a minimize button but if for some reason we don't want that we could turn it off and we can also add a maximize button to the window as well that acts the same way a maximize button does on other operating systems i'm going to leave it off and even without the maximize button being enabled you can double click on the title bar right here to do exactly the same thing and then you could double click on it again to on maximize so you won't really need the maximize button at all but if you do want that you can turn that on on this tab right here we can set the background and you can scroll through the various wallpapers that we have here by default it's pretty simple you just click on the one you want you can add a new picture here if you have a picture you want to use as the wallpaper so pretty standard stuff there under appearance it defaults to dark mode and as an alternative you could turn on light mode so just to give you an idea of what that looks like we could see the difference immediately now i'm going to change it back to dark mode but on your end you could just choose whichever of these that you prefer and then on the dock section we can customize the dock which is this thing right here we saw some of these options when we went through the welcome screen but there's some additional options here in this menu that you might want to take a look at so for example we have a workspaces button it's this one right here so essentially we have two workspaces buttons you have this one and we have this one and i think that's a little bit redundant so what i can do is disable that one i could disable the applications menu as well and that gives you the ability to disable the buttons right here if you want to and have them only show up down here so basically you have some pretty cool options when it comes to where to show the applications menu and the workspaces menu but i'm going to turn that back on and then when we scroll down we have some additional options one thing we could do is choose always hide for the dock which made it go away and if you move your mouse down here at the bottom that makes it come up and then it goes away but the one that i like the most is intelligently hide if i was going to use a dock this would definitely be the method that i would like now the difference between always hide and intelligently hide is that with intelligently hide it's only going to hide when a window gets too close to the panel and the reason why i like that is because it allows you to have a panel without the panel wasting screen real estate so i maximized the window the panel went away and then when i on maximize the panel comes back if we have a set to always visible we're going to lose this screen real estate all the time regardless of the situation i don't have this area of the screen available for anything else but the panel so that's why i like to choose intelligently hide when i do use a panel because again that gives me more of my screen real estate back and that's great down here we can also choose a size for the panel as well and we could totally just crank it and make it completely ridiculous if we want to that's huge so what i'm going to do is just go back down to 60 which was the default just keep in mind that you do have full control over the size but not only that you can also move the panel to the left hand side of the screen if you prefer i think i like that a little bit more you can move it to the right side or back to the bottom [Music] when it comes to workspaces which i'll be getting into shortly we could choose some options that are associated with workspaces i think some of these options are beyond the scope of this video the one thing that you might want to take a look at is whether or not the workspace picker is on the left side or the right-hand side of the screen so when i click up here on workspaces it's on the left and now it's on the right so you can choose to have the workspace picker on the left or the right it's up to you we have a section for notifications sometimes applications will show notifications and you will see them at the top of the screen and if you didn't get a chance to read what the notification had to say you could actually click on the time and date right here all of the notifications will show up in this menu if you don't want to see any notifications at all you can choose do not disturb you can turn that on and that'll prevent any notifications from showing up on the screen while you're working then later on you can click right here and view any notifications that might have appeared while you had do not disturb enabled now if an application is driving you crazy and showing notifications that you would prefer not to see then you can go through this list and you can disable the ability for any app to show notifications on the screen so as you can see i could turn off notifications and then the files app is now no longer able to show me notifications there's also some settings for individual applications as well so here for example we have the archive manager the archive manager is what you'll use to zip and unzip files things like that we have some options for that and if you click through the various apps here you'll have options for each now how many options you have here depends on the individual application that you're clicking on some of them like this one won't have any options at all and sometimes that's because this whole settings section here for applications is relatively new and maybe the developer of an application just hasn't gotten around to making the settings visible here in this menu but you might want to take a look through the applications here and customize any settings that might be relevant when it comes to printers if you have a printer that's already attached to your computer it should be automatically installed this particular printer right here is a network printer so i didn't even have to install it popos found it and installed it for me so if you have a compatible printer you really shouldn't have to do anything it should just work if for some reason it doesn't work you could check the manufacturer's website for a driver for linux in the absence of that then the printer might not be supported there's countless models of printers out there so i can't go through them all but if you do have a printer you should be able to plug it into your computer it should automatically show up if not again just download the appropriate software if you have a network printer you should find that as well if it supports linux as mine does right here so here we have users if we need to add a new user to the system we first need to unlock this menu right here and type in our login password and that gives us full access to users we can click add user so i'll create batman then we can set it right here to allow them to set a password when they first log in we can set a password now you get the idea we can make them an administrator as well and that means that they are able to do things like install applications remove applications update the system things like that but i'm going to cancel we get the idea if you want to create a user you can do that right here we also have the about screen and this will give us information about the computer that we have popos installed onto in my case it's a thinkpad x1 extreme the first generation of that model and you can see right here which cpu i have the gpu the amount of ram and some of that memory is reserved is actually 32 gigabytes the capacity of the hard drive and so on we also have right here an os upgrade and recovery option and through this menu if a new version of popos is available we'll have a button somewhere around here that will allow us to update to that version now we also have a recovery partition created as well so if we run into any problems and we want to reinstall popos we don't need to grab that flash drive again we can boot into recovery mode and we can restore it that way every now and then the recovery partition itself will have an update so i'll click on that so now the recovery partition has been updated just something you might want to check into every now and then and there's a lot of other settings here that are beyond the scope of this video i can't go through everything i think you have a general idea of what to expect now actually there's a few other options i do want to show you now up here on the upper right hand corner of the screen we have the control center and of course we have our obvious things like the volume and the screen brightness and things like that we have quick access to some of the settings that you saw earlier in the settings menu the one thing that i want to show you guys is that if you click right here where it shows you how much battery you have remaining you can actually change your performance mode so you can set it to battery life as i have mine set to to save battery on my end the fan on this particular computer is very loud so i set it to battery life to kind of dial down the cpu a little bit because it's really annoying to try to edit out the fan when i record a video so there's that but if i was going to do some crunching or something that was going to be a bit more intensive i can crank it all the way up to high performance and if you're curious it defaults to balanced now let's go ahead and talk a little bit about the panel down here at the bottom i've already been talking about it on and off but there's a few more things that i would like you to be aware of now the thing is right now we have no applications running at all we do have icons but nothing is actually running if i was to click on the files app we now have a dot you can kind of just see it right here underneath the icon and that tells us that that application is running so if i was to open a new window now i have two of those windows open and now a third and a fourth and a fifth now what you can see here is that we have four dots underneath the icon so if you have multiple instances of that app running you'll have a dot for each instance but it's up to a maximum of four i have five of these windows open and i have only four of the dots right here and as i close them the dots will start going away so in case you're wondering why we have application icons down here even for apps that aren't running a lot of these icons are applications that have been set as favorites out of the box pop os has set some of the apps as favorites for you so for example if you don't use the linux terminal at all you can right click on it and you can click remove from favorites and it's gone and then if you go to the applications menu let's just say for example you like to use the text editor we have that right here it's a pretty decent text editor we'll right click on it and add it to favorites so now when we close it the icon for it remains so with the panel you can set all of your favorite applications as favorites and keep the icon visible down here at all times that's just something that you might want to consider if you think that having apps listed as favorites and being always available on the panel will be of use to you but i'll leave that up to you now the last thing that we're going to go over in this section is the concept of workspaces and i love this quite a bit again we have a button for it right here by default we also have a button for it down here on the panel and in addition to that you can hold down super and press letter d and that's going to show the workspaces overview as well at first it doesn't look like much all it does is just bring up whatever this is on the left hand side which just shows the wallpaper well actually this is a visual representation of the desktop itself and i think if i have an application running it'll be a bit more obvious you can see the app right here and you also see it right here but you also see another desktop you click on it you have an empty desktop now i have nothing i can open up firefox or whatever other application and go back to workspaces and i have another empty desktop created as you can see every time i open an application on a workspace it gives me another workspace and this concept is referred to as dynamic workspaces that means that you'll always have at least one empty desktop to use at any one time and on each of these workspaces you can have different applications running and i will tell you i have found that workspaces is by far the most useful feature of pop os in my opinion because for every project that i'm working on i can have all the apps and windows that are associated to that project on its own workspace and that's great because i could be working on a youtube video maybe i'm editing a video here in this workspace maybe i have an email client open right here a chat app and perhaps on this workspace i have a bunch of linux terminals and i'm using them to do some development work and that's what workspaces are in a nutshell you can use workspaces to separate your apps into groups or separate desktops and you can organize them any way you'd like if nothing else if you find your current desktop is extremely busy you have a bunch of apps open you can just go to an empty workspace and start over from there and you can switch between them anytime you'd like and you can do that by just opening up the workspaces menu as you see here and clicking on the workspace that you want to switch to and after you've chosen the workspace just click on an application and then the workspace picker goes away also if your computer has a touchpad then you can use the touchpad via gestures to switch from one workspace to another so what you do is you swipe four fingers up or down and as you can see i'm flipping through between these different workspaces and i'm able to do that without even having to click on workspaces the button right here i could just use the touchpad i could use gestures that's pretty cool but even if you don't have a touchpad there's another way that you can switch from one workspace to another and you could do that via keyboard shortcuts if you hold ctrl and super at the same time and press up or down that's going to allow you to switch from one workspace to another and especially on a desktop that's going to be a great way to do it also you can move a window from one workspace to another by holding super and shift instead of super and control and then you can press up or down to move the application that's currently selected to a different workspace so as you can see this files window is following me around as i go through the workspaces so i can move it to whichever workspace i'd like and there you go in the next section what i'm going to do is go over tiling tiling is awesome i'm going to show you all about it and why i like it so much i think it's going to improve your workflow so i definitely recommend that you follow me into the next section and check out tiling mode in this section i'm going to teach you guys about tiling right there with workspaces tiling is one of my favorite features of pop os but first of all what exactly is tiling what tiling allows you to do is have better arrangement of the apps that are on your screen so for example perhaps i'm extremely busy and i have a bunch of things going on here and sometimes the desktop can get a bit crowded i mean it's not so much of an issue i can open applications i can close them i can maximize something i could even drag an app to the left hand side of the screen and i can also drag one to the right hand side of the screen so even without tiling i have some pretty decent features here for arranging applications on my screen but tiling takes it to a whole new level so what i'm going to do is enable tiling right now right here we have the tiling icon and this icon has a few little rectangles on it and you can see that one rectangle is overlaid on top of the others and this actually means that tiling is disabled if i click on it we can see that tiling is in fact disabled this is the button to turn it on right here so i'll click on it and as you can see both applications have been switched to full screen each sharing a specific section of the screen and that's essentially what tiling is now with tiling off i was still able to do this and that's okay if i was to open up something like settings for example that window is just overlaid on top of the others it's not actually tiled if i switch back to tiling mode and then i open another app maybe i'll open up this text editor right here you can immediately see what happened here the new application has actually been given its own quadrant on the screen and that's what tiling allows us to do all applications are always visible in tiling mode you don't have to worry about another app underneath this one or behind one of these every time you open a new app it gives it a new section of the screen now tiling even goes further than that which i'm going to show you here shortly now first i really don't like that we have this panel down here i mean the panel is good and all but it's taken up a little bit of screen real estate and when i'm running in tiling mode i really don't like to have a panel so let's go ahead and get rid of it now already we have a little problem here because the settings app is too small i can't actually see what's inside that window now on my desktop i have an ultra wide display and on that display i could fit a bunch of applications but what you're seeing this footage from is a standard laptop it has a 4k screen but it still has a 16 by 9 aspect ratio so i am a little bit limited as far as how many things i can have on the screen at any one time there is a way around that which i'll show you shortly but right now what i want to do is move this window somewhere where i can see it better so with this application selected i can hold super and press enter and notice that it actually turned into a different color using the arrow keys i can move it to a different section as you can see i'm just pressing up down left right and i can certainly see it better up here so i'll go to desktop because what i wanted to do is get rid of the dock and i don't want to disable it i mean i could but i really like intelligently hide that's pretty cool and now the dock is gone what i like about intelligentlyhide like i mentioned earlier in the video that means that the panel will be shown when there's nothing else on the screen now with tiling mode the first application that i launch is going to be full screen so if i launch a new web browser window for example the panel's going to go away so i still have the panel available when i need it but i won't lose any screen real estate so i think that's a good trade-off one of the things that i really love about the tiling implementation in popos is that it has a feature called tab stacks and in my opinion tab stacks makes it a lot easier for most people to benefit from tiling since this laptop has a display that's not an ultra wide you could probably make the argument that tiling really doesn't make sense because i don't really have that much screen real estate anyway at most i could probably have four applications here in tiling mode and each quadrant is kind of small so for example this web browser right here if i was to go to my website i mean it works but it's kind of small and if you're watching one of my videos for example it's in a very small section of the screen that's not really ideal now when it comes to a browser i can actually open a new tab and the concept of tabs has spread to other applications as well so for example here in the file browser i can right-click a folder i can open it in a new tab so i have different tabs now this really helps my screen real estate because i can close this window right here for example i can have all of my individual folders open in tabs that'll save a lot of screen real estate but the problem is i can't have a tab that's a text editor sharing the same window as a file manager and that's a limitation of tabs in most apps because each app is only going to allow you to have tabs for other instances of that same app where tab stacks come in is that allows you to tab any application with any other application it doesn't matter if you want firefox to be one tab and then the g edit text editor right here to be in another you can do that let's go ahead and see it in action and maybe a more practical example is you're watching one of my videos and i'm teaching you something about the linux command line one of the many things that i teach you on my channel so in that case you might have a terminal open and maybe you are also taking notes as well so you have a text editor open in addition to that now honestly this isn't so bad i think this is workable but the problem is with this video window being so tiny i think some of the text might be hard to read so let's enable tab stacks and see what we can do about that so to enable tab stacks you select the first window so i've selected firefox right here you hold super and press s and you can see that i have a new border on top of that application now what i'm going to do is click on another application i'm going to hold super and press enter and again that's how you change the location of where that particular application is which quadrant it's in so for example i can move it up and down but what that also allows me to do is move the window into a tab stack directly to the left of that window is a tab stack we know that because we see an orange border right there at the top i can even move it left and right inside the tab stack maybe i want it to be the first thing maybe i want it to be the second thing and when i have the window where i want it to be i press enter and that's going to finalize the move i could do the same thing right here again i hold super press enter and then i move it into the tab stack i think this works out very well even on a computer that has a resolution that's relatively small i now have different tabs i can click on so maybe i'm studying a video i can enter in some commands right here and take some notes right here so you can set this up any way you'd like and then to move something out of a tab stack you just reverse the process hold super press enter and then you can move the application out of the tab stack press enter again select the next one hold super press enter move it out and then you can convert a tab stack back to a normal window by holding super and pressing s the same keyboard combination that you used to create the tab stack in the first place and now the border is gone and it's a normal window again in tiling mode you can use the mouse too so you can actually resize a window and as you can see here the other windows that are here in tiling mode they will automatically resize as well and in addition to keyboard shortcuts you can also use your mouse as well if you prefer that so as you can see i was able to move one quadrant into another by just simply dragging the window what i can also do is drag a window directly on top of another one and what that does is well it creates a tab stack and then i could drag it out of the tab stack if i'd like so if you prefer not to use keyboard shortcuts or you have problems remembering keyboard shortcuts you can simply use the mouse and you can tile your windows accordingly and then to disable tiling you just click right here and turn it off it's that easy now if you do prefer to use keyboard shortcuts you can click right here and then click view all right here to get a complete list of keyboard shortcuts that are associated with tiling we have the list right here so for example if you are an advanced user and you are familiar with vim you can use bim shortcuts such as hjkl to move windows as well if you like that so i'll hold super press enter and then i'll press k to go up h to go left l to go right and j to go down if you become familiar with vim if you're not already it'll save you a lot of time because in resting position your fingers are already in that position anyway so you may as well use those keys to move windows around i think it's actually a lot easier once you get used to it it also tells us right here that we can hold super and press slash and that brings up the application launcher that's a holdover from a previous version of pop os we don't really need to press slash anymore because we simply press super and it brings up the application launcher just like we discovered earlier in the video now another thing that you can do is you can convert a window to be a standalone window even when tiling is enabled without actually disabling tiling so what i can do then is i can actually select whatever window i'd like to have omitted from tiling i can hold super and then press letter g and now this window is converted into a normal window tiling mode is still enabled we know that it's still enabled but this window is a freeform window i could just move it wherever i'd like and then to reverse that process i can hold super and press g and then it becomes a tiled window again in addition to that i could change the orientation of windows in tiling mode with keyboard shortcuts as well so in this case i'm going to hold super i'm going to press letter o and as you can see it's now a horizontal window when before it was vertical and there i've reversed the process so tiling mode is definitely something that i recommend that you try out it's one of those things that i just can't live without it's just so awesome i especially love the fact that with tab stacks i can tab individual windows together even unrelated apps can share up this same section of the screen and that allows me to use tiling here on this laptop that has a smaller resolution so feel free to play around with that and in the next section what i'm going to do is show you how to install applications i'll see you there [Music] in this section i'm going to teach you guys how to install additional applications applications that go beyond the apps that are installed by default as we've discussed earlier we have the applications menu right here and that shows us applications that we have installed currently and by default we have a web browser we have firefox we have an office suite and in particular this is libreoffice which is actually my office suite of choice my latest book mastering ubuntu server third edition was written solely in libreoffice so yeah libreoffice is pretty good and we have that right here but even though we have applications installed by default that are very useful we're eventually going to need to install additional applications so what i'm going to do is walk you through the process of installing an application right now down here on the panel we have pop shop that's also visible in the applications menu as well we have it right here and here it is now when you first open it up you're going to have a spinning icon right here it just went away what that means is that it's actually synchronizing with the list of available packages on the server side you could think of pop shop kind of like an app store it's not all that different from an app store that you might have on your phone you select an application to install and it's really simple so right here we have steam and steam is a very popular game distribution platform if you're coming from windows then you are no doubt very familiar with steam and we can simply install it by clicking on the install button right here it'll ask us for a password just to make sure that we have permission to install applications in the first place and that was easy it's now installed the install button changed to uninstall and in the applications menu here's steam so far so good now if there's an application that you want to install and it's not in this list right here we can still install it and this list in particular is just a bunch of applications that the popos developers have added as pics things that a lot of people end up installing matter most for example that's the application that you would use to connect to the popos chat room and that's here as a pick i recommend you install that because well why not it's definitely a great way to chat with the popos developers and other popos fans in the official chat room so just like before we can click on it now here it actually says something different there's different types of packages that we can install in popos and we only have this one option right here but if i was to go to another application for example and what i'm going to do is search for an application actually i want to install thunderbird by default we have geary as the default email client personally i prefer thunderbird so i'll click on that and it also says flat pack right here as well but we also have a dub version or ubuntu version without going into too much detail popos is based on ubuntu that's the parent distribution if you will so we have an option for the dub version and right here we have the flat pack version what's the difference most of the time i recommend flat packs over the normal debian package version the reason for that is because the flat pack will often be a much newer version than the one that is typically available in ubuntu's repositories and by repository i'm just referring to the source where the application comes from now if i scroll down we can see that this particular version of thunderbird is version 78.11 and this is the flat pack version this version here may not be the actual newest version it just depends doesn't really matter which one you install both are perfectly valid but the reason why i mentioned this is if you install an application and you notice that it's an older version maybe you want to benefit from newer features in that application then you might want to install the flat pack often the debian package will be the most stable and the flat pack version will be the most up-to-date and that's a trade-off the decision is up to you but anyway i'll go ahead and install it and there we go and i can open the app by clicking on open right here but it's also right here in the applications menu as soon as you install a new application it'll show up in the menu and now i have thunderbird so i can fill in the details for my email account right here and then it'll be set up and ready to go i'm not going to do that though i already have my email account set up on another computer anyway but you get the idea now i just showed you how to install applications it's a pretty easy process but there is one problem though it's often the case that there might be an application that you want to install and it's simply not available here at all and that's not the fault of pop os some developers out there just don't publish their applications in the pop shop for whatever reason sometimes there could be licensing issues it doesn't mean that you can't install that application it just means that it's not available here in popshop so if you search for an application here and it doesn't show up that just means that it's not available in popshop but again that doesn't mean that you can't have that particular application so one example of that is google chrome that's an application that a lot of people will end up installing i'm going to go ahead and search for it and i don't see it here on the list at all there's a bunch of applications listed we even have an on google chromium version right here which is pretty cool but we don't have google chrome itself what can we do about that well what i'm going to do is minimize this for now [Music] i'll bring up the browser and i'm going to search for google chrome and we need to be careful and make sure that we're clicking on a legit website it doesn't happen often but every now and then a malicious person will try to insert a bad link here it's very unlikely but we always want to make sure that we are installing from a proper source and this one's from google so we should be fine and right here we have a download button so i'm going to click on it and it's smart enough to notice that we're running on linux it says that right here popos is after all a distribution of linux so in our case we're going to choose the default option right here i'll click accept and install so we have the download dialog right here we can save this file to our disk but it's probably better to open this file with eddie which is the default this is a deb file it's essentially a debian package which is linux specific so it's giving us the correct file we can go ahead and install it now if you click open with you won't want to close the browser because the package will download to a temp directory and we want to make sure that we install it before we close the browser otherwise it's going to clear the cache and we won't be able to install it so i'll click on ok and here's eddie so what eddie is is an application that facilitates the installation of dub files which is pretty cool so i'll click install i'll type in my super secret password and there we go we have google chrome the install button changed to uninstall so i'm going to close this and this and inside the applications menu we have google chrome so i can make it the default if i want it to be and i think google has enough of my information already i'm not going to be giving them any more anyway i'll click ok and now we have google chrome so if that in particular is your browser of choice well there you go if nothing else i just showed you the process of installing an application that is not normally available in popshop google chrome is not available in popshop at this time maybe it will be in the future but as of right now you can download it directly from google and install it like i just did back in popshop though go ahead and clear everything out we can also remove applications in popshop as well you can click on installed and on this tab we'll have a list of any application that we have installed as you can see here now i installed thunderbird earlier so i can click on it and click on install i'm going to leave it installed i actually plan on using that but you get the idea this is how you remove applications you can install applications here and remove them as well at the very top of the screen if there's any updates available it's going to show the updates right here we saw that earlier we don't have any updates available at this time it even tells us that we're up to date but as soon as there are updates we'll have the ability to install them right from popshop and now you know how to install applications in popos which as you can see is very easy to do so there you go popos is my favorite linux distribution i just love it and i really enjoyed making this video and hope you guys enjoyed this video as much as i enjoyed making it if you did like this video please click that like button and also be sure to subscribe if you haven't already done so because i have some awesome videos coming very soon thanks for watching [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: LearnLinuxTV

Views: 39,288

Rating: 4.9391513 out of 5

Keywords: Linux, Tutorial, Review, Howto, Guide, Distribution, Distro, Learn Linux, operating system, os, open-source, open source, gnu/linux, LearnLinuxTV, LearnLinux.tv, pop!_os, pop_os, pop os, Pop!_OS Linux, 21.04, COSMIC Desktop, Cosmic, Beginners, Beginners Guide, system 76, linux tutorial 2021, linux desktop, linux laptop, linux pc, pc, switching to linux, windows alternative, full guide, course, full course, getting started, pop os 21.04 review, popos 21.04, pop os 21.04, pop _os, system 76 os

Id: 4mySqL4bCSw

Length: 72min 45sec (4365 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Gerald_of_Rivia_ww]

Great Video Guide for installing Pop OS.

I want to add for those that are doing a dual or multi boot OS install there's a couple of things you should do during the install.

1. Choose the custom install partition instead of clean install. You want to pick usually the last choice to customize your partition. There's plenty of guides out there for that. But basically you will create 3 partitions.

/boot/EFI _ _ _ _ [partition around 800mb - FAT32]

/ _ _ _ _ [mount partition for the OS - ext 4]

swap _ _ _ _ [swap partition for memory depends on your Ram ( 4GB - 8GB )]

2) Install rEFInd boot manager, don't use GRUB to avoid any problems.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y refind

​

Full Guide for installing rEFInd

[u/gide_wilder]

To change shell themes and icons just install user themes extension then go to https://www.gnome-look.org/browse/ .