If you are interested in Gnu+Linux you’re in the right place. I started using Linux as my daily drive 2 years ago. At the time I barely knew Linux. Here you’ll find my main tools that enable me to have a nice setup and be productive as hell.

The shell

Is one of the main tools if not the main tool of a Linux computer. You will spend a lot of time there and you have to be comfortable in there.

Most of the distros are shipped with Bash. It’s a great and powerful tool but for me it wasn’t very enjoyable. Many times my tab completion did not work because of a typo. Other times it wasn’t handy when selecting items displayed by the tab command. Bash’s tab auto-completion isn’t good enough.

But then I heard of Zsh, a child of Bash.

Zsh

If you had already learned Bash and started to be confident using it then don’t worry. Zsh and Bash are very similar. Most commands are identical and the logic is the same. Although they seem identical, Zsh have some improvements it’s father has not !

Tab Auto-completion

is great.

A picture about the amazing features of Zsh

You can navigate through the tab results with your arrow keys or just pressing tab to hop to the next element.

A misspelled cd documents will transform into cd Documents magically !

Style

Zsh supports many themes. I don’t say Bash hasn’t but it’s good to know.

Oh my Zsh !

Is a great bundle of plugins and themes ! It is an incontournable of Zsh.

I won’t go through the plugins as they are already documented in their website.

Be Carefull: you have to use the .zshrc instead of the .bashrc .

Battery optimization

A lot of students and developers out there use laptops as main computers when it comes to work. Most of our devices doesn’t last a day. I see a lot of colleagues that are plugged in more than two times a day and they make me suffer because Linux has a lot of battery optimization tools.

TLP

I don’t know what TLP stands for but I know it gives me more than 2h of battery ! The install and setup is straightforward. Satisfaction guaranteed !

Here is the link to the documentation !

Powertop

It is another one battery optimizer. It gives me the same results that with TLP.

Zram, Zswap or Zcache ?

Linux offers many solutions when it comes to optimize. You have seen two battery optimization tools. But what about Ram optimization ?

When you define partitions for your Linux OS, you are often offered a Swap partition. Swap is a “fake” Ram, it acts like it but as it is stored in your hard drive it is much slower than your Ram (physical). Yet not, don’t delete that partitions because Swap is very useful.

So here we face multiple positions :

  • If you don’t have a Swap partition then go for Zram

  • If you have Swap go for Zswap

  • If you like risks and want bleeding edge tools go for Zcache, is it not ready yet but it does a better job than Zswap.

    If you want to know more about it, I recommend you to read this post on StackExchange.

Gnome

For the Ubuntu or the elementary OS you may know your DE (desktop env.) is GNOME. I personally use Gnome under Wayland and I find it very good. It is the main alternative of Kde at this time and same you’re not fan of WM’s (Window Managers).

Gnome vanilla is nice but can be improved

If you don’t use Ubuntu then you may want to use Snapcraft as well. It is a widely popular “App” Store. It is developed by Canonical so only Ubuntu based distributions support it in native. But other distros can use it too !

If you build your Linux from scratch you may want to have Flatpack too. It is installed on Gnome by default.

One thing that is very important is to be careful of the permissions of the snap/flatpack package. They are usually very restricted (i.e. can only use the ~/ by default). If you have a package that needs access to /bin or /usr you have to give then the access to it. You can learn more about it there.

 UnixPorn

Gnome isn’t as flexible as Wm’s or Kde when it comes to style. But it can change a lot and improve.

One of the mains reasons to choose Linux over Windows or Mac is that you can and you may tailor your OS for your personal needs. You don’t use a “for everyone” OS. You have your own OS that is optimized for your workflow.

For that you have to install gnome-tweak-tools. This module enables you to install extensions from GNOME Shell Extensions. It can be added with ease from this website. If you want to change the style then. You’ll find extensions such as Caffeine, Dash to Dock, User Themes etc.

I recommend you use Gnome Shell Themes - Gnome-look.org as theme store for Gnome. The themes are easily installable as you have a superb helper.