Pop OS 20.04 Review: Best Ubuntu-based Distribution Just Got Better

Brief: Pop OS 20.04 is an impressive Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. I review the major new features in this review and share my experience with the latest release.

Now that Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and its official flavours are here – it’s time to take a look at one of best Ubuntu-based distro i.e Pop!_OS 20.04 by System76.

To be honest, Pop!_OS is my favorite Linux distro that I primarily use for everything I do.

Now that Pop!_OS 20.04 has finally arrived. It’s time to take a look at what it offers and whether you should upgrade or not?

What’s New In Pop!_OS 20.04 LTS?

Visually, Pop!_OS 20.04 LTS isn’t really very different from Pop!_OS 19.10. However, you can find several new features and improvements.

But, if you were using Pop!_OS 18.04 LTS, you have a lot of things to try.

With GNOME 3.36 onboard along with some newly added features, Pop!_OS 20.04 is an exciting release.

Overall, to give you an overview here are some key highlights:

• Automatic Window Tiling
• New Application Switcher and Launcher
• Flatpack support added in Pop!_Shop
• GNOME 3.36
• Linux Kernel 5.4
• Improved hybrid graphics support

While this sounds fun, let us take a look at a detailed look on what has changed and how’s the experience of Pop!_OS 20.04 so far.

User Experience Improvements in Pop OS 20.04

Undoubtedly, a lot of Linux distros offer a pleasant user experience out of the box. Likewise, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS has had top-notch improvements and features as well.

And, when it comes to Pop!_OS by System 76, they always try to go a mile further. And, the majority of new features aim to improve the user experience by providing useful functionalities.

Here, I’m going to take a look at some of the improvements that include GNOME 3.36 and Pop!_OS-specific features.

Support For System Tray Icons

Finally! This may not be a big change – but Pop!_OS did not have the support for system tray icons (or applet icons).

With 20.04 LTS release, it’s here by default. No need of any extension.

There may not be a whole lot of programs depending on system tray icons – but it is still something important to have.

In my case, I wasn’t able to use ActivityWatch on Pop!_OS 19.10 – but now I can.

Automatic Window Tiling

Automatic Window Tiling is something I always wanted to try – but never invested any time to set it up using a tiling window manager like i3, not even with Regolith Desktop.

With Pop!_OS 20.04, you don’t need to do that anyway. The automatic window tiling feature comes baked in without needing you to set it up.

It also features an option to Show Active Hint i.e it will highlight the active window to avoid confusion. And, you can also adjust the gap between the windows.

You can see it in action in their official video:

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And, I must say that it is one of the biggest additions on Pop!_OS 20.04 that could potentially help you multi-task more efficiently.

Even though the feature comes in handy everytime you use it. To make the most out of it, a display screen bigger than 21-inches (at least) should be the best way to go! And, for this reason – I’m really tempted to upgrade my monitor as well!

New Extensions App

Pop!_OS comes baked in with some unique GNOME extensions. But, you don’t need GNOME Tweaks the manage the extension anymore.

The newly added Extensions app lets you configure and manage the extensions on Pop!_OS 20.04.

Improved Notification Center

With the new GNOME 3.36 release, the notification center includes a revamped look. Here, I have the dark mode enabled.

New Application Switcher & Launcher

You can still ALT+TAB or Super key + TAB to go through the running applications.

But, that’s time-consuming when you have a lot of things going on. So, on Pop!_OS 20.04, you get an application switcher and launcher which you can activate using Super key + /

Once you get used to the keyboard shortcut, it will be very convenient thing to have.

In addition to this, you may find numerous other subtle improvements visually with the icons/windows on Pop!_OS 20.04.

New Login Screen

Well, with GNOME 3.36, it’s an obvious change. But, it does look good!

Flatpak Support on Pop!_Shop

Normally, Pop!_Shop is already something useful with a huge repository along with Pop!_OS’s own repositories.

Now, with Pop!_OS 20.04, you can choose to install either Flatpak (via Flathub) or the Debian package of any available software on Pop!_Shop. Of course, only if a Flatpak package exists for the particular software.

You might want to check how to use Flatpak on Linux if you don’t have Pop!_OS 20.04.

Personally, I’m not a fan of Flatpak but some applications like GIMP requires you to install the Flatpak package to get the latest version. So, it is definitely a good thing to have the support for Flatpak on Pop!_Shop baked right into it.

Keyboard Shortcut Changes

This can be annoying if you’re comfortable with the existing keyboard shortcuts on Pop!_OS 19.10 or older.

In either case, there are a few important keyboard shortcut changes to potentially improve your experience, here they are:

• Lock Screen: Super + L changed to Super + Escape
• Move Workspace: Super + Up/Down Arrow changed to Super + CTRL + Up/Down Arrow
• Close Window: Super + W changed to Super + Q
• Toggle Maximize: Super + Up Arrow changed to Super + M

Linux Kernel 5.4

Similar to most of the other latest Linux distros, Pop!_OS 20.04 comes loaded with Linux Kernel 5.4.

So, obviously, you can expect the exFAT support and an improved AMD graphics compatibility along with all the other features that come with it.

Performance Improvements

Even though Pop!_OS doesn’t pitch itself as a lightweight Linux distro, it is still a resource-efficient distro. And, with GNOME 3.36 onboard, it should be fast enough.

Considering that I’ve been using Pop!_OS as my primary distro for about a year, I’ve never had any performance issues. And, this is how the resource usage will probably look like (depending on your system configuration) after you install Pop!_OS 20.04.

To give you an idea, my desktop configuration involves an i5-7400 processor, 16 GB RAM (2400 MHz), NVIDIA GTX 1050ti graphics card, and an SSD.

I’m not really a fan of system benchmarks because it does not really give you the idea of how a specific application or a game would perform unless you try it.

You can try the Phoronix Test Suite to analyze how your system performs. But, Pop!_OS 20.04 LTSshould be a snappy experience!

Package Updates & Other Improvements

While every Ubuntu-based distro benefits from the improvements in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, there are some Pop OS specific bug fixes and improvements as well.

In addition to it, some major apps/packages like Firefox 75.0 have been updated to their latest version.

As of now, there should be no critical bugs present and at least none for me.

You can check out their development progress on GitHub to check the details of issues they’ve already fixed during the beta testing and the issues they will be fixing right after the release.

Download & Support Pop!_OS 20.04

With this release, System76 has finally added a subscription model (optional) to support Pop!_OS development.

You can download Pop!_OS 20.04 for free – but if you want to support them I’d suggest you go for the subscription with just $1/month.

Pop!_OS 20.04

My Thoughts on Pop OS 20.04

I must mention that I was rooting for a fresh new wallpaper with the latest 20.04 release. But, that’s not a big deal.

With the window tiling feature, flatpak support, and numerous other improvements, my experience with Pop!_OS 20.04 has been top-notch so far. Also, it’s great to see that they are highlighting their focus on creative professionals with out-of-the-box support for some popular software.

All the good things about Ubuntu 20.04 and some extra toppings on it by System76, I’m impressed!

Have you tried the Pop!_OS 20.04 yet? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

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How to Handle Automatic Updates in Ubuntu

Brief: This tutorial teaches you how to handle the unattended upgrade i.e. the automatic system updates in Ubuntu Linux.

Sometimes, when you try to shutdown your Ubuntu system, you may come across this screen that stops you from shutting down:

Unattended-upgrade in progress during shutdown, please don’t turn off the computer.

Unattended Upgrade In Progress In Ubuntu

You might wonder what is this “unattended upgrade” and how come it is running without your knowledge.

The reason is that Ubuntu takes your system’s security very seriously. By default, it automatically checks for system updates daily and if it finds any security updates, it downloads those updates and install them on its own. For normal system and application updates, it notifies you via the Software Updater tool.

Since all this happens in the background, you don’t even realize it until you try to shutdown your system or try to install applications on your own.

Trying to install a new software when these unattended upgrades are in progress leads to the famous could not get lock error.

As you can see, the automatic updates present a couple of minor annoyance. You may choose to disable the auto updates but that would mean that you’ll have to check and update your Ubuntu system manually all the time.

Do you really need to disable auto updates?

Please note that this is a security feature. Linux allows you to do practically everything in your system even disabling these security features.
But in my opinion, as a regular user, you should not disable the automatic updates. It keeps your system safe after all.
For the sake of your system’s security, you may tolerate the minor annoyances that come with the automatic updates.

Now that you have been warned and you think it is better to take up the additional task of manually updating your system, let’s see how to handle the auto updates.

As always, there are two ways to do it: GUI and command line. I’ll show you both methods.

I have used Ubuntu 20.04 here but the steps are valid for Ubuntu 18.04 and any other Ubuntu version.

Method 1: Disable automatic updates in Ubuntu graphically

Go to the menu and look for ‘software & updates’ tool.

Software & Updates Settings

In here, go to Updates tab. Now look for the “Automatically check for updates”. By default it is set to Daily.

You can change it to Never and your system will never check for updates on its own again. And if it won’t check for updates, it won’t find new updates to install.

Disable Auto Updates in Ubuntu Completely

If you do this, you must manually update your system from time to time. But that’s an additional chore to do and you may not remember it all the time.

Slightly better way to handle auto updates in Ubuntu

Personally, I would suggest to let it check for updates on its own. If you don’t want it installing the updates automatically, you can change that behavior to get notified about the availability of security updates.

Keep “Automatically check for updates” to Daily and change “When there are security updates” option to “Display immediately” instead of “Download and install automatically”.

Get notified for security updates instead of automatically installing them

This way, it checks for updates and if there are updates, instead of installing them automatically in the background, the Software Updater tool notifies you that updates are available for your system. Your system already does that for normal system and software updates.

Get notified about security updates

With this setup, you won’t see the “unattended upgrades in progress” when you shutdown your system However, you may still encounter the ‘could not get lock’ error because two separate processes cannot use apt package manager at the same time.

I believe this is a better solution, don’t you you think?

As I promised both GUI and command line methods, let me show you how to disable unattended upgrades in the terminal.

How to disable automatic updates in Ubuntu using command line

You’ll find the auto-upgrades settings in the /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades file. The default text editor in Ubuntu terminal is Nano so you can use this command to edit this configuration file:

sudo nano /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades

Now, if you don’t want your system to check for updates automatically, you can change the value of APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists to 0.

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "0";
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "0";

If you want it to check for updates but don’t install the unattended-upgrades automatically, you can choose to set it like this:

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "0";

In the end…

The automatic security updates are enabled automatically for a reason and I recommend you keep it like this. A couple of minor annoyances are not really worth risking the security of your system. What do you think?

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Encrypt You Files Before Uploading it to Cloud With Cryptomator

Open source software highlight of this week is Cryptomator. It is a unique free and open-source encryption software that lets you encrypt your data before uploading it to the cloud.

There are several cloud services available for Linux and almost all of them offer end to end encryption.

This sounds good but end to end encryption is not the same as encrypted storage.

What’s the difference between end to end encryption and encrypted storage? In end to end encryption, the connection between your device and the server is secure. But your data stored on the server is not encrypted. Employees with direct access to the infrastructure at your cloud service providers may access this data.

Of course, these companies have strict policies against such intrusion but a rogue employee can do a lot of damage. Remember the incident when a departing Twitter employee deactivated the account of US President Donald Trump.

If you are one of the privacy cautious people, you would want the ease of cloud storage but with the added security layer of encrypted storage.

Now some services like pCloud do provide encrypted storage but that comes at an additional cost. If you could afford that, well and good. If not, you can use a free and open source tool like Cryptomator.

Cryptomator helps you secure your data by encrypting it before uploading it to any cloud storage services. In this article, I’m going to highlight the key features of Cryptomator along with instructions to use it.

Cryptomator: Add an encryption layer to your cloud data

Cryptomator is a solution to encrypt your data locally before uploading it to the cloud.

With this, you can create vaults locally and sync them to the cloud storage services you use.

It’s very easy to use and you don’t need to have any specific technical knowledge to encrypt your data – that’s what Cryptomator is tailored for.

Features of Cryptomator

Cryptomator is a simple encryption tool with the essential features. Here’s what it offers:

• AES and 256-bit Encryption for files.
• Ability to create a vault and sync it with the cloud storage service
• Optional recovery key for your master password of the vault
• Cross-platform support (Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS)
• Supports the dark theme for a one-time license fee.
• Supports WebDAV, FUSE, and Dokany for easy integration with your operating system.

Do note that the Android and iOS apps are paid apps that you have to purchase separately while the desktop program is completely free to use. Also, you need to purchase a one-time license to unlock the dark mode. Don’t blame them please. They need to make some money in order to develop this open source software.

Installing Cryptomator on Linux

Cryptomater provides an AppImage file that you can download to get started on any Linux distribution.

You can get it from its official download page. In case you don’t know, please read how to use an AppImage file to get started.

Download Cryptomator

How To Use Cryptomator?

Attention!

Encryption is a double-edged sword. It can protect you and it can hurt you as well.
If you are encrypting your data and you forgot your encryption key, you’ll lose access to that data forever.
Cryptomator provides a recovery key option so please be careful with both password and the recovery key. Don’t forget it or lose the recovery key.

Once you have installed Cryptomator, it’s really easy to use it following the user interface or the official documentation.

But, to save you some time, I’ll highlight a few important things that you should know:

Setup Your Vault

After launching Cryptomator, you need to create the vault where you want to have your encrypted data.

This can be an existing location or a new custom directory as per your requirements.

Now that you proceed creating a new vault, you will also observe that you can open an existing vault as well (if you had one already). So, always have a backup of your vault, just in case.

Here, I am assuming that you are a new user. So, obviously, proceed to create a new vault and give it a name:

Next, you need to specify a storage location. If you already use OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or something similar, it might detect it automatically.

However, if it doesn’t, like in my case (I use pCloud), you can select the cloud-synced directory or any other custom location manually.

Once you select the location, you just need to create a password for it. It’s best to create a strong password that you can remember.

Also, I’d suggest you to opt for the recovery key and store it in a separate USB drive or just print it on a paper.

And, that’s it. You’re done creating your secure vault that you can sync with the cloud.

Now, how do you add files to it? Let’s take a look:

Adding Files To A Vault

Note: You can’t just go into the folder that you created from the file manager and files there. Follow the steps below to add files properly in your encrypted vault.

Once you’ve created your vault, you just need to unlock it by typing the password as shown in the image below. If you’re on your personal computer, you can choose to save the password without needing to enter it every time you access the vault. However, I advise not to do that. Manually entering the password help in remembering it.

Next, after unlocking the vault, you just need to click on “Reveal Vault” or reveal drive to open it using File Manager where you can access/modify or add files to it.

Backup / Recover Your Vault

You should simply copy-paste the folder you create to another USB drive or somewhere else other than your cloud storage folder to ensure that you have a backup of your vault.

It’s important to have the masterkey.cryptomator file of the vault in order to open it.

Upgrades, Preferences & Settings

Note

You should enable the auto-updates feature to ensure that you will have the most stable and error-free version automatically.

Apart from the most important functions of the Cryptomator app, you will get a couple of other features to tweak, such as:

• Change the type of your virtual drive
• Tweak the vault to read-only mode

You can explore the Vault options and the settings on Cryptomator to know about what else you can do.

Wrapping Up

Now that you know about Cryptomator, you can easily encrypt your important data locally before uploading them to the cloud.

What do you think about Cryptomator? Let us know your thoughts in the comments down below!

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Manjaro 20 Lysia Arrives with ZFS and Snap Support

Manjaro Linux has refreshed its ISO with Manjaro 20 “Lysia”. It now supports Snap and Flatpak packages in Pamac. ZFS option is added in Manjaro Architect installer and the latest kernel 5.6 is used as the base.

It’s raining new distribution releases. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS was released last week. Fedora 32 will be releasing shortly and Manjaro has released version 20 codenamed Lysia.

What’s new in Manjaro 20 Lysia?

Plenty actually. Let me show you some of the major new features in Manjaro 20.

New Matcha theme

Manjaro 20 has a new default theme called Matcha. It gives the desktop a more polished look.

Snap and Flatpak support in Pamac and terminal

Snap and Flatpak package support is improved. You can use them in command line if you want.

You can also enable Snap and Flatpak support in the Pamac GUI package manager.

Enable Snap support in Pamac Manjaro

Once enabled, you can find and install Snap/Flatpak applications in the Pamac software manager.

Snap applications in Pamac

Pamac offers to install new software based on search (in GNOME)

In the GNOME variant, if you search for something, Pamac software manager will now offer to install software that match the query. GNOME Software Center does that in other distributions that use GNOME desktop.

ZFS support lands in Manjaro Architect

You can now easily use ZFS as root in Manjaro Linux. The ZFS file system support is available in Manjaro Architect.

Do note that I am saying Manjaro Architect, the terminal based installer. It’s not the same as the regular graphical Calamares installer.

Linux kernel 5.6

The latest stable Linux kernel 5.6 brings more hardware support for thunderbolt, Nvidia and USB4. You can also use WireGuard VPN.

Miscellaneous other features

• New desktop environment versions: Xfce 4.14, GNOME 3.36 and KDE Plasma 5.18
• zsh is the new default shell
• Display-Profiles allows you to store one or more profiles for your preferred display configuration
• Improved Gnome-Layout-Switcher
• Latest drivers
• Improved and polished Manjaro tools

How to get Manjaro 20 Lysia?

If you are already using it, just update your Manjaro Linux system and you should already be using version 20.

Manjaro uses a rolling release model which means you don’t have to manually upgrade from one version to another. You don’t have to reinstall as soon as there is a new version is released.

If Manjaro is rolling release distribution, why does it release a new version every now and then? It’s because they have to refresh the ISO so that new users downloading Manjaro will not have to install updates for last few years. This is why Arch Linux also refreshes its ISO every month.

Manjaro ‘ISO refreshes’ are codenamed and have a version because it helps the developers clearly mark each stage of development.

So, the bottom line is that if you are already using it, just update your Manjaro Linux system using Pamac or command line.

If you want to try Manjaro or if you want to use ZFS, then you can install Manjaro by downloading the ISO from its website:

Download Manjaro Linux

Enjoy the new release of Manjaro Linux.

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Lubuntu 20.04 Review: Lightweight, Minimalistic, Polished

Lubuntu 20.04 LTS is significantly different than its previous LTS version. It is aiming to give you a more polished experience rather than just focusing on older computer. Read more about it as I review Lubuntu 20.04.

Lubuntu 20.04 Review: First LTS release with LXQt

I have been using Lubuntu 20.04 from a few days before the release. I usually dwell in Arch world with Manjaro and Cinnamon desktop so using Lubuntu was a pleasant change for me.

Here’s what I have noticed and felt about Lubuntu 20.04.

Bye bye LXDE, Hello LXQt!

For a long time, Lubuntu relied on LXDE to provide a lightweight Linux experience. It now uses LXQt desktop environment.

LXDE is based on GTK (the libraries used by GNOME) and more specifically on GTK+ 2 which is dated in 2020. Dissatisfied with GTK+ 3, LXDE developer Hong Jen Yee decided to port the entire desktop to Qt (the libraries used by KDE). LXDE, the Qt port of it, and the Razor-qt project were combined to form LXQt. Although today, LXDE and LXQt coexist as separate projects.

Since LXDE developer itself is focusing on LXQt, it makes no sense for Lubuntu to stick with a desktop environment that had its last stable release more than three years ago.

Lubuntu 18.04 is the last version of with LXDE. Fortunately it’s a long term support edition. It will be supported officially by Lubuntu team till 2021.

Not exclusively for older machines

As the definition of “older machine” has changed in 2020 Lubuntu 18.04 is the last 32bit version. Nowadays even a 10 year old machine comes with at least 2 gigabytes of ram and a dual-core 64bit processor.

As per that, Lubuntu Team will no longer provide minimum system requirements and will no longer primarily focus on older hardware. Although LXQt is still a lightweight, classic yet polished and feature rich desktop environment.

The First Lubuntu release with LXQt was 18.10, giving the developers three standard releases to perfect the LXQt desktop before the Lubuntu 20.04 LTS release, which is a good development strategy.

Not the regular Ubiquity, Lubuntu 20.04 uses Calamares installer

Lubuntu 20.04 Calamares Installer

A fresh installation begins with the new Calamares installer, in place of the Ubiquity installer that other official Ubuntu flavors use.

The whole process is done in approximately 10 minutes, slightly faster than the previous Lubuntu releases.

As the .iso comes with the essential applications pre-installed you can get your system fully configured pretty fast too.

No upgrade from Lubuntu 18.04 to Lubuntu 20.04

Normally, you can upgrade Ubuntu from one LTS to another LTS release. But Lubuntu team advises not to upgrade from Lubuntu 18.04 to 20.04. They recommend a fresh install and rightly so.

Lubuntu 18.04 used LXDE desktop while 20.04 uses LXQt. Due to the extensive changes in the desktop environments, upgrading to 20.04 from 18.04 will result in a broken system.

More KDE and Qt applications

Here are some of the applications that are available by default in this new release and as I can see, not all of them are lightweight and most of them are Qt-based.

Even the software center used is KDE’s Discover instead of Ubuntu’s GNOME software center.

• Ark – archive manager
• Bluedevil – bluetooth connector
• Discover Software Center – package management system
• FeatherPad – text editor
• FireFox – web browser
• K3b – CD/DVD burner
• Kcalc – calculator
• KDE partition manager – partition manager
• LibreOffice – Office suite (Qt interface version)
• LXimage-Qt – image viewer and screenshot tool
• Muon – package manager

• Noblenote – note taker
• PCManFM-Qt – File manager
• Qlipper – clipboard manager
• qPDFview – PDF viewer
• PulseAudio – audio controller
• Qtransmission – bittorrent client (Qt interface version)
• Quassel – IRC client
• ScreenGrab – Screenshot creator
• Skanlite – scanning
• Startup Disk Creator – USB boot disk maker
• Trojita – email client
• VLC – media player
• MPV video player

Testing Lubuntu 20.04 LTS

Boot times on the LXQt version of Lubuntu are under a minute, booting from an SSD though.

LXQt currently requires slightly more memory than the Gtk+ v2-based LXDE, but the alternative Gtk+ v3 toolkit would also have required more memory.

After a reboot the system runs approximately at a very low of 340 MB for the modern standards, 100 MB more than LXDE.

htop running on Lubuntu 20.04

LXQt is not only for users with an older hardware but also for those who are seeking a simple and classic experience at their new machine.

The desktop layout looks similar to KDE’s Plasma desktop, don’t you think?

Lubuntu 20.04 Desktop

There’s an application menu in the lower-left corner, a taskbar for pinned and active applications, and a system tray in the lower-right corner.

Lubuntu in its LXQt version can be easily customized and everything is in the menu under preferences, with most key items under LXQt Settings.

It is worth-mentioning that LXQt uses the popular Openbox window manager by default.

Like the last three releases, 20.04 LTS comes with a default dark theme Lubuntu Arc, but it is quick and easy to change it if it doesn’t suit your taste.

In daily use, Lubuntu 20.04 has proven to me completely trouble-free as every Ubuntu flavour in fact.

Conclusion

Lubuntu team has successfully made the transition to a modern, still lightweight and minimal desktop environment. LXDE looks like abandoned and it is a good thing to move away to an active project.

I hope that Lubuntu 20.04 makes you as much enthusiastic as I am, and if so don’t hesitate to let me know at the comments below. Stay tuned!

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