Let us look at the 5 most important things that you should immediately do after installing your brand new Ubuntu operating system!
Check for updates
After you boot into Ubuntu 21.04 after installation for the first time, do not forget to check your OS for any updates that might have been released. To check for updates, open up a terminal window and type - sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
Type your password and hit enter if it asks you to.
The first update command is going to check whether you have updates available or not, and the second 'upgrade' command is going to apply those updates to your system. The two commands are combined into one by using &&.
Install restricted media codecs and Microsoft fonts
By default, Ubuntu comes with some basic media codecs. These are not nearly enough to play the vast variety of content available on the internet. So, you need to install some codecs. Also, you need to install Microsoft fonts on your PC, or otherwise, you would not be able to read any document or any text written in Microsoft Fonts.
To install these, open a terminal window and type the following command -
sudo apt install ubuntu-restricted-extras
If it asks for your password, just enter your password and hit enter. A screen will pop up which will ask you to accept the EULA, as these are proprietary fonts you are installing. Just use your arrow keys to navigate to yes and press enter. It will do the rest of the work automatically for you.
Decrease your swap usage
First, we need to know what 'Swap' is. Swap is a file or a partition on your computer, which is used as a backup RAM to support your main RAM. When your RAM fills up to an extent, the OS begins to store some data into the swap directory. The problem is, even if this swap acts as a backup memory, it is still your hard disk or SSD, which is much slower than your actual RAM. Also, by default, the 'swappiness' in Ubuntu 21.04 is set to 60, which means that the system begins to use SWAP memory when 60% of your actual RAM is empty. It means your system begins to use low-quality storage as a memory even when your RAM is just 40% full. We need to change that. The most common value is 10, which means the system will begin to use the swap directory when the RAM usage touches 90%.
To set the swappiness to 10 -
Open up a terminal and type cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness (the result of this command should come 60, confirming that the current swappiness is set to 60).
Then in the same terminal, type sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf (this will open the system configuration file in a .txt format.
Create a new line at the bottom of the document and then type vm.swappiness=10 and click on save.
Reboot your system and then again use cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness in the terminal. This time, the result should be 10.
Install gnome-tweaks
Gnome-tweaks is a very important application in Ubuntu as it lets you customize your system. It gives you the option to toggle animations, change fonts, change the hinting in fonts, tweak the window title bar buttons, increase the text scaling, etc. To install gnome-tweaks, type the following command in the terminal -
sudo apt install gnome-tweaks
and press enter. Enter your password if it asks you to. Then you can go to your application menu and open 'tweaks' from there.
Enable Night Light
You can enable night mode in Ubuntu by going into Settings --------> Displays --------> Night Light tab ----------> Enable Night Light
You can set it to turn on at night in your location automatically too. A manual option is also available.
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