My first real Linux experience

2025-09-25

I've done some things with Linux before. I used WSL when I was first learning bash, and I also helped my dad set up his Raspberry Pi. But this is the first time I've really worked Linux for all of my tasks.

Several days ago, my annoyance with Windows reached critical mass and I decided to switch over to some form of Linux once and for all. I was sort of scared, since tech is mostly a hobby for me and I didn't want to mess things up, but my computer hasn't exploded yet!

The bulk of my time has been spent customizing as much as I can about my desktop and the apps I use. I'm making a post about what I've done in the spirit of learning in public.¹

The basics

It took me a while to pick a good starting distro, and I'm still not sure about my choice, but if I let myself change it now, that's a slippery slope I don't have time for at the moment. I'm using Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS.

I was originally gonna go with Linux Mint, but I wanted a less Windows-like experience. I wanted to look at my desktop and go "Woah, this is something I don't see often." I thought I wanted a bunch of widgets (see "Ricing?") at first, so I tried out Cinnamon, but ultimately preferred the default Ubuntu desktop layout.

The only real issue with switching to Ubuntu was that my sound wasn't working for a bit. My system wouldn't recognize the built-in audio input and output of my laptop. I wish I could remember exactly how I fixed it, but I don't. All I remember is that the audio finally worked after blacklisting something in Alsa -- but that could have been a final fix in addition to all the re-installing and re-starting of Pulseaudio and Pipewire I did.

Command line stuff

For now, I'm sticking with the default GNOME terminal. As for the shell, I tried working with zsh for a bit until I realized that it probably does much more than I need it to do. I saw people recommending fish as a good beginner shell, so I tried that and I've stuck with it so far. I might mess around with fish scripts later.

I really wanted those cool looking fetches and prompts I kept seeing, so after way too much time experimenting with different options, I am now using Fastfetch and Tide. Here's what I got after messing with some presets (and finding some ASCII art to use until I make my own). The rest of my specs can be seen there.

Ricing?

When I first started, I wanted my computer to look like something off of r/unixporn, so I ended up at this ricing guide.

I tried and didn't understand Qtile, and I looked into but didn't install Hyprland. Tried to install some of the theme creators linked by the guide, but I was having some trouble so I ultimately uninstalled them. I think I'm a bit too much of a beginner to understand most of what was going on, but I do think the guide was a great resource, with a lot of useful links (it helped me understand what Wayland was, for instance). I just don't have the patience for intense ricing at the moment. A minimalistic setup is better for my attention span, anyway.

Painting absolutely everything green

In case you are also obsessed with the Everforest palette, here are all the themes/resources I've used to make my computer pretty. I'm only including the ones that took a bit more effort to figure out (as opposed to, say, a Firefox theme that can be found and installed in a few clicks).

Desktop

For the native system windows, I'm using this GTK theme by fkorpsvart -- the bordered version with legacy buttons. For it to fully work, I installed it according to both the GTK3 and GTK4 instructions. I don't know why, that's just what did it. This same person puts out a ton of themes based on a lot of the most popular Vim color palettes, so they'll probably have one for you, if you're interested.

Icons & cursor

The reason these are together is because it took a bit of troubleshooting to get the icon and cursor sets I downloaded to work with some of my apps. This had something to do with Snap being the way the apps were installed. All I know is that Snap had a difficult way to fix it, but Flatpak had an easier way to fix it, so I switched several of my apps over to Flatpak, including Discord, Firefox, and Thunderbird. Now they use the same icon set and cursors as the rest of my system!

Obsidian

This doesn't really have to do with Linux, but It has to do with me customizing my stuff, so I'm talking about it.

I wasn't satisfied with any of the Everforest themes already available for Obsidian, so I made my own modifications to one of my current favorite themes, AnuPpuccin. It has the best rainbow folders css I've seen, plus it's really similar to Minimal, which is one of my other favorites.

In AnuPpuccin's extended colorschemes snippet, though, the Everforest option was too high-contrast and high-saturation for my liking, so I changed the colors to be closer to the original palette. However, since AnuPpuccin is based on Catppuccin, it has more colors than Everforest. I added in a few extra colors by picking variations (specifically, front the Tailwind chart) of Everforest's colors using HTML Color Codes. I think they blend in pretty nicely.

If you want to make this change, too, find "everforest-dark" in extended-palettes.css and replace that section with the following:

.theme-dark.anp-theme-ext-dark.ctp-everforest-dark,
.anp-theme-ext-dark.ctp-everforest-dark .themed-color-wrapper > .theme-dark {
  --ctp-ext-rosewater: 237, 182, 156 ;
  --ctp-ext-flamingo: 244, 195, 196 ;
  --ctp-ext-pink: 222, 171, 196 ;
  --ctp-ext-mauve: 195, 105, 149 ;
  --ctp-ext-red: 230, 126, 128 ;
  --ctp-ext-maroon: 236, 156, 158 ;
  --ctp-ext-peach: 230, 152, 117 ;
  --ctp-ext-yellow: 219, 188, 127 ;
  --ctp-ext-green: 167, 192, 128 ;
  --ctp-ext-teal: 131, 192, 146 ;
  --ctp-ext-sky: 148, 199, 192 ;
  --ctp-ext-sapphire: 88, 167, 156 ;
  --ctp-ext-blue: 127, 187, 179 ;
  --ctp-ext-lavender: 214, 153, 182 ;
  --ctp-ext-text: 211, 198, 170 ;
  --ctp-ext-subtext1: 157, 169, 160 ;
  --ctp-ext-subtext0: 133, 146, 137 ;
  --ctp-ext-overlay2: 122, 132, 120 ;
  --ctp-ext-overlay1: 86, 99, 95 ;
  --ctp-ext-overlay0: 79, 88, 94 ;
  --ctp-ext-surface2: 79, 88, 94 ;
  --ctp-ext-surface1: 66, 80, 71 ;
  --ctp-ext-surface0: 61, 72, 77 ;
  --ctp-ext-base: 52, 63, 68 ;
  --ctp-ext-mantle: 45, 53, 59;
  --ctp-ext-crust: 35, 42, 46 ;
}

Now, when you select "Everforest" from the extended themes dark mode menu, it should look a lot more subdued, like so:

Finally, my desktop

It's no r/unixporn post, but I like it!

I thought the numbat was a really cute mascot, so I found an image of one online and dithered it with some select Everforest colors, and voilà! I do think the bottom left corner of the screen is the perfect place for a calendar or something, but I'm not really sure how I want to implement that.

Notes

#customization #learning #linux