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Ubuntu 20.04 - how to make it perfect for development & productivity

Alexandru-Dan Pop on April 05, 2021

Since I recently configured my laptop to dual boot into Ubuntu 20.04, I wanted to share my experience and what I think you can do to make your use ...
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Jan Gazda

Thanks @alexandrudanpop for both articles about Mac M1 and Ubuntu, I'm currently doing a research what machine should I buy. I've been working on Mac past few years but user interface still does not fit me on the other hand I really liked the battery life.
I've heard there are some problems with meeting programs like Zoom or MS Teams, Slack, etc..

Do you have any experience with that?

Another thing that is holding me back from MacM1 is that it comes with maximum 16GB of RAM and non-mac computers offer 32GB even 64GB for the same/similar price.

I plan to run a bunch of docker containers, so more RAM is always better however if I cannot use the communication tools for video meetings it may be a deal breakers.

Thank you!

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Alexandru-Dan Pop

Zoom, slack, Skype, all work on Ubuntu. Haven't tried MS teams but shouldn't be a problem since it's an electron app.

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Jan Gazda • Edited

Thank you for your reply,

I've heard that "drawing on someone elses screen" may be a problem, but I guess I have to try it myself, I mainly use Chrome for these apps rather than native app.

UPDATE: I installed Ubuntu 21.04 and I'm unable to share the entire scree in any application - it's just black - this issue seem to be related to the Wayland session in Gnome.

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Devang Pipaliya

There is an wayland option available in "/etc/gdm3/custom.conf"

Just uncomment it and restart. Full screen sharing should work.

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Oziel Perez

I'm here to advocate for this development environment. I switched from MacOS to Ubuntu 20.10 and I think I've had a speedier experience working in this environment. Only one app has given me problems and that was Zoom but everything else works perfectly; less system resources were wasted too (I'm using Kubuntu distro).

If you happen to be a designer, I do recommend you try GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, and Darktable as I've been able to replace Adobe with those apps in my workflow. If you are using Ubuntu in a non-Apple laptop and need Android Studio emulators, I recommend you have a dedicated graphics card installed; otherwise hang in there with using an Android phone via USB. If you develop iOS apps, unfortunately you can't build native stuff with Swift, but you could always try Flutter and integrate CodeMagic or an AWS Mac Mini server into your build pipeline.

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Alexandru-Dan Pop

Thanks for this comment, a great addition for the creative folks of course those are great alternatives and you can also use tools like Figma that are browser-based.

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Ladipo

This is a great writeup. I removed my dvd drive and added another hard disk to install Ubuntu 20.04 since last year, when Windows was frustrating my live with their troublesome update. I have never regret doing it. The writeup is just on point. All what you install was just great.

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Alexandru-Dan Pop

Thanks! 🙏

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Alexandru-Dan Pop

You can definitely try. You can research more what Linux distros are out there that have even lighter system requirements than Ubuntu, as there are quite a few out there. Of course, they will lack in other areas. Good luck!

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Sm0ke

Cool! Keep Writing.
... <('_')> ...

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joyess

This was very insightful! Thank you for this. I recently used UTM to install Ubuntu 20.04 on my M1 mac and attempted to install Homebrew and VSCode due to me not running on an Intel chip. Was wondering if you had any additional tips/insight on how to accomplish installing the recommended tools?

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iamolami

Can I try all this settings on Ubuntu 19.04?