Among Linux distributions, Ubuntu is the undisputedly most well-known for its user-friendliness (with a tip of the hat to Fedora, though Red Hat aren’t spending as much time advertising it as Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, does). In most cases when I’m not being a gearhead with Gentoo, and want to use Linux as a sensible desktop environment, Ubuntu is my choice. Canonical have put a lot of good engineering work into it and that’s shown by its ever increasing popularity among Linux users.

Canonical attempts to ship a set of sensible default applications, themes and other preference settings so that when one installs it, they have a ready-made desktop that’s all set to use.

Like all operating system vendors though, they chose what in some cases, I think, are a dubious set of defaults. So, as with MacOS X and Windows, when I install Ubuntu I go about customizing it and choosing some better applications. These are listed here:

• Change default theme to Clearlooks and add Blended 1.6 window style from gnome-look.org
• Change default font to FreeSans 10, window title 12 point bold
• Remove Evolution mail reader and install Mozilla Thunderbird + Lightning extension
• Remove Empathy IM client and install Pidgin
• Remove Totem Movie Player and install VLC Media Player
• Remove F-Spot photo manager and install Google Picasa 3 + Shotwell Photo Manager
• Install Google Chrome

This is a much shorter list than in years past, and can be accomplished with the graphical admin tools Ubuntu ships with. One I’ve finished customizing as per above, I’m ready to go!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 18th, 2010 at 9:23 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.