I got a new laptop this week and decided to install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS seeing as this is the first new machine I’ve had since that version was released (well, I actually happened to get a new work PC recently as well, but I can only dream of being allowed to use Ubuntu on that, ha). It’s a Lenovo ThinkBook (i.e. the poor man’s ThinkPad) and I got it specifically for its compatibility with Linux seeing as that’s what I use most of the time. There was also some kind of Halloween sale on, not that there is anything intrinsically spooky about buying a new computer as far as I’m aware, but I won’t complain when it saved me a couple of hundred quid.
Tried my best to update my usual install script for 20.04 in advance, removing a couple of unnecessary PPAs, etc., although the main issue I ran into was that a couple of packages weren’t available in the 20.04 respositories and because I was trying to install everything using the same apt command the whole thing failed so none of the packages I wanted were installed, lol. I found a workaround for this after the fact but couldn’t even get sed to run properly so who knows. Anyway, installed them all afterwards and now everything is set up, even my fairly substantial music library (most of whose substance, I learnt during the transfer, consists of the vast majority of the Square Enix music catalogue).
A few things that caused issues, or didn’t work as I expected:
I always always have trackpad issues, although not this time as much as my previous install of Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro, which was much more tricky for various reasons. Installing gnome-tweaks miraculously worked for disabling tap-to-click; I say miraculously because I don’t even use GNOME and I find tap-to-click impossible, so it was a fortunate success. It did not, however, sort out the vertical scrolling direction, and I find myself having to “drag the page down” rather than “flick the page up”. There was some workaround for this involving editing something in /etc (quelle surprise) but this didn’t work either after a restart. It’s not too difficult to get used to, though, and this is the only laptop I’m going to be using regularly so unless I start spending significant amounts of time in the Windows partition it’s not going to cause any confusion.
There was also an issue with right-clicking where I couldn’t get two-finger right-click to work. I used gnome-tweaks again to switch the “mouse click emulation” to “area”, which means I can now right-click by clicking the bottom-right corner of the trackpad. This is fine, but it’s also turned on clicking the “bottom middle” area for middle-clicking, which I have no use for and keep hitting by accident. There may be a way of turning this off somewhere but I suspect that it might not work, based on the outcome of trying to change the scroll direction. (Edit: fix here, which actually turns off the entire functionality of the middle button and is exactly what I wanted.)
Some kind of service started crashing periodically but it didn’t seem to affect anything. I checked the crash logs and it was either geoclue2 or the specific iteration of emacs26 that runs in conky. Redshift still works fine even if it is geoclue2 so I’m not bothered about fixing the crash, I just wanted to get the annoying dialog box to stop popping up whenever this happened. This one was an easy fix.
Came across a weird issue which I haven’t seen before in all the many times I’ve installed emacs, which is that the compose key just didn’t work, and the minibuffer kept saying <Multi_key> is undefined. I found the fix here, although as I normally run emacs from Plank this involved editing the command in the emacs26.desktop file, which is buried somewhere in /usr.
I’d been having trouble with existing installations of cmusfm, which failed to scrobble (so keen was I to resolve this that in a moment of madness I tried switching to libre.fm before realising it basically didn’t work at all). Building the newest version solved this so I am now able to scrobble from cmus without issue. I now just have to work out how to uninstall the previous version from my PC so I can sort it there.
After running my install script and generating all the necessary config files for Openbox I was puzzled to find that logging in still put me into GNOME. I then realised I actually had to change the setting on the login screen. It’s been so long since I set up a new Ubuntu install that this passed me by entirely.