Category: Reviews

Review: Ubuntu Cleaner

In today’s article, we’re going to review a piece of software known as ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’. It won’t be a very long article, as there’s not much to cover – as it’s fairly self-explanatory. If you’re interested in learning about ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’ then this is the article for you.

As the name implies, this software is designed to work with Ubuntu. You may find that it works fine with Ubuntu derivatives. It may also work with the various official Ubuntu flavors – in part or in whole. But, the key here is ‘Ubuntu’. It’s software designed for Ubuntu. If you don’t use Ubuntu, this may not be the software for you.

I guess this isn’t a review so much as it is making folks aware of Ubuntu Cleaner. It’s reasonably easy and safe, so it seemed like a good idea to share this with Linux-Tip’s Ubuntu users.

About ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’:

You’ll find that ‘Ubuntu Cleaner‘ does more or less what you’d expect it to do. In many ways, it’s similar to BleachBit. Though, you’ll sometimes read stories of people using BleachBit and hosing their systems. That’s extremely unlikely to happen with ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’.

In short, you’ll see that this application cleans your system. It deletes files you don’t need, reducing the amount of disk space used. It cleans the following things at the push of a button:

  • Clear browser cache
  • Clear APT cache
  • Clear thumbnail cache
  • Remove unneeded packages
  • Remove old kernels
  • Remove old installers

So, ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’ is a system cleaner. If you’re curious about the browser cache, it appears to work with Firefox and the major Chrome/Chromium-based browsers. It did not seem to recognize the Snap version of Firefox, but that could be a problem at my end or something they’re working on.

You can see that it clears other things, like running the APT commands you’d consider running manually. If you have extra kernels installed, it’ll remove them – leaving one kernel version as a backup. 

But, it does what it says it does on the label, it cleans Ubuntu.

Installing/Using ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’:

It’s easy enough to install ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’ in Ubuntu. You will need an open terminal. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, simply follow the directions to install ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’ on their project page. I’ll copy them here, but be aware that things change and these installation directions may change:

Then, open ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’ from your applications list and the rest is pretty obvious. On the left side of the screen, select the category of items you want to clean. On the right side, select the specifics you wish to have cleaned with ‘Ubuntu Cleaner’. When you’re done picking, push the button to clean your Ubuntu system. It’s not complicated, and looks like this:

Ubuntu Cleaner in action.
It’s pretty easy to understand how to use Ubuntu Cleaner.

See? It’s not all that complicated and it does what you’d expect it to do. It cleans Ubuntu’s system files – including your browser cache.

Thoughts and Closure:

These are all things you could manually clean yourself, including being able to run commands to remove your APT cache and the likes. But, if you’re one of those people who likes to stay on top of removing unused system files, this might be an application you’d like to use – assuming you’re an Ubuntu user.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I suppose I can rate it a 9. The application could do more, but it doesn’t need to. It does what it says on the tin and there’s little risk of it harming your system. Ubuntu Cleaner is a safe and effective way for Ubuntu users to remove system files.

If you’re an Ubuntu user, go ahead and install it. If you use an official Ubuntu flavor or a derivative, you can also try installing it – but it may not do things like remove the thumbnail cache. You can give it a shot. It’s unlikely to break anything.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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[Total: 9 Average: 4.8]

How To: Install XnView MP On Ubuntu

Today’s article is going to do exactly what it says in the headline, it’s going to show you how to install XnView MP on Ubuntu. It won’t be a very long article, perhaps a bit longer than some, nor will it be all that difficult. XnView is a great photo viewing and manipulation application that I invite you to try out. I’ll be counting this as a review. That defines it best.

First, let me be clear… XnView is a closed-source application. It is proprietary and you never own the software. That doesn’t make it bad, it’s great software, it just means that some people may choose to ignore this article in favor of truly open software. That’s okay, they have that choice. Yay! Freedom!

So, what is XnView? It’s an image viewing/manipulation tool. It even allows you to do some batch processing on images, while offering some great ways to visualize your image collections. I was a fan back when I used Windows. When they started releasing versions for Linux I was pretty stoked.

In fact, it used to be XnView and now it’s XnView MP with the ‘MP’ standing for ‘multi-platform’. And, well, that’s true. It is mult-platform. And, well, that’s a great thing. I love this program!

I have previously mentioned XnView MP in these articles:

Let’s Reduce The Size Of .png Files
How To: Sanitize Exif Data From Your Digital Images For Privacy Sake

And, while this article is aimed at Ubuntu, it will work for other distros with just a few changes. Feel free to check XnView.com to see if they have a download for you.

More About XnView MP:

See, the greatest thing about XnView MP is exactly how many image files types it can deal with. It works for *all of them*. You’ll have to work REALLY hard to find an image format that doesn’t work properly in XnView.

Lemme find you a link…

Here, XnView handles more than 500 image formats. I wasn’t kidding. You’ll work REALLY hard to find an image format that’s unsupported by XnView MP!

Not only that, you can convert between image formats. You can not only do so, you can batch process them. If you visit the link, everything with the ‘write’ box checked can be converted to. It’s an easy to operate application, as well.

You can also do things like watermark an image – and, again, do so by batch processing your image collection. There are other tools from the same company, including XnConvert which is a more specialized tool. Examine those in your free time, if you’d like.

Anyhow, XnView MP has the usual tools. You can resize and crop. You can edit red eye out of the image. You can adjust contrast and light. Then, there are a variety of effects and filters you can apply. 

Finally, or not, you can view your photo collection in a variety of ways. You have everything from filmstrip view to slideshow options. There’s a bunch of different choices and things like EXIF data are supported. You really can’t go wrong with XnView MP.

How To Install XnView MP:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Once you’re there, let’s change to the Downloads directory:

Next, you’re gonna download XnView MP:

Finally, you’ll want to install XnView MP:

Now, XnView MP updates frequently, so you’ll want to remember this page and these steps. When XnView MP updates, simply run the above commands all over again and you can update XnView MP on Ubuntu. It’s amazing what you can do in the terminal. You can do all the things in the terminal!

Bonus:

By pure happenstance, I happened to check this on a Linux Mint box. It’s an older version of XnView, but you can actually find a version of XnView in the default repositories. It probably(?) won’t update with nearly the same frequency as your manual updates, but Mint users can install XnView with:

Follow the prompts and you can install what I suppose would be a supported version of XnView. I can’t think of any good reason to use an older version, but I wanted to mention that the option is there. Then again, it might just be the same and update with the same frequency. I confess that I’ve never tried it.

Notably, there’s no such option on Lubuntu (Ubuntu) 22.04. So, I guess it’s a Mint thing. Even with Mint, I’d expect that you’ll be just fine by installing XnView MP with the method above. The above method will, of course, work on any system that’s using a package manager that works with .deb files. Easy peasy…

Closure:

And there you have it. You have a new article! This time around, you’ll have learned how to install XnView MP on Ubuntu. It’s not terribly difficult and it’s a great application.

Sure, it’s proprietary – but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. If you’re philosophically opposed to closed source software, this article isn’t really meant for you. Again, this is really more of a review – a way to make more Linux users aware that XnView exists and is available for Linux.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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[Total: 5 Average: 5]

How To: Make Google Chrome Use Less RAM (And Other Browsers)

In today’s article, we’re going to explore one way to make Google Chrome use less RAM. This is also useful for other browsers and will reduce CPU usage as well. This will be a shorter article (I was wrong), outside of the norm for the articles I tend to write.

This article has an update:

How To: Make Google Chrome Use Less RAM (UPDATE)

Though, to be fair, the efficacy of this depends a great deal on how you use your browser. If you’re a light browser user, this probably isn’t the article for you. Otherwise, if  you’re anything like me, read on!

See, right this very minute, I have 108 open tabs in this browser. On top of that, I have three browser instances open. I do different things in different browsers, as a way to both organize myself and to keep things compartmentalized. Even with gobs of RAM, the browsers consume a ton of resources.

While I do make use of bookmarks, I also have a lot of open tabs that I return to with some regularity. Eventually, you’ll have to restart Chrome, assuming you also don’t reboot as often as I do. Browsers just consume more and more resources, ’cause the concept of a simple webpage is gone as everyone uses the latest libraries and insists on being interactive.

This increasing resource usage equally true with Firefox, Chromium, Opera, Brave, etc… If you have enough tabs open, it’s gonna consume a bunch of resources, continuing to use more as time passes. This can lead to a system, or just browser instance, that slows down or even becomes unresponsive. It can even cause the system to freeze entirely.

Well, if you try this one simple trick (Ha! I crack me up!) then you can probably resolve this issue. This article will tell you how!

Make Google Chrome Use Less RAM:

For once, you don’t have to open a terminal for this article!

Instead, crack open Google Chrome – or any other major browser. This works for most of the popular browsers. As long as it’s in the Chrome or Firefox family, you should be able to use this extension.

I guess I should call this a review. It kinda is. 

As I was saying in the intro, my browsers were consuming too many resources. They’d chew up RAM, sometimes chew up CPU, and generally take more resources than I felt they needed to.

I knew what I wanted to do, so I went looking for a browser extension that’d let me do what I wanted. I tried a few extensions that did what I wanted, but settled on the add-on/extension called “Auto Tab Discard“. 

Auto Tab Discard is available for both Google Chrome and Firefox. What it does is, after a certain amount of time (which you set) it ‘discards’ tabs. This is handier than you might think!

Auto Tab Discard unloads unused tabs from memory, reducing RAM consumption by an immeasurable (but about 60% in my case) amount – as well as reducing CPU usage, though CPU usage is usually pretty minimal for non-interactive tabs that aren’t currently open.

You can set the time for this, meaning you can make Auto Tab Discard discard tabs after being inactive for 15 minutes, for example. If this was a blanket statement, then the browser extension would be pretty useless – but it’s not. After all, you probably don’t want all tabs to be automatically discarded.

To that end, you can also set certain tabs to never be discarded. You basically whitelist the domain and those tabs will not be discarded automatically with Auto Tab Discard. On top of that, and this is moderately important, you can tell Auto Tab Discard to *not* discard tabs that have audio or video playing.

For example, you can load up a YouTube playlist and let it run in the background and Auto Tab Discard will let it remain resident in memory. This also works for tabs just playing audio. As near as I can tell, this feature works fine – and I’ve been using the extension for well over a month now.

That’s how I use Auto Tab Discard. You can also manually choose to discard a tab. If you need to, you can even tell Auto Tab Discard to discard everything but the current tab. You can note discarded tabs by the ‘zz’ in the changed tab title. There are a ton of options that let you customize Auto Tab Discard for yourself. Click on the extension’s icon to see a bunch of other options for Auto Tab Discard.

Hands down, this is the best extension I could find that would make Google Chrome use less RAM and CPU. As a bonus, it’s also available for Firefox!

Bonus:

While doing all this testing, I decided to solve another problem. Any time I’d open a YouTube tab, even by mistake, it would automatically start playing the video. That was really annoying – especially as I was now discarding those tabs and they’d automatically load when I clicked on a tab by mistake.

For this problem, and I have a lot of YouTube tabs open, I managed to find “Stop Autoplay For YouTube“. I only make use of the version for Google Chrome, but I’m sure something exists for Firefox. For some reason, it doesn’t seem to always work, but it works often enough for me. It’s still annoying, but far less often.

I just haven’t trialed anything in Firefox because Firefox isn’t one of my favorite browsers. Because of this, I’m reluctant to recommend any specific extension. I’m sure there’s a browser add-on for Firefox that will stop YouTube from autoplaying videos. If you do find a good one, feel free to recommend it as a comment.

But, for Google Chrome (and Chromium, of course) I find the Stop Autoplay For YouTube to be a handy extension, doing useful things. If your browsing habits are anything like mine, you too might find it useful. If you don’t have 20 YouTube tabs open (technically actually discarded with Auto Tab Discard) like I do, you’ll find it helpful when you mis-click and a YouTube video starts playing automatically.

Closure:

Well, that was a different article. Today’s article is going to be useful to a subset of people, some of whom will be using operating systems other than Linux. Hopefully more people will learn how to make Google Chrome use less RAM, even if they’re using Windows or a Mac. You can even use Auto Tab Discard in the Microsoft Bing browser, for that tiny subset of users who do use that browser on Linux.

Automatically discarding tabs makes computing so much nicer and it means I don’t have to change my ways all that much. I just let tabs get discarded and that means my RAM usage is a whole lot less than it used to be. The browsers accounted for well over 60% of my RAM.

So, if you’re anything like me, this will help you reduce the resources used by your browsers. And, if you’re anything like my, at least 90% of your computing time will be spent in your browser.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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[Total: 10 Average: 4.9]

It’s Time To Introduce You To The Terminator!

Today’s article is about one of my favorite terminal emulators, Terminator. Terminator is one of my favorite terminal emulators, and I’d like to use this opportunity to expose more users to it. For lack of a better category, we’ll say this is a review. Why not? It’s my site, I’ll call it a review if I wanna! I’ll make it a review!

So, we call it a terminal emulator because it emulates the terminals of old, back when terminals were the main way for a person to interface with their computer. They are not true terminals, but they perform similar functions. Long gone are the days of just green-screens. Today, we have graphical user environments and there’s less focus on the terminal for some folks. From here on out, I’ll just be calling it ‘terminal’ for simplicity and brevity sake.

There are some die-hard folks who still cling to the terminal – and I’m one of them, at least for certain tasks. At any given moment, I have at least two terminal instances open, each a different piece of software. One of those is usually Xfce4 and the other is often Terminator. Today’s article is about the latter.

Chances are good that you can install Terminator with ease. It’s likely in your default repositories. For example, on Ubuntu you’d install it with this command:

Go ahead, give it a shot… If not immediately available, you can look here for more information. If you’re really energetic, you can read the documentation. In this case, it’s going to be a positive review (obviously), so I’d not recommend it (such as I am) if I wasn’t a fan… So…

Why Terminator:

You’ll not be even remotely surprised when you open Terminator for the first time, and that’s a good thing. You’ll see your standard terminal looking thing, complete with a title bar. Truthfully, it’s kinda ugly looking until you make it your own (more on that in a minute). It looks like this:

terminator terminal emulator in its naked form
Terminal (terminal emulator) without any customizations.

What you’re looking for is in the right mouse-button click – the preferences menu. Once you open that, you’ll see all sorts of options.  

Once in the options, you’ll start to understand why I like Terminator. You can make it visually appealing, use multiple tabs, group tabs, auto-run commands when opened, and have all the various profiles you could possibly want. If you’re working on multiple servers at the same time, this is definitely a great help.

You have infinite theme options, but there are a number of them that are built in – the standard types like solarized dark or light. If I’m not taking screenshots, I like mine to look like this:

terminator with a thene
As I’m often in a dark room, this is excellent for my eyes.

That is so much nicer on my eyes. And, if the Terminator theme didn’t clue you in, yes I am using a computer that I don’t normally use. It’s a long story, but nothing is broken beyond my ‘net connection. But, that’s why the screenshots look different. I am also using Flameshot instead of my beloved Shutter.

So, that’s not enough? Seriously – go through and check the preferences. You have global options and then you have all sorts of preferences that you can pick – each contained in their own distinct profiles. When you get to the profiles, you’ll see how much customization is really possible. Allow me to show you:

terminator has options - lots of them
As you can see, there are a whole lot of options with Terminator.

What does Terminator offer? A whole lot… Not only are there tabs, you can set it up in a more traditional grid fashion. These layouts can be moved with drag-and-drop. The list of keyboard shortcuts is extensive – and you can probable tell I’m just reciting the documentation. Layouts are even saved from session to session.

But Wait, there’s more!

Anyhow, all those preferences, not just layouts, can be saved from session to session. Once you get it configured the way you want, it’ll let you retain those settings. Many of these are all extensions of the profiles feature, so it’s highly customized if you want it to be.

I especially like the individual profiles – not seen on this computer’s screenshot. If I paid a bit more attention, I could just copy the config from ~/.config/terminator, but I’m slacking and this situation is temporary. (I’m amazed that I’ve still been able to keep up my publication schedule!) I did not, so you get a different set of screenshots.

If you want, you can even find plugins for Terminator. You can write your own, if such is your desire. If you click here, you’ll see a bunch of plugins that you can use to extend Terminator even further. (Quite a few plugins exist, so do check the link.)

Note: I also wrote an article explaining how to change your default terminal.

As I said, there are quite a few plugins and some of them are quite useful – especially for system admins and programmers, or DevOps folks I guess. They’re universally free, in every sense of the word. They’re also easy to install – just drop them into ~/.config/terminator/plugins/ and they’ll be available to enable from the preferences menu.

If nothing else, go ahead and install Terminator to see if you like it. I dare say that you won’t be disappointed, unless you’ve got some weird edge-case and even then it’s about the best you’re going to get.

Rating Terminator:

Terminator does everything you can want in a terminal, more or less. If it doesn’t do what you want, plugins are easily developed and someone else may have scratched that itch for you already.

I honestly can’t think of anything it’s missing that I personally need or want. It can be a bit boxy and the look is dated, but it should match your theme fairly well, or better if you do some work customizing it.

I appreciate how easy it is to configure it to work with my eyesight. I’m partially colorblind (not the way you’re probably thinking) and have difficulties with the spaces between the primary colors. I can see green, but yellow-green may appear as either yellow or green to me. So, some of the themes (again, you can customize them as much as you desire) are wonderful for my eyes.

Yeah, try as I might, I just can’t think of anything bad to say about it. I’m reluctant to give anything a 10/10, but this is really close to being the perfect application for the task it is designed for. I’d even go so far as saying that it’s feature-complete, but some folks must not agree ’cause they keep writing plugins and that means they want more features.

So, I’m going to give this a 9.5 out of 10. That’s the highest I’ve ever rated anything on this site and I’d not expect to see that score for anything else. I knock the 0.5 because obviously people expect more from it – options they feel should be defaults. A few of the plugins are indeed handy (even to me, a simplistic user). Yeah, I’ll knock off the points for that. That sounds good. It gets a 9.5/10. That’s pretty much a gold medal winner, right there!

Closure:

And there you have it… You have another article – this one a review, and a review of not just one of my favorite pieces of software but of a piece of software I use many, many times a day. Even if you have a favorite terminal, give Terminator a try. You won’t be disappointed – probably… If you are, you’re just weird!

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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[Total: 6 Average: 5]

Review: It Appears That uMatrix Is Back Under Development

This article is a bit of a review of some software called ‘uMatrix’. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s an impressive piece of software – especially considering it’s a browser extension.

I was nosing around some old projects in my GitHub when I decided to look upstream. Lo and behold, Ray Hill (gorhill of uBlock Origin fame) has picked up developing uMatrix again. (Install through your browser’s extension manager. Links below.)

What is uMatrix? GitHub page here.

Well, do you remember old school firewalls where you could not just block things by application, you could be even more refined – like narrowing it down to which port, ingress or egress, and even which domains that application could connect with?

Imagine something similar to that, except it’s for your browser. For each page, you can elect to block images, CSS, cookies, scripts. Then, you can decide which scripts and which CSS to allow through. You can elect which third party assets load, from cookies to images – and you can do so on a domain name basis.

There’s a learning curve. It’s a pretty big learning curve for a browser extension. Plan on a couple of hours to really get used to it – and to get your favorite sites configured. You need only configure them once and then you can backup the settings so that you can use it on multiple devices or put it aside for safekeeping. 

It WILL break sites. You WILL get frustrated.

More About uMatrix:

If I took privacy serious and were more security focused, I would not use the internet without uMatrix. As it stands, I have an older version (now updated) configured in one browser for when I want to visit stuff I absolutely don’t trust. If you take privacy serious (and cross-domain scripting, third party cookies are a huge no-no, but so shouldn’t images and CSS files) then you really, really should take a look at this extension.

Take a look at this:

uMatrix in Opera.
Look a little daunting? You can figure it out. I have faith in you!

In each of those columns, you can click to block it everywhere or to allow it on this one specific domain. As you can see, there’s everything from cookies to CSS, from media to scripts. The refinement you can achieve is amazing. It will take some work and time for you to ‘get good’ with uMatrix.

Now, you basically want it to operate in the default configuration you have it in right after installing, only allowing CSS and images from the domain you’re visiting.

When a site refuses to work properly, you can start by allowing scripts on an individual basis – on the per-site basis you see from the domains listed on the left. You can click on two areas in each column to give fine-grained permissions. After a while, you can get pretty quick at deducing why it doesn’t work. It’s usually a script from another site that needs to be enabled.

You’ll also learn how much cruft the web has, browsing much faster and having fewer scripts chew up your CPU and RAM. If you have a low-end computer, this is also a must-have.

At one point, Hill had stopped working on the project and shuttered it. I’m not sure when he started working on it again. I’m glad they did because it’s the best privacy and security browser extension I’ve ever seen in my life. Now that he’s working on it again, I feel comfortable recommending it.

uMatrix Review:

Really, I wrote this to share my joy. If I had to review it, and I guess I have to, I’d give it a solid 9.5 out of 10. I’ve deducted a half point because there’s no effort to make it all that intuitive to new people and this makes the learning curve harder. It’s hard to explain, but once you see what it does you will understand it better.

Not even I can make it all that intuitive until you actually test it out and start browsing the web with it. If you get frustrated, settle down and relax. You can make it work. It will take some time to get used to the new paradigm. You can browse much faster (more so than from just blocking ads) when you’re not loading a bunch of 3rd party cruft.

You might as well know where to get it. It’s available for the two major browsers, plus in Opera’s own little extension store. These extensions work fine on same-family browsers, like Pale Moon or Google Chromium.

You can pick it up for Opera here.

Of course, you can pick it up for Firefox here.

And you can pick it up for Google Chrome here.

Give it a shot. Commit to browsing with it for a full day and see for yourself what the web is like when  you’re not loading tracking cookies, scripts, ad images loaded from other domain names, and so much more.

By the way…

I worried more about these things years ago, back when I was a Windows user and for the times when broadband wasn’t a realistic option. I was more concerned with my security and letting scripts load in the browser, so I’d use uMatrix. It had the added benefit of doing a great deal to protect my privacy by making it extremely difficult to track my movements across the web. These days, browsers are much more secure and run in their own containers and I care less about privacy.

Even just blocking remote scripts, media, and images will speed up your browsing noticeably. By the time you have it configured for the sites you visit, you’ll have a pretty secure and private browsing experience. You should also consider making it work in incognito mode if you make regular use of private browsing.

Closure:

There you have it, another article. This one is a review of uMatrix, one of my favorite browser extensions even though I don’t actually bother with it for most of my browsing. I used to browse with it exclusively, but I’ve given up caring. If you care, and many of my readers do, then I highly recommend trying it for a full day. Commit to a full day and then leave a comment telling us of your experiences.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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