This article is based on an AskUbuntu question I answered a while back. The user wanted to know how to use Wayland in a live instance of Ubuntu. They wanted to test some Wayland stuff and this was how they wanted to do it.
I personally would have gone a different route, but that’s fine. There are likely other people who have this same question, so it seems prudent to put the answer up here, as others will likely want to use Wayland in a live environment.
It actually turned out to be pretty easy, so this isn’t going to be a very long article. If you follow the directions carefully, you should be able to use Wayland while running Ubuntu live.
Use Wayland in Ubuntu Live:
The first thing you need to do is boot into the live instance of Ubuntu, and then you change the way you login. You don’t want to automatically login for this exercise.
Click in the bottom right and ‘Show Applications.’ Once there, you can enter the word ‘users’, click on the settings app offered, and then disable automatic login.
Next, you have change the password. You’re forced to deal with Ubuntu’s need for a complex password. The password you pick must be at least 12 characters long, not a dictionary word, and have a mix of numbers and letters.
Next, you want to edit “/etc/gdm3/custom.conf” and comment out the line that disables Wayland. To do this, we’ll open a terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T. That opens the terminal where you’ll enter:
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sudo nano /etc/gdm3/custom.conf
Find the line:
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WaylandEnable=false
Change it to (comment it out):
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#WaylandEnable=false
Make sure to save it. Just press CTRL + X, then Y, and then ENTER and nano will save it.
Restart gdm3 with:
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systemctl restart
If that doesn’t automatically log you out, log out manually.
Now start the process to log back in, but after you click the user, there’s an icon in the lower right. It’s a gear icon. Click that gear icon and choose “Ubuntu on Wayland”. Then enter your password and press ENTER.
If everything worked, you’re now logged in with Wayland.
Now, if you want to verify that you’re using Wayland…
Press CTRL + ALT + T to open the terminal and enter:
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echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
If you have done everything correctly, it looks like this:
See? That’s how you use Wayland in a live Ubuntu instance. And now you know…
So, there you have it for those that want it. If you want to use Wayland then you can. You can do that in a live environment if you want. It’s Linux. You can do most anything, if you put enough work in.
Closure:
And there you have it. Another article is in the books. This one helps you use Wayland and helps you use it in a live Ubuntu instance. I suspect you could use this as a basis for other distros, but I’ve never actually tested that theory out. If you have tried it, let me know in a comment. Thanks!
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As you learn Linux, you’ll possibly find yourself using the terminal more often. You’ll run processes in the terminal because you need to or because you prefer to. This is how you stop, pause, and resume those processes running in your terminal.
There are any number of reasons why you’d need to do this. I’ll give you an example in the main part of the article, but there are all sorts of reasons to know and use this information. There are a few generic reasons to do so, of course.
First, you’d want to stop processes because you don’t just want them to keep running forever. That’s the easy one, though they’re all easy. Speaking of which, this article should be pretty short and easy.
Second, you’d possibly want to not stop but rather pause a running process because you expect to return to it. This is different than stopping the process. It’s very much like pausing a movie.
Third, obviously, will be resuming the above mentioned process. If you’ve paused a running process then it only makes sense to know how to resume said process. If you don’t intend to resume it, it doesn’t make much sense to pause it.
This article will explain how to do all three of these operations!
Stop, Pause & Resume Terminal Processes:
So, we’re going to need both a practice exercise and an open terminal. Let’s start by getting the terminal open by using your keyboard and pressing CTRL + ALT + T.
That should open your default terminal. Assuming it does open your terminal, I want you to run the following command:
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ping linux-tips.us
Once started that command will keep running over and over again. I assume you don’t need to keep pinging forever, so you can stop it with CTRL + C. That’s it. Once you issue that command, the process will stop.
What if you don’t want to stop it – you just want to pause it for a little while? Well, run the ping command again and this time use CTRL + Z. When you issue that key combination, the running process will pause and be pushed into the background.
If you want to resume running that process in the terminal, in that same terminal, you just use the following command:
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fg
Unlike the first two, it’s text that you enter into the terminal before you press enter. There’s no CTRL + anything that you use. You just literally type ‘fg’ (think foreground) and press enter. That brings the paused process back into the foreground and resumes running it.
The above commands, when run in succession, should look a little something like this:
It should look a little something like that. Those are the commands from above.
You can do this with all sorts of applications that run in the terminal. You can stop, pause, or resume, as needed by moving the running process into the background and then bringing it back into the foreground.
If you look carefully at the above image, you’ll see that it counted five packets as being transferred. This indicates that the process doesn’t keep running in the background. It’s truly paused. Typing ‘fg’ and pressing return brought the process back to the foreground, where it continued pinging this site.
Closure:
There you have it. It’s another article in the books! This one tells you how to start, pause, and resume processes running in a terminal. Hopefully, you can find some use for it. If you have any ideas for articles, feel free to leave a comment. My publication schedule seems to be working, so you can expect another article every other day.
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There are many reasons why you may want to change your default terminal emulator. It’s actually nice easy to change the default terminal. This article explains how and anyone should be able to do it, even a beginner!
First, it’s often called a terminal emulator because it allows you to emulate the terminal in a graphical environment. There are other ways to refer to it, but just calling it the terminal is usually enough for all but the most pedantic. We’ll mostly just call it the terminal from here on out.
The people who put your distro together also picked the default terminal. It’s usually a basic terminal, and often just a terminal that has been around for a long time. That’s not a bad thing, but there may be better terminals than the default. There are terminals with all sorts of features, from multi-window terminals to terminals that support drag-and-drop!
Perhaps you might like XFCE-terminal, or you may prefer Terminator? Maybe you’d like Guake or Tilde? The choices for new terminals are vast, and Wikipedia has a ton of them listed.
You can find even more by using your favorite search engine and searching for Linux terminals. Someone is always writing a new terminal and you can pick a new one to be your default terminal any time you want. There’s bound to be one out there ticks all your boxes.
If you want to open your default terminal, you can usually use your keyboard. Just press CTRL + ALT + T and it should open your terminal. If you don’t like the default, you can make any other terminal your default.
Change the Default Terminal:
For the purpose of this exercise, we’ll start with assuming you’re using Ubuntu and that you want to install Terminator and then set Terminator as the new default. However, aside from the initial installation command, it should work for other distros just fine. In fact, the installation command will work for most any distro that uses the apt package manager.
So, seeing as you opened the terminal up above, we’ll just skip right ahead to installing our example, Terminator:
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sudo apt install terminator
Go ahead and let it finish the installation after you enter your password and agree to install it. Terminator should be in your default repositories and easily installed. This is true even if you’re not using Ubuntu or an Ubuntu derivative.
Once you’ve done that, you will need to set Terminator as the new default. To do that, run this command:
That should bring up some information that looks a little like this:
From there you just pick the number of the terminal emulator you’d like to be the new default and press enter. That’s it. That’s all you should need to do.
You can test this by simply using your keyboard to open the default terminal like you did in the first section of this article. Once you’ve made the change, it should take effect immediately and the new default terminal should open up when you next open the terminal with the keyboard. You’ll still have the old links to the original default, but you can move those around at your leisure.
Closure:
And there you have it. That’s how you change your default terminal emulator. It’s not terribly difficult but it’s a quick and easy step you can take to make your Linux a little more customized, a little more something of your own. If you have any ideas for articles, feel free to leave a comment suggesting them. We’ll see what we can do!
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Should you use screenFetch or Neofetch? That’s up to you to decide. This article will share some info about both of them. This should be a pretty short article.
I also confess that there’s not much of a “vs.” here. The screenFetch app hasn’t been updated in a long time and Neofetch is the clear winner for most folks. But, well, it seems like people have forgotten that screenfetch exists and that it existed well before neofetch was conceived. That’s why I’ve picked ‘History’ as one of the categories.
See, the thing is, screenfetch (I’m tired of capitalizing the F, and the N, just to be right!) still exists and still works just fine. In some cases, you might get the wrong information from it, especially with newer distros, so why use it? Well, you use it because it shouldn’t be forgotten – and ’cause it still works most of the time.
So, you decide… Screenfetch or neofetch? Or maybe both?
Screenfetch:
The screenfetch application was was created to gather system information so that it could be presented in a screenshot format. In fact, their GitHub page clearly states the purpose as:
Fetches system/theme information in terminal for Linux desktop screenshots.
Though it’s old, it’ll almost certainly be available in your default repositories. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it isn’t still useful! (Perhaps I’m having some sort of crisis, ’cause I too am old and part of the purpose of this site is to be useful!)
Assuming you’re using a distro with apt, it’s a mere install command away:
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sudo apt install screenfetch
Then, well, you use it. You could just run it with ‘screenfetch’, but you can also actually use the -s switch and create a screenshot of your full screen, making it easy to take and share a picture of your desktop to show others in forums and social media sites.
This is an edited down screenshot, ’cause the rest of my desktop isn’t all that interesting right now.
See? Screenfetch in action. I like the ASCII art better, actually. That’s a matter of taste.
As you can see, that was with the -s switch. It happily generates a screenshot of the entire screen, but I edited it down to just the terminal. There’s nothing interesting on my screen right now. Just a bunch of open windows, largely with text in them.
Screenfetch still works, and I like the ASCII art better. I suppose I could probably customize neofetch to make it do the same thing, but I’m way too lazy for that. Either way, it works – and it works just fine. It still does the task it was designed to do, even without any recent updates.
Neofetch:
Neofetch is newer and probably better in every single way. (Though I do have some issues with it on some systems, as it won’t create its own screenshot! That’s a ‘me’ thing, I suspect.) It’s also familiar to many people, and indeed has been mentioned on this site multipletimes.
It gets regular updates and has a ton of options. It’s also able to be highly customized. In pretty much every single way, it’s the superior solution. It’s described by the authors like so:
The overall purpose of Neofetch is to be used in screen-shots of your system. Neofetch shows the information other people want to see. There are other tools available for proper system statistic/diagnostics.
It’s a much newer application. Screenfetch last had a release in 2019, while neofetch had a release just last August (at the time of writing). It should be noted that there have been some commits at the screenfetch repository, but they’ve not yet been released. The project isn’t dead. It just isn’t as active as neofetch.
Again, it’s easy to install. It’s in the default repositories for most any distro out there, at least the major ones. There are some distros that include it by default, including Lubuntu! Again, assuming you’re using a distro with the apt package manager, it’s installed just like screenfetch:
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sudo apt install neofetch
And, like screenfetch, you can just run it as ‘neofetch’. However, check the man page for it and you’ll see there are a ton of other options. It’s seriously highly configurable. It looks like this:
This looks a lot like screenfetch, doesn’t it? The art is different. The output is also different!
For whatever reason, on that system the neofetch doesn’t seem to want to take a screenshot. I’m probably missing scrot or something like that. I’m too lazy to figure it out, but it’ll likely work just fine on your system. It’s a great way to gather a bunch of presentable information about your system, with the end goal being to show it to other people.
So, is neofetch the one for you? Is it really any better?
Screenfetch or Neofetch:
Sure, there hasn’t been a screenfetch release in a long time – but there’s sure to be one eventually. There’s activity in the repository at GitHub. That’s usually an indicator that there’s still more to come. I wouldn’t count it out and it’s pretty much feature complete.
Neofetch? Well, it’s much newer and has more consistent releases lately. It’s also highly configurable. You’ll be able to customize it all you want. You’re encouraged to edit ~/.config/neofetch/config all you want, making neofetch your own. It’s also a mature application, with a large install base and likely also feature complete.
Either one works. They do spit out different information. If you examine both screenshots above, you’ll see the data output is different. Not gonna lie, I ain’t gotta clue why they’re different. The areas where they’re different are trivial and I’ve made no effort to find out which is correct.
What? It’s a blog. I have finite time for these things, you know! 😊
You can decide between screenfetch or neofetch – or you can use both. They’re both very similar and neither should be used for anything all that serious. They spit out some system information in a form that’s convenient for screenshots so that you can show off your system to your forum friends.
Closure:
Here’s another article in the books. It’s not really about a ‘vs’ anything, but the title seemed appropriate. It’s a good time to expose some of the newer Linux users to the venerable screenfetch tool, as choice is always a good thing.
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Finally, an attempt to answer to the age old question: Which Linux distro is the best?
This question has been asked time and time again and debated from the moment more than one distro existed – so, pretty much since day one. It has been so hotly debated that it has caused true animosity and people rage-quitting entire sites. Some people have high conviction that their distro of choice is the best distro!
Hint: It’s not.
I’ve been using Linux exclusively for more than a decade. Many years ago, I used Unix extensively. I have dozens of virtual machines of current distros. My Linux ISO folder is 250 GB in size. If you can name it, I’ve probably installed it and used it.
I think that makes me pretty darned qualified to finally put this question to bed.
So, what is the best Linux distro?
There isn’t one.
There is No Best Linux Distro:
The best Linux distro is the one that is best one for you. It’s the distro (perhaps even plural, ‘distros’) that suits your individual needs best. The best Linux distro the one where you’re most able to get your work done, because that’s what an operating system is for. An operating system is a tool to help you accomplish a computational goal.
The best distro the one that’s suited to your personal workflow. It’s the one that makes you the most happy, and the one that best lets you use the applications you need to use. Basically, it’s the one that works for you.
You can look up Linux distro benchmarks. And can check their popularity. Or you can test them out virtually online.
You can download the images and use VirtualBox to test them for longer periods. You can download the various .iso images and test them on bare metal by using them live – without making any changes to your currently installed operating system.
But, at the end of the day, nothing beats experience.
It May Take a While:
The reality is, it may take you some time to find the right distro for you. Maybe you’ll start with something easy to install and maintain, and maybe your final destination ends with Gentoo. Who knows? Only you. Only you know.
When someone attempts to tell you the best Linux distro, what they really mean is what is best for them. That may not be the best for you. It could very well be, but you won’t know until you try. You still might not know until you’ve tried many distros.
There are many things to consider. Do you want a stable release? Maybe you want a rolling release with the most up-to-date software? Or, perhaps you want to use Aptitude or Zypper, or maybe no package manager at all? Which desktop environment do you want? What default software do you want? Which window manager is right for you? Do you want a fancy desktop or just the bare minimum? How about something in between?
TIP: You can do some really refined searches at DistroSea.
Do you want a distro that comes with just the basics so that you can add your own software? How about a distro that comes with the software you’re most likely to use? Maybe you want a specialist distro that comes with the tools you need, like Springdale Linux? Do you want to work with multimedia as a creator with Ubuntu Studio?
Then, what computer architecture are you using? Are you trying to keep your old 32 bit computer running? You can do that!
There are unique Linux distros to do all of those things!
So Many Choices:
There are many, many choices. Odds are great that there’s a distro that’s just right for you. And, if you can’t find one that’s just right, you can make your own. On top of that, you can make pretty much any distro do the same thing that another distro does. So, you can start with one distro and turn it into whatever you want.
The choices are so many and so broad that you have practically limitless choices. That’s one of the things that makes Linux so great. You have a say in what your operating system does (and what it doesn’t) do. It’s your computer, you get to decide.
And that, that’s the answer to this age-old question. There is no right distro, there’s only the right distro for you.
Me? I’m old. I want stability and an environment that gets out of my way to let me get my work done with the smoothest possible workflow. The distro that does that is the distro that’s right for me. You do you and you decide what the best distro is for you.
Most of all, enjoy the wondrous journey of discovery, as you too find the right Linux distro for you.
Closure:
This article has been pulled over from the old site. It may look familiar to some of my readers. I cleaned it up and moved it, formatting it to match the current site.
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.
NOTE: This article was updated on 06/19/2021. NOTE: This article was updated on 05/13/2022.
