Ubuntu first week

[liv]

Some notes because I want to capture the experience of being a total beginner. I am really touched that anyone at all is bothering to read this, it's very much a logbook and not written for an audience. In this case, please don't give me any advice! I may get stuck and ask for advice, but I want to see how much I can figure out for myself before I get stuck.

So, I have a browser (pre-installed), my computer connects to the internet, and I have a mouse. So far, so good. But ugh, everything about the desktop is ugly. On Windows the first thing I do with a new install is change the superficial appearance. Doing this under Ubuntu was the first thing I tried that was non-obvious. I found a little menu made up of a 3x3 grid of dots, which on hover says 'show applications'. OK, good. It does a horrible wooshy thing like on some Macs, so high on my list of stuff I want to fix is, make it stop doing that. And then it brings up a grid of icons like you get on a mobile phone, but the font size is way too huge so I can only see the first few letters of the name of each program (why are they called applications nowadays? I am feeling very curmudgeonly about change in both language and visual idiom). I want to make the font size and ideally the icons smaller, or even better, find a way to display all my programs in an alphabetical list, not as a grid of little pictures.

I tried Settings. Background: ok, I can remove the slightly scary (though pleasingly purple) picture of a stylized feline glaring at me. That's a start. But Appearance only has three options, light, standard and dark, and nothing more fine-grained than that. It does have a slider for making smaller icons, which it turns out only applies to the task bar, but at least having the task bar neatly tucked away rather than huge is an improvement. Screen display lets me change the overall resolution but doesn't have any options beyond that. Nothing else in Settings looks at all promising.

Next I tried Utilities which contains Fonts. Fonts briefly showed me some icons in a grid but again I couldn't see more than the first few letters of the name of each one due to the too-large font size. And then it crashed. I tried it again, crashed again. I restarted the computer, and it crashed again with nothing else open. So I gave up on that for the time being; I don't think it's the right place to be looking anyway.

Next, I want to connect to IRC, which means I need PuTTY. Except, duh, no I don't, because Linux already natively knows how to do SSH. I looked for a terminal; it wasn't listed in the Applications folder. jack wandered past at this point and said Ctrl-alt-T. So I'm not sure how easy it would have been to discover that for myself, but anyway, yes, it works. And it has a lovely little burger menu which includes the option to make the font size small enough for my hyperlexic brain. (In the terminal window, I mean, not on the desktop.)

Having at least one version of text-based chat makes my computer feel a lot more like home. But it's the plague year and lots of my social life happens via fifteen different proprietary messaging systems. This bit I expected to be difficult on Linux, but actually it wasn't, and it was a good test case for installing new software. The Applications folder has three different things called 'Sof...' something (still can't read the full names because I still haven't fixed the huge font issue), all with variants of a capital A symbol. It turns out two of them are to do with updating the OS, but the third takes you to a page that acts somewhat like an app store. The correct one has a white A on an orange background looking slightly like a shopping bag. (I don't know what the A stands for.)

The search box is somewhat unobvious but I figured out you need to click the magnifying glass icon in the header. I searched for Skype. It appeared, I downloaded it, and boom, Skype. No configuration issues at all, I was able to make a video call straight away. Then Zoom. I tried going to zoom.us, which has an option to download the client for Linux. I did that, it looked as if it downloaded the file, but then I couldn't easily figure out how to install / run it (I'm not even sure which of those I should be aiming for). So I went back to the orange A program and searched for Zoom. That again just worked, and Zoom has the menus in a slightly different place with a different OS but that's Zoom for you. OK, so I'm starting to feel confident here.

Then came a tougher test: could I use the new computer to make teaching materials for my online Hebrew classes? That means I need to be able to type in Hebrew, and create documents that use a mix of Hebrew and English (and handle bidi text correctly), and because I'm teaching children under the Anglo system, I also need to be able to add vowels and punctuation. Now, doing any of this under Windows utterly sucks rocks, but I know how to make it just about bearable. In Ubuntu, I have no idea.

I quack for 'type Hebrew Ubuntu', and find this ten year old article on how to Add Keyboard Input Language to Ubuntu. Well, I don't have a System menu or anything called Preferences, but I figured Settings would probably be the modern equivalent. I went up a garden path a little bit and found myself in a menu with options for Keyboard input method system, which I didn't understand, so I left it alone with the default setting of IBus. And I kept being confused whether changes were going to affect the input language, which I wanted, or the language of the operating system, menus etc, which I did not want to change into Hebrew.

The correct approach is: Settings > Language and region > Manage installed languages > This brings up a window with an option to Install/Remove languages. Then I ticked Hebrew, Apply, and some files got downloaded. Then a new item appeared in the header bar, with en and a triangle indicating a dropdown menu. I was somewhat expecting this from the out-of-date article I had read, and it indeed gives me the option to switch between UK English and Hebrew. The snag is that show keyboard layout brings up a graphic that is entirely illegible. The layout of the consonants is roughly the same that I'd got used to under Windows, vowels work completely differently. Actually more sensibly it turns out but given that the vowels in the keyboard image are tiny, and overlap with the dashed circle symbol that some Hebrew fonts use to indicate a space where a consonant should be, I pretty much just had to use trial and error to figure out what keys to press. Right-alt is the control key that switches from the main symbol to the secondary symbol. But it naturally puts the dots in the most sensible place without needing to use the cursor for precise placement.

Libre Office is a completely terrible rotten piece of software. I already knew this because I've used it in Windows too. But it is helpful that Ubuntu comes with it installed by default, and at this stage I wanted to get on with my teaching prep rather than try to find a better word processing / slide design / etc package. I notice that when I installed Hebrew I acquired some at least halfway decent Hebrew fonts (including fake STA"M script, endearingly.) Bidi mostly works without me having to wrestle it, again, it's a new system to get used to but I think within a few weeks I'm going to like it better than Windows. Mixed Hebrew and English text works fine. Of course, when I saved the document I made and then opened it the next day, everything had moved around and looked awful, and I didn't have time to fix it properly before the lesson, but that is Libre Office for you. Overall that went a lot better than I expected.

Minor diversion: I tried to open some PDFs of worksheets I'd made previously. I got an error message saying that the file couldn't be opened. I used the app store to search for PDF reader, and found something called Pympress which sounded promising. Installing that seemed to place an icon in my icon list, but when I clicked on the icon it didn't actually do anything. However, when I tried to open a PDF using it (by going directly to the file), it automatically opened in something called Document viewer which I think was already in place. And that seems if anything nicer and cleaner than the official Adobe software, so that's good. On the whole I'm happy that I can usefully open PDFs, but I'm still confused what happened with all that.

So overall, most things I wanted to do (including at least one fairly complex and non-standard task) have been quite manageable. But I was expecting a lot more looking up the syntax of things to type at a command line, and a lot less clicking on pictures and letting some incomprehensible magic happen. I think I like Ubuntu's incomprehensible magic better than Windows', but at the moment I feel a bit at sea when it comes to installing software. If I happen to find the right thing in the app store, it's almost too easy, but I don't really know where to begin if that doesn't work.

Next steps:

• Desktop display especially font size
  
• Investigate decent word processing / document handling software - maybe Lyx?
  
• Installing fonts that are not present by default. EzraSIL?
  
• Yet more telecoms software. Google Hangouts / Meet? Jitsi (I think this works in browser but I should try it). Discord. Mumble.

Comments

[silveradept]

Without offering advice, it looks like you're running into problems that plague a significant amount of Linux users, including me when it was getting started. Linux usage still has a certain amount of fixing things by using a search engine and then typing commands into a terminal/console window, a strategy that still serves me well when things go weird.

Hopefully your font size issues resolve quickly and without useful interfaces crashing on you.