Exploring Elementary OS
Peruse the plenitudes of programs for work, play and edification
One thing you won’t find on Linux is bloatware. On Windows this is generally added by manufacturers and OEMs, or as unnecessary extras that come with device drivers. Those few manufacturers that do supply Linux on their machines know better than to commit such an atrocity, and because most drivers are included in the Linux kernel itself they don’t have need of these unwanted extras.
Even compared to other Linux distributions, the number of applications bundled with Elementary OS is pretty small. Most of those included in the default install are unique to Elementary, so integrate nicely with the minimalist feel of the Pantheon desktop. Don’t be put off by their lack of menus and options. These apps, particularly the file manager, have been engineered to provide powerful features without the need for complex configuration. Scratch, the text editor, (which will be renamed to Code in the next release), remembers your tabs and autosaves documents. Even ones that haven’t been named yet.
Distros that come crammed to the hilt with applications can be confusing, especially for beginners. Better to start out with the basics (some people are happy with just a web browser and a music player) and add what you need as you need it. If your life revolves around (or at least involves frequent dealing with) documents, spreadsheets and presentations, then you’ll need an office suite. There are a few options on Linux, but the most popular is the excellent
LibreOffice. We could install this from the AppCentre (although there seems to be a long-standing issue which makes this harder than it should be, see http://bit.ly/
libreoffice-wont-open), but now is as good a time as any to introduce the command line.
From the applications menu click Terminal. You’ll be greeted with an expectant and vaguely intimidating-looking flashing cursor. This is where advanced Linux users love to do their work. Once you get used to it, this becomes an incredibly powerful way of working. You can play music, check your email or write scripts to automate dull tasks. Actually pretty much everything you can do from the GUI can be done at the command line. We’ll use it to install LibreOffice, which is achieved by running: $ sudo apt install libreoffice
SuperUsers last all summer long
Before we talk about the scary output, let’s dissect the above command. The sudo part indicates that what follows is to be run as root (similar to the Administrator account in other OSes), it’s short for (SuperUser-do). Whenever you see a command beginning with sudo , make sure you understand what it does, since it has the potential to do harm to your system. Running commands as a regular user can only do harm to that user’s files.
Apt is the package management suite used by Debianbased distros. Software in Linux is distributed as packages that are housed on repositories (repos) maintained by distribution teams. Packagers take the software from
upstream (the application developers themselves) and tailor it so that it plays nicely with their distribution. New technologies like Snaps and Flatpaks ( seepage46) do things differently and enable application developers to distribute distro-agnostic packages, but let’s not worry about that right now (we’ll touch on Snaps later). Packages are signed and checksummed for security and integrity, and can easily be removed without reliance on some shoddy uninstall utility. The rest of the command is pretty self-explanatory: we want Apt to install the libreoffice package. So now, onto that scary output. LibreOffice is a big bit of software, and depends on many other things (a Java runtime, fonts, various nondescript libraries) also shipped as packages and known as dependencies. The individual LibreOffice components also have their own packages, named
libreoffice-writer , libreoffice-calc and so forth. Apt is asking us to confirm that we do indeed want to download and install all of this gubbins, and telling us how much space will be taken up by doing so (about 450MB when we tried).
Since we live for clerical duties, let’s go ahead with the install by hitting enter (the capital Y indicates it’s the default, you can type y and hit Enter if you want, too). After a few coloured ASCII-rendered progress bars the process will finish, and if you check out the Applications menu you’ll find shortcuts to the various facades of the LibreOffice suite. Firing up Writer may bring back memories of MicrosoftWord circa 2000, but if you look beyond such trivialities you’ll find a word processor more than capable of prosecuting all your character and paragraph-related business.
Back to the Appcentre
Although installing software from the AppCentre seems vastly different to installing packages from the command line, behind the scenes that’s exactly what AppCentre does. With very few exceptions, almost everything that you can do with a mouse and a GUI app can be done from the command line. For example, elementary OS will periodically check for updates and (very politely) notify you if any are pending.
What’s really happening here is that the command (or at least one functionally identical to it): $ sudo apt update is being run in the background. This updates Apt’s cache of available packages. Once that’s done any updates can be applied with the following: $ sudo apt upgrade
As you explore Linux more, you’ll find lots of examples beginning with these incantations. If the package cache is stale, then you’ll run into errors when Apt starts trying to fetch outdated packages that no longer exist in the repos. Our long-running and ongoing Terminal series (available to subscribers from the LinuxFormat Archive) will provide more in-depth coverage of the command line, but for now we’ll just mention one more command: man . This is short for manual, and is exactly what the oft-iterated acronym RTFM encourages you to read. For example, if you want to know the ins and outs of the ls command for listing the contents of a directory (what the vulgar refer to as a “folder").
Elementary ships with the Epiphany browser from the Gnome desktop (which is now just known as Web). This is more than capable, and is powered by WebKitGTK so it conforms to all the latest web standards. Be that as it may, you may prefer to use Firefox (it now supports Netflix and other streaming services out of the box), which you’ll find in the AppCentre, or GoogleChrome, which you won’t. You will find Chromium there though, which is the open source version of Chrome that lacks the creepy bits and the restrictive redistribution policy. If you really need the full-fat Chrome, you’ll find installation instructions at www.google. com/chrome/browser/desktop/index.html.
“Terminal enables you to play music, check your email or write scripts to automate dull tasks”