Mint 20 initial manual setup

Here's everything I did after installing Linux Mint 20 to customise to my liking

• Install git, xclip, tmux, parcellite

sudo apt install git-all xclip tmux parcellite

• Mint theme:

  • Menu ⇢ Themes: Window borders = "Mint-X", Icons = "Mint-Y", Controls = "Mint-Y"

• Terminal:

  • Change the background colour to black
  • Untick "show menubar by default in new terminals" in preferences

• Parcellite:

  • Run on the command line as parcellite & (after restart it will launch at startup by default)
  • Right click the clipboard icon that appears in the corner panel, in Preferences tick the top 3:
    • Use Copy (Ctrl-C)
    • Use Primary (Selection)
    • Synchronize clipboards
  • (Now selected text will be copied to the clipboard: what else do you use select for anyway?)

• Firefox settings:

  • Change default search engine to DDG (type "search engine" in the search bar)
  • Type "home" in the search bar and
    • Untick home page junk (just show search bar), under "Firefox home content" untick:
      • "Top sites"
      • "Recommended by Pocket"
      • "Highlights"
    • Unset home page from the Linux Mint site
      • Set both "Homepage and new windows" & "New tabs" to the option "Firefox Home"
  • Untick "Ctrl + Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order" (type "Tab" in search bar)

• Git:

  • Regenerate SSH keys

    • For GitHub in particular that'd be this page, the important commands are

      ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "[email protected]"
      eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
      ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
      xclip -selection clipboard < ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

  • (Then paste into GitHub: https://github.com/settings/keys)

  • Git clone your git-versioned dotfiles repo (either backed up from previous OS or on another machine)

• Conda:

  • Go here and wget the latest version of miniconda into your ~/Downloads then run the shell script installer with bash
  • I suggest doing this after setting up your bashrc (so it writes to your bashrc file after you change it)