Ubuntu 18.04
The Bionic Beaver is the Gnome driven normal ubuntu version since 2011. Its nice to play around a little, but it's far from perfect yet. I keep mij production versie still on 16.04.
The Beaver uses the Wayland display manager bij default. I myself prefer not to use wayland, since many graphical programs like screencapture programs don't work properly with wayland. You can choose the version of the displaymanager when loggin in (tap the settings wheel).
When you use Wayland after all:
First open a terminal and type
xhost si+:localuser:root
to be able to run gui programms like synaptic or gparted in superuser mode when running wayland mode.
Then update the repository list and install all updates,
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
In My opinion, extra software that is needed for a good desktop is:
sudo apt-get install synaptic gdebi gparted chromium-browser gnome-tweak-tool ubuntu-restricted-extras keepassx keepass2 remmina simplescreenrecorder
When you use the Gnome Tweak Tool, go to windows and detach the modal dialogs if you want these dialogs to be movable like they are in unity.
sudo apt install libavcodec-extra nautilus-dropbox subtitleeditor handbrake vlc deluge gimp
Gnome-subtitles is no longer available in Ubuntu 18.04
Cloud drivers:
Start dropbox from activities to install dropbox
Install MEGA to run the MEGA cloud service
Install Nextcloud client using this ppa
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nextcloud-devs/client sudo apt-get update sudo apt install nextcloud-client nextcloud-nautilus
Now you're intsalling using ppa's it's time to manage these ppa's:
Extra software that is needed to manage ppa is the y-ppa-manager.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/y-ppa-manager sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install y-ppa-manager
And go to the Insync website to download the laters Insync .deb installation file. I used the 64 bit version for Ubuintu 17.10 and it works, but doesn't show the tray icon.
A simple workaround is installing a smal program:
sudo apt install sni-qt
and logout and login again.
Install DVD readability using this site
http://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss.html
sudo -H gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
add this line:
deb http://download.videolan.org/pub/debian/stable/ /
save and close the file. Now in a terminal type:
wget -O - http://download.videolan.org/pub/debian/videolan-apt.asc | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2
sudo dpkg-reconfigure libdvd-pkg
Install Tixati to be able to handle bittorrent files a bit more sophisticated. It isn't in te repositorys so install it using a downloaded .deb.
https://www.tixati.com/download/linux.html explains it all
After intalling Ubuntu 18.04 from scratch you might want to install Unity, since it isn't the default desktop anymore. After this tou can choose unity as desktop environment again at logon.
sudo apt install ubuntu-unity-desktop unity-session
will do the trick
to be sure Gnome is installed you could do:
sudo apt install ubuntu-session gdm3