In Gnome, you need GSConnect.

On the device, you need KDE Connect.

GSConnect

GSConnect is a Gnome Extension. If you have not already started using Gnome Extensions, read this. Long story shory: you can easily enable Gnome Extensions from a web browser, and that’s super handy. In this case, you’ll want to enable GSConnect. It’ll look like this:

Wow look at all my browser tabs. Cool, right? (Can you still trust me, now that you know?)

Nothing will look immediately different. You will, however, notice when you pull down the top right:

“Mobile Devices” now appears. (And look at all that stuff you know about my laptop now! Wow!) At this point (prior to installing KDE Connect on your phone / device), turning it on will do nothing of consequence, but you should turn it on, so that you can connect when we get KDE Connect running for you. So let’s move on to installing on your phone.

KDE Connect

Play Store / search KDE Connect / install.

Open KDE Connect.

It will discover the name of the machine running GSConnect. Click connect.

Over in the Gnome Environment, you should get a notification that something is trying to connect. You should accept this.

(When I first tried, I had a problem with the notification. It would disappear almost instantly, before I could accept. I found this page about the problem. But then I can’t remember what I did to fix it. Sorry.) ((I might have reinstalled or something simple like that. Shrug. I wasn’t expecting to write this article, but then my wife wanted to connect her Android phone to her Dell XPS 13, and I realised this is a good topic to write about. But alas, I hadn’t taken notes on my experience…. Live and learn, am-i-right?))

Once Connected

Check this out:

(Guess what kind of cheap phone I have?) And look at all the stuff you can now do. This is pretty powerful business. You’ll need to grant permission for Gnome to do stuff to and on the phone, and vice versa. All quite self-explanatory.

You can set things up so that, when connected, phone notifications will show up in your Gnome notifications area. You can also use the phone screen to move the mouse on your computer, which is fun so show off at parties (but I can’t find any other reason for this function, and, yes, I attend strange parties).

I’ll note: if you connect to “Messaging”, you’ll be connecting to the default SMS service on your phone. For example, I’ve been using Signal, and nothing I sent after I switched showed up on Messaging. AND (!) all my deleted messages showed up as well. (This is worth a second article some day….)

That’s it.

Now go.

Enjoy.

If you want all the specifics, I suggest familiarising yourself with the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). There’s a lot of detail there; the most important thing for you to understand is that, when coming from a Windows to a Linux environment, you don’t have “drive names”. There’s no “C:” or whatever. Everything starts at “/”. (That’s the root of the filesystem.)

To see what’s available from the root, drop into a command line (terminal) and type the commands:

cd /
ls

The results will look something like this (this is my default Ubuntu 21.04 install):

Everything in dark blue is a directory. Everything in white is a text file. Everything in green (nothing in the shot above) is exceutable. The directories you’ll find yourself fiddling with the most include /etc, /home, /media, and /var.

/etc

/etc (pronounced et-see) has all the configuration files. Again default configuration of Ubuntu 21.04, here’s what I’ve got:

Obviously there’s a lot in there. Again, anything in white is a text file; anything in dark blue is a directory. Notice the commands I’ve used: ls and cd.

“ls” gives you a directory “listing”.

“cd” changes to a directory.

“more”, “less”, and “cat” will show you the contents of text files; it’s useful to read up on how these commands work. My tendency is to use “less”, as it presents an easily-navigable, paged display of a file’s contents.

Note: when in doubt, RTFM. (You don’t want anyone to tell you “RTFM” when you ask a dumb question (there are dumb questions)). Read. The. Fucking. Manual. This means to read the manual page for whatever command is in question. For example, if you want to know how “less” works, don’t ask someone “hey, how does ‘less’ work?” They will be within their rights to tell you to RTFM.) To read the (fucking) manual, type this at a command prompt:

man less

As an example, you’ll see something like this:

Follow the on-screen instructions to learn how to navigate a paged viewer like this. (That is, RTFM; I’m not going to re-invent the manual here because FTN.)

It is well worth your time to get to know how these common, basic commands work; they’re extremely powerful and will help you navigate and administer your computer like a fucking boss.

Anyway. Have a cruise around /etc and see what’s in there. Don’t worry: unless you’re the administrator, you can’t break anything.

/home

Linux, like all UNIX-oriented operating systems, is a multi-user system. If you installed fresh and created one user, there will be only one sub-directory in /home. It will be named after you. Mine is /home/brian/.

There are lots of other users on the system. You can view them in the file /etc/passwd:

You’ll never interact with most of them. It’s mostly just you and root, assuming you are your own administrator.

You might be thinking: what’s the freaking point to all this complication? Well, if, in principle, the administrator and users are separated, it’s much more difficult for malware to affect the system. Notice some of the user names in that file: www-data, mail, lp, and so on. They all have different jobs, and those jobs are logically separated from both users and the administrator. In a well-maintained system, even if www-data is compromised, that user cannot affect things like the printer, or you! If you’re compromised, you can’t affect the printer, or the web server, or whatever.

Notice, there are no subdirectories in /home for any of these utility users. That’s what we expect; they never log in; they never use the system, as you do. Sub-directories in /home are legitimate users set up by the administrator.

/media

If you plug in a USB drive, or pop a camera card in a slot, or whatever, that “device” will be “mounted” in a subdirectory of /media.

/media is reserved for removeable devices.

This is important: a device is anything attached to the computer. This includes the keyboard, the wifi controller, the screen, a printer, the hard drive, anything. All of those things are represented somewhere in the filesystem — as a “file”. This simplifies everything. If a printer can be treated like a file, then I can control access to the printer the same way I control access to a file. Easy peasy.

Briefly: the very concept of a file, in the UNIX world, includes the very concept of permission (more on this in a separate article). This is very important: the very idea of security is built in to the very concept of what it’s like to exist in a UNIX-style environment. (For ages, the idea of security was separate from the idea of a file, in a Microsoft environment. This made everything quite vulnerable, and this structural concern is among the reasons why there were so many ways to infect a Microsoft environment with malware. But I digress — and I guess Microsoft has changed its ways by now, I hear. I dunno. I don’t pay attention to those billionaire fuckers.)

So anyway, when you plug in a new device, the system recognises the presence of the new device and “mounts” it. This means that it gets its own spot in the filesystem. (Ages ago, this was all a manual process; nowadays, it’s all very simple, so lucky you!) When the system mounts something new, it will be mounted to a subdirectory of /media corresponding to the user’s name. In my case, anything I mount will live in /media/brian/.

/var

This is a directory where “variable” things go — things that we expect will change as the operating system operates. A specially useful example are the files in /var/log/. These are the log files, where the system tracks the things that happen — depending on how you’ve configured it to keep track of such things. When errors occur, they’ll be in here somewhere. When services restart, you’ll find logs of that as well. Have a bounce around in here and view some of the files. It’s good fun.

Summary

You’ve entered a different world. There’s a lot to learn at first, but everything is very deliberately designed — especially for security — and has been operating successfully for fifty years. It’s worth spending a little time getting to know how the filesystem works, and how it contributes to both the security and stability of a UNIX-oriented system like Linux. This is best done through the command line, and the manual.

When in doubt, indeed, RTFM.

LibreOffice

The leader of the pack these days is LibreOffice, which is installed by default with Ubuntu Linux, among other distributions. LibreOffice Writer is the word processing component of the office suite. It can process every kind of Microsoft format you can imagine, plus more. The default file format for documents created in LibreOffice Writer is ODT, which stands for OpenDocument Text. This format is compatible with modern versions of Microsoft Word.

The software has a familiar look and feel. A blank document with all default settings looks like this:

There isn’t a “ribbon” style menu, as Microsoft Word has (sadly) embraced. According to Microsoft:

While you might simply refactor a traditional menu bar and toolbar design of an existing program to a ribbon format, doing so misses most of the value of using a ribbon. Ribbons have the most value when used to present immediate, results-oriented commands, often in the form of galleries and live previews. Results-oriented commands make commands easier to understand and users much more efficient and productive. Instead of refactoring your existing commands, it’s better to redesign completely how commands are performed in your program.

If you can find a better example of bullshit business speak, leave it in the comments. “Results-oriented commands”. Hah! Efficiency! Productivity! Man this has got it all. Why hasn’t LibreOffice embraced this revolution? Well they have.

If you want to experience the incalculable productivity boost of the ribbon style user interface, just do this, from “View / User interface…”:

I think “Tabbed” is the Microsoft rubbish ribbon style. But look, if it’s efficiency you want, I recommend setting up keyboard shortcuts to do all the stuff you regularly do. Toolbar style doesn’t matter a whit; once you have to remove your fingers from the keyboard to perform an action, you’re wasting time. Surely someone has studied this, but it’s incompatible with the popularly asserted (by Microsoft) value of performing any and all actions in a Graphical User Interface, so. This is Linux people: the keyboard is your friend. Embrace your friend.

(I have digressed. Oops.)

Anyway, there are alternatives to LibreOffice Writer.

OpenOffice

OpenOffice is, essentially, an original version of LibreOffice. Long story short: there was a split between developers of OpenOffice after the rights were acquired by this and that billionaire multi-national leech (details irrelevant), and what we have now are two office suites developing side-by-side that are nearly identical. They are both robust and wonderful. But, given that Ubuntu chooses to bundle LibreOffice with their distribution, I choose inertia and go with that.

WPS

This is an interesting one. It’s proprietary, costs money, but by reputation is almost perfectly compatible with Microsoft Word. However, I’ve never run up against anything given to me in a Word format that LibreOffice couldn’t handle. Maybe I’m not the kind of user who runs into incompatability problems. I dunno.

I can tell you this: I installed WPS once — the free trial version — and it was bloody hard to uninstall. I wasn’t pleased with that. Maybe it looked more like Word, but I also don’t know about that; I don’t use Word.

If you’re looking for a free, open alternative to Word (obviously a good thing), this isn’t it. Proceed with the same caution your would exercise toward any non-open software.

Calligra

Here’s one that I know exists, but I’ve never used it. See, there’s this split in Linux environments between Gnome and KDE. I’ve always been more of a Gnome user. So, the stuff developed for the KDE environment hasn’t been on my radar.

Looks cool though. Give it a try and leave a comment about how you like it. (Hah. Comments.)

AbiWord

I’ll be honest here (am I ever dishonest here?) — I used to love AbiWord. But that was twenty years ago. Recently, for old times sake, I gave it a try again and. Sigh. What to say. Why wouldn’t I just use LibreOffice Writer? I don’t know.

In fact, I just tried to open one of my documents with it, and the damned thing crashed.

It has a small memory footprint, so if memory is a concern, this might be your answer.

TL;DR

LibreOffice Writer is good. Why are you still paying the richest people on the planet for the privilege to use an entirely replaceable and inferior product?

(Collaboration and Presentation)

OK, so some of you need to do collaborative work with “Teams” or whatever other bloated thing. The good news is that for the overwhelming majority of users, the web-based versions of whatever you need (Office 365?) work just fine.

If you’re worried about documents not looking the same if you open them on this computer with this version of this thing vs. that computer with that other version of that other thing, then you shouldn’t be using word processing software. Word processing software is not about consistent, professional-looking presentation. It’s about storing and editing words (content). For consistent, professional-looking presentation, you’re looking for desktop publishing software (things like Adobe InDesign, etc., or Scribus — the open source alternative) and you want a professional designer to make your content look amazing.

Summary

Liberate yourself.

sudo vim /etc/hostname

(Note: hostnames must start with a letter and can contain only letters, numbers, and hyphens.)

Next, change any occurrence of the original hostname to the new one in /etc/hosts. Like this:

sudo vim /etc/hosts

Now, to make the change take effect, either reboot (guh!) or — in my Ubuntu 21.04 case — use hostnamectl. (Other distributions and older versions of Ubuntu use different mechanisms; look up “what service do I use to reset hostname in [your Linux distribution]”.) Here’s what I did:

sudo hostnamectl set-hostname Yo-Yo-Yoga

Where “Yo-Yo-Yoga”, as we all know by now, is my new, preferred hostname. Yours will likely be different, like “Hacker-Station-Delta” or “Party-Machine”.

Note that if you use hostnamectl without changing those files, then the next time you reboot, your computer will be named whatever is still in those files.

You can test the new hostname with the command “hostname”, like this:

I hope that was a lot of fun for all of you. I sure got a laugh out of it. In fact, I’m going to keep my hostname like this for a while. See you on the network!

In my case, I had an errant line in my grub config file. What’s that? It’s the bootloader. It’s the thing that controls how the machine passes control from the BIOS to the hard drive (not exactly, but that’s good enough to get you approving nods at cocktail parties; go with it.)

Sometimes when you monkey with things in Linux, you make mistakes, and oh shit. Now what. This is probably one of those times (if you’re seeing the infamous black screen with cursor). My story was simple. Instead of a “quiet splash”, where you don’t see the system messages as your computer boots and shuts down, which is the default behaviour with Ubuntu, I wanted to see the system messages. This is controlled by GRUB — the Grand Unified Bootloader.

There’s a simple file that controls how GRUB behaves. It is: /etc/default/grub

If you edit that file (as root (with sudo), of course), be very careful. In my case, I wanted to remove the “quiet splash” in the line

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

When I did this, I left some text between the quotes. Oops. In order to see the system messages, the line should read

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""

In my case, the change results in this (after I fixed the error that precipitated this whole conversation):

Now, when you edit this file, in order for the changes you’ve made to have an effect, you must run:

sudo update-grub

Of course, I did this. But with the errant text between the quotes (not shown here, because I went back and fixed it), GRUB was like, what the fuck do you actually want??

The result: the black screen of death.

The solution: when booting, press whatever it takes to force the boot menu. For me, on a Lenovo Yoga 530, I pressed F12.

From the boot menu, you can drop into a command prompt (recovery mode) and edit the grub file and remove whatever is wrong.

Then, DON’T FORGET, run

sudo update-grub

Then resume boot as normal.

In my case, this fixed the problem. If this doesn’t fix the problem, then I recommend altering your GRUB config so that you can see system messages, then boot again and see where the problem is. Then, search for solutions to that problem, whatever it is.

But, in many cases, errant grub config might well have been the problem.

** A quick note about the black screen with the cursor: sometimes the system is really just waiting for something to finish, and if you’re patient enough, it’ll finish and the next phase of booting or whatever will commence. In this case, the question is how patient you’re willing to be. (I’m not very patient, so I’d just cold boot the bastard and figure out what was taking so long and eliminate or streamline it. But that’s me, and I’m really fun in queues.)

For technical reasons, there are a few laptops out there that actually can’t run Linux; it’s to do with how their hard drives are configured; it’s to do with RAID, and your eyes are already glazing over. Fair enough.

Your best bet is to use a popular search engine and enter a term along the lines of “[some random laptop] linux”. There will be information about someone out there in the world who has tried Linux on this machine. It’s a big world; you will not be the first to wonder.

The big players these days (Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, and so on) have all the drivers you can imagine bundled up in their distributions. Generally, you’ll never have to install a driver; that’s a problem of the past — and it was a hell of a problem when it was a problem, back in the day.

A good idea is to try running Linux from a USB stick (or some other medium) and see that everything works. For example, Ubuntu offers instructions for creating a bootable medium and going for a test drive. I won’t reinvent the wheel they invented, but the basics are: download a thing, write that thing to a medium that is bootable, boot from that medium, have fun!

If you’re trying to see whether Linux will run on an old laptop, then you might want to try a minimal “Live Linux”. There are several options, with the most popular teeny tiny Linux being Puppy. (It can be good fun to just hack around with tiny distributions if you want to learn some of the basics and some of the non-mainstream software options.)

Assuming that everything is working from the live distribution, use whatever graphical installer they offer and go for it!

If you want to, you can install Linux along side some other operating system, like Windows. To do so, you’ll need to create partitions — scary! But the installer will help you along, and again, assuming you’re following along with someone who has done this before on your laptop of choice, you’ll have a model to follow. In a case like this, you’ll be creating a “dual boot” system, and the world is full of instructions of how to set this up. (I can’t really help because I’ve never done this because Windows: yuck.)

Long story short: yes you can run Linux on your laptop, with very few exceptions. And these days, installation is as easy as booting from a removeable drive and following basic instructions.

Have a go. Good luck. Enjoy your freedom.

The symptom: Suddenly, randomly, some of the keyboard will stop working. Usually this happens in clusters. Perhaps some of the number keys stop working. Perhaps some of the qwerty row. Sometimes the shift key stops working. It could be anything.

The problem is either hardware or software. Here’s how to easily determine which.

• Reboot and get into the BIOS (use F2, F1, whatever special key for your machine).
• Find a place where you can enter text. The admin password field is an option.
• Try to enter text with the keys that weren’t working.
• If the keys work, then it is a software problem.
• If the keys still do not work, then it’s a hardware problem.
• Exit without saving!

Hardware

I’ll start with hardware, because that’s probably the problem. (Especially with Linux; blaming drivers is such a Windows thing to do, isn’t it….)

Easiest fix: clean the keyboard. Use a can of compressed air with a straw; you know the ones. Hold down one of the errant keys and spray air under the top as best you can. See if that does it. (Some warn that this might jiggle debris around and make things worse, so proceed with caution, as always.) If this doesn’t do it, invert the machine and gently tap the keys as you would when typing. In this case, gravity will try to pull any bits out. Finally, you can pop off an errant key and spray air directly around under the top.

Did that work? No? Well, things get more complicated.

Slightly more difficult fix: reseat the ribbon cable. (Unless you’re lucky enough to be using an old ThinkPad where taking the keyboard out is an absolute cinch! But then, if you’re using an old ThinkPad, you’re probably not having keyboard problems (those were the best laptop keyboards ever made. Full stop.))

To reseat the keyboard ribbon cable, you have to get into the machine. This will vary from model to model, but it probably involves removing screws. Do that and find the ribbon cable and reseat it.

Lots of people report success with this technique. But notice something: to do this, you have to invert the laptop and, voila! Gravity and jiggling very well might dislodge debris as in the Easiest Fix. (I struggle with the ribbon cable solution. It’s either seated correctly or not. How could this possibly affect Shift-9, for example? It just doesn’t add up. If you can think of a way that it does add up, please leave a comment. (Haha. Fuck comments.))

While you’re at it, some recommend doing a power cycle. This means disconnecting the battery and pressing the power button for anywhere from 30 seconds to an hour. This will discharge any weird built-up static or whatever. Plausible solution, but I bet it doesn’t help!

If you’ve done these things and the symptoms persist, then you might have drawn the short straw and gotten a munted keyboard. It happens. These are fiddly things, and nobody’s perfect. You might just be staring down some new hardware.

(This happened to me; ultimately, it was a glitch in the actual hardware; there was nothing to be done outside of replacing.)

Software

Uh. If you’re using Linux, then, reinstall the driver? No? That isn’t really a thing. But what I can recommend is updating everything responsibly. The drivers are part of the kernel, so at this point, you’re monkeying with that kind of thing, and that’s not for everybody. (It’s also very likely not your problem. If one key works and one key doesn’t, then clearly the driver works — because that one freaking key works!)

If none of this works and you’re in a real pinch, then plug in a USB keyboard.

Seek professional help.

(Actually, you can do most things without the command line these days, but you really should use the command line whenever possible.)

Linux is a UNIX-oriented operating system (there’s a lot more to it, but that’s all you need to be able to say at parties), and UNIX is a keyboard-oriented operating system. (There was no concept of a window when it was developed.) So, it’s best that you have a crack at the command line and take a little time to learn a few things. In fact, you can get things done a lot quicker with the command line than you can through a window.

Advantages of using the command line

Power. In Linux, anything you can do in a window, you can do from the command line. But not everything you can do from the command line can be done in a window. This means that the command line is more powerful. (Of course, you can accidentally delete your entire system if you’re not careful. But you could spill coffee all over the machine and fry the main board, but you still keep a cup of coffee next to you am-i-right?)

Speed. Navigating the filesystem, moving things, backing things up, renaming things, all that business — much easier from the command line. Commands such as mv and cp are super awesome and you don’t have to drag and drop icons all over the place. (mv for ‘move’ and cp for ‘copy’.) Once you have a sense of the filesystem, which is set up like a tree, plus a few basic commands, everything falls into place. Trust me.

Knowledge. If you try to run something graphically and it fails, what happened? Well, you can browse the system logs, look around for messages, and so forth. Or, if you try to run the same thing from the command line, any errors will be reported there. So much simpler for troubleshooting.

Disadvantages of using the command line

Nope.

First, bring up your “Settings”. You can do this through the drop down in the top right corner, if you’re using Gnome. Or, you can hit the “Super” key (usually the “Window” key), then typing “settings”.

Here’s mine.

Oh my god now you know my gmail.com address. Whelp….

See, it’s pretty simple these days. Just click “Online Accounts”, then click on Google, then enter your information and accept that Linux will be able to access your stuff, and you’re in business.

Now, your calendar should be integrated in the top bar of Gnome. Like this:

As you can see, I prefer a pretty basic setup. See those dots under the days? Those are all events on my Google Calendar. Events will show up in the “Notifications” area, as appropriate. “No Events” today. Oh well.

For further tips on how to set up your Gnome environment as incredibly simply as mine, refer to my Tweaks post.

For now, enjoy how easy they’ve made it .

The solution is simple enough with a few commands, but you’ll have to use the terminal for this one.

First, the symptom: Using Firefox, it was not possible to scroll using the touchscreen. Instead, all you could do was click links or select text. You could drag the scrollbar, but generally this is not the behaviour of a tablet, and tablet behaviour was what we expected.

The solution: You need X11 Gestures, touchegg, and to adjust a few settings in Firefox and elsewhere.

First, ensure that you have touchegg installed (this link is for an older version of Ubuntu, but the same principle applies).

Next, assuming you’re using Gnome (Ubuntu out of the box uses Gnome), you’ll want to install X11 Gestures. This is a Gnome Shell Extension, and if you’ve not set yourself up to use those, you’ll want to set up Gnome Shell Extensions now.

At this point, your problem will not be solved. There are two more subtle steps, and they have to do with security, so proceed with caution. (You’ll be OK. I believe in you.)

In Firefox, in about:config, set dom.w3c_touch_events.enabled=1. Here that is in monospace:

dom.w3c_touch_events.enabled=1

Now, you need to edit a file that only root (the administrator) can edit. The instruction is this: edit /etc/security/pam_env.conf and add MOZ_USE_XINPUT2 DEFAULT=1

I use an editor called vim. You can use whatever editor you want. gedit is popular. nano is popular. Whatever you’ve settled on, use that. Replace in these commands as necessary.

sudo vim /etc/security/pam_env.conf

Once in the file, ensure you have a line that looks like this (the last blue line):

Save the file and reload modules — or just bloody reboot — as necessary.

Was all of this necessary? To be honest, I don’t know exactly; I’m unsure whether the X11 Gestures were necessary, but they’re cool and you should have them. I know that pinching and scrolling didn’t work in Firefox until these last two steps, so they’re essential.

Following this, I bought my own Lenovo Yoga 530 and set all this up. Then, when I installed Google Chrome, it worked seamlessly. So, officially, this is a troubleshooting guide for Firefox in Gnome with a touchscreen.

Enjoy.