My primary work laptop is now a Thinkpad with Ubuntu Linux 20.04 on it. To make life easier when switching from the Mac, I needed quite a few utilities and configuration tips:
- Use Mac keyboard shortcuts on Linux (with the kinto utility)
- Making fingerprint login work (~80% of the time)
- Get external monitor working properly (with Nvidia proprietary drivers)
- Adjust external monitor brightness (from the command line)
- Remove the Trash icon from the desktop (and add it to the Dock)
- Notes clone (for writing quick notes)
- Weather widget (adds Weather to menu bar, very customizable)
- Caffeine for Linux (prevents computer from sleeping from menu bar)
- How to pair AirPods (by setting the correct Bluetooth controller mode)
- Remove stale Bluetooth devices
- Turn off the beep in Terminal
- Soulver clone (mostly works but not bug-free)
- Mount Time Capsule network attached storage from Linux
- Reader view in Brave/Chrome/Chromium (sort of like Safari’s Reader view)
- Time tracker (technically RescueTime for Linux is available too)
- FaceID-like Authentication for logging in and sudo (slower than real FaceID on the phone though)
Things I haven’t figured out how to do yet:
- Disable CPU turbo boost to lower fan noise (these instructions didn’t work for me)
- Ctrl-Zoom properly without using an outdated crashy window manager
Please let me know if you’ve figured out how to do either of these last two things on the Thinkpad with Ubuntu.
