Author: Gayan

If you don’t possess the right knowledge & experience, then finding the best Linux laptop can be a daunting task. And thus you can easily end up with something that looks great, features great performance, but struggles to cope with ‘Linux’, shame! So, as a RedHat Certified Engineer, the author & the webmaster of this blog, and as a ‘Linux’ user with 14+ years of experience, I used all my knowledge to recommend to you a couple of laptops that I personally guarantee will let you run ‘Linux’ with ease. After 20+ hours of research (carefully looking through the hardware details…

Whether you are new to touch typing or trying to improve it, having installed a decent typing tutor is a must. If you are a GNU/Linux user, there there are a few different ones that you can try. We have ‘TIPP10’, ‘KTouch’, ‘nlkt’, ‘gtypist’ or ‘dvorak7min’ (which is specially designed for the ‘Dvorak’ users). Or, if you are looking for a way to improve your typing speed, then ‘Typespeed’ might also help. But, due to its simplicity, features & ease of use, I still prefer ‘Klavaro’. It has well-organized lessons (including an introductory lesson that gives you an overview of…

If you have a web camera on your Laptop that you don’t use at all, then you can disable its driver from loading in Ubuntu as it has two main advantages. Firstly, you might be able to save some power, and secondly, it should save you a few Megabytes from your RAM, which might help speed up the booting times as well. Now, even after disabling it, I did not see any noticeable reduction in power. That is because, most webcams that come with laptops these days are actually connected through a USB port (not visible to the outside), including…

About a month or so ago, I decided to re-arrange my KDE desktop layout. I took a new approach, one that I came up with all by myself (using the customization options already graciously provided by the KDE desktop, of course). Then I made a few slight changes on the way, and I’m extremely happy with the results. With the new setup, not only my desktop looks minimalist and beautiful (I think), but it’s easier to use as well. That being said, preference is highly individual, but I thought a short article about how I set it up might look…

It’s been almost 20 months since I last tested one of my highly respected GNU/Linux distributions; Linux Mint, the Cinnamon edition. Linux Mint 19.2 (based on Ubuntu 18.04), the latest release which I’m going to review, features the Cinnamon 4.2.3 which includes few new features, performance enhancements (such as a reduced memory footprint), improved theme and Kernel 4.15, among others. This operating system will be supported up to 2023. As always, in this Linux Mint 19.2 Cinnamon review, I’ll be focusing mostly on its performance, such as the Boot-up speed, memory usage upon loading the desktop, power usage (idle), system…

These days my main operating system is Kubuntu 17.10 because I’ve switched to KDE as my desktop environment. However, since my Asus laptop comes with a hybrid GPU setup, I decided to enable the more capable Nvidia GPU by installing its proprietary driver. Once I enabled it on Kubuntu 17.10, then after rebooting, I noticed that the fonts looks slightly (unnecessarily) bigger on the desktop and on the application windows. Luckily I was able to fix it quite easily. So if you’re having the same issue, this post will help you out for fixing it. To be honest, I rarely use…

Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon boots fast (even on a slow rotational disk), very stable (I haven’t seen any application crash in the past 3 days that I’ve been using it) and the level of responsiveness it has shown is top-notch, probably matched only by another Linux Mint! As far as the end user-experience is concerned, I’d say it’s the best ‘Linux’ distro for beginners, it certainly knows how to please the end-user… welcome to the HecticGeek’s review of Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon edition. Few years ago Linux Mint changed their release strategy. They now rely on the core of Ubuntu LTS…

Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system comes with a major change, it no longer includes Ubuntu’s Unity desktop shell as it has been replaced with Gnome 3 (3.26.1 to be precise). There are many reasons behind this, but the most obvious one is that Ubuntu has failed to get its ideas accepted into the GNU community. To their credit, over the years, Ubuntu developers have come up with fresh ideas that’re worthwhile (Upstart, Mir, Snappy etc). It is just that ideas along isn’t always enough to change a community, especially if one desire to make a fundamental shift, which is…

Apparently, the recently released Ubuntu operating system (17.04) will be the last time Ubuntu will feature its own desktop shell ‘Unity’ which was first introduced back in 2010. So, it survived 7 years, almost. It actually did not ‘survive’, in my opinion, even though I myself was too quick to criticize it (well, back then I was young, somewhat 😉 ), it thrived! Sure the desktop may have had its flaws, but compared to the GNOME3, the foundation of which Unity was heavily relying upon, Unity was a much sensible desktop shell to use. That is at least my judgement after…

I can’t believe that I haven’t written anything for the past 4 months for my website! But I promise that I’ll add fresh content in the future (yes an Ubuntu 17.04 review is on the way). One reason why I was not able to add new ‘Linux’ operating system reviews was because after I switched to a new laptop few months ago, I created a ‘logical volume’ (a especial type of partitioning method, mostly used in server environments) for testing GNU/Linux distributions, rather than creating a traditional partition (which is what I had in the old laptop). And the thing is, some distributions, don’t yet…

The last version of Fedora operating system I reviewed was Fedora 23, and I quite deliberately skipped Fedora 24. The main reason was that starting with Fedora 22, Fedora developers had decided to abandon a core utility (‘systemd-readahead’) that was capable of speeding up boot-up times quite significantly on rotational hard disk drives. The reason for its exclusion according to Fedora developers was because they don’t use rotational disks anymore, that was basically their explanation. Now, I do believe that I have a firm grasp on of the mentality of Fedora & GNOME (they’re very close communities), and thus I knew it…

As promised in my earlier Ubuntu 16.10 review, I have come up with an Ubuntu 16.10 flavors comparison as well, although, I was planning on coming up with this comparison much sooner (but hey, it’s here!) Unlike in my Ubuntu 16.04 LTS flavors comparison which only included two main Ubuntu flavors (Ubuntu GNOME & Kubuntu), this time, I’ve also added Xubuntu 16.10 to the comparison because it was requested by a couple of my readers. The ISO disc image sizes are as follows: Ubuntu 16.10 (1.6 GB), Ubuntu GNOME 16.10 (1.5 GB), Kubuntu 16.10 (1.6 GB) & Xubuntu 16.10 (1.3 GB). And also,…