This tutorial will help you with useful suggestions to do for using elementary OS 7 on your computer for the first time. It will help you add applications, games, stuff important for your work & daily activities, and some recommendations. We wish you great experience in computing with OS 7. Now let's read on!

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1. Software Updates & Application

 

First thing to do on OS 7 is to update all our software. Please beware that this may cost you a fair amount of time, internet access and disk space. Once you finished this, you are ready to go. To do so, run AppCenter -> Updates -> Update All -> wait for the process -> Reboot when asked. If you prefer doing this faster, run Terminal and invoke command lines below.

$ sudo apt update 
$ sudo apt upgrade
$ sudo apt dist-upgrade
$ flatpak update

 

Add Synaptic & enable PPA: We value AppCenter and its importance for most users. However, we need to install many programs not listed in it. We prefer Synaptic Package Manager,
an old way to do things, but it works for tens of thousands of software
packages actually available but hidden if you only use AppCenter. Do this command line: $ sudo apt install synaptic apt-xapian-index software-properties-common.

 

To this point, now you have access to all tens of thousands of software packages available on elementary OS plus Ubuntu.

2. Daily Life & Productivity

 

Get Firefox: we acknowledge Web, the default browser, is a user-friendly one. But we do prefer Firefox for daily work and we believe many will also do. The easiest way to get Firefox on OS 7 is to download it from its official website.

(Left: Impress with a Harvard presentation
 Right: Firefox showing elementary OS website)

• Go to mozilla.org
• Click Download Firefox.
• Firefox downloaded as .tar.gz archive file. 
• Extract the archive file.
• This creates a new folder named 'firefox'.
• Double-click 'firefox' file inside firefox folder.

Get an office suite: elementary is the only major
GNU/Linux desktop OS which does not ship with any office suite. We use
and recommend LibreOffice. The easiest way to do so:

$ sudo apt install libreoffice 

3. Amusement and Games

 

We found that OS 7 cannot play many of our videos well, unfortunately. But we use VLC Media Player anyway and it works.

Right: a fun color puzzle game)

We have plenty of games on OS 7 thanks to the support from Ubuntu software repository. For example, here we want to play a simple game Swell Foop. It's fun to play this especially with your kids. You can find more games via Synaptic such as Warzone and Nexuiz for you both rts and fps lovers.

$ sudo apt install vlc
$ sudo apt install swell-foop
$ sudo apt install warzone nexuiz # just example in case you want it

 

4. Recommended Applications

 

We believe most of people who use elementary OS coming from prior Microsoft or Apple background and many work in either education, multimedia or software development field. For that reason, we pick six apps for you below. All of these can be installed using Synaptic.

GIMP Photo editing.	Krita Digital painting.	Blender 3D animation.	OpenShot Video editing.	OBS Studio Screen recording.	Geany For coding.

 

5. Parental Control

 

Finally, we also believe many users of elementary OS are parents who have children. Do you know that OS 7 has parental control features? You can limit how long the computer can be used by your son and daughter, or which website they may not visit, or which apps/games they cannot access. Open up Settings -> Parental Control and try to follow example below.

Upper right: he may not access a few websites including Facebook and Tiktok

Lower right: he may not access a few programs like AppCenter and Terminal)

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This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.