Background

I've been a developer for many years. My beginnings were on Windows 95. Since then my primary development environment has been Windows OS based.

Some time back I had an opportunity to switch my work web development environment to MacOS. MacOS is great for that. Switching back to Windows was not necessarilly any comparable experience 😄

So what about trying something else, shall we?

In this chapter you get some introduction and I share my feelings and struggles.

Zorin OS?

When searching over a dozen of modern Linux distributions, I suddenly found Zorin OS hidden behind Ubuntu, Debian, Mint (from a popularity perspective) and elementary OS (from UX perspective). It's great looking desktop OS. Very visually appealing. There are a few editions you might choose from:

• Ultimate
• Core
• Lite
• Education and Education Lite

All but Ultimate are free of charge.

I've got a spare Fujitsu Celsius H710 laptop, so I decided to install Core edition on it.

Installation

I don't want to go through the whole installation procedure. You can find many tutorials on internet. After burning the installation DVD of Zorin OS 15.1, I just followed the installation steps. It is super easy (if you manage to boot from DVD).

Struggle with NVidia drivers

The first installation went through, all fine. Then I wanted to tweak the OS a little bit, that was a mistake 😄. The H710 has hybrid graphics. So actually 2 graphics adapters - Intel and NVidia. I tried to install the additional NVidia drivers from the Software & Updates

Neither of the NVidia drivers worked perfectly. With the proprietary driver you get this annoying NVidia logo while booting and the booting seemed to take longer. Both proprietary and open source NVidia drivers caused the brightness adjustment to stop working. I mean the functional key still work, but the brightness always stays on 100%. Switching back to Nouveau drivers was a nightmare, too. The screen resolution went to 640x480 and no way to change it properly.

If you now get a cool idea to switch to Intel graphics adapter ...

sudo prime-select intel

... don't do this 😏. At least I was not able to make it work with Intel adapter. Mind you, even reinstall won't help as you need to switch back to NVidia.

The only remedy that worked for me was:

• switch to NVidia

sudo prime-select nvidia

• uninstall NVidia drivers completely:

sudo apt purge nvidia-*

After that Zorin OS experience was back to the top level:

• Zorin OS logo when booting in high-res
• resolution back to screen native

Laptop power management

Power management is surely important if you want to use your laptop on battery. The most advanced tool is the TLP.

Just install TLP on your laptop:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linrunner/tlp
sudo apt update
sudo apt install tlp tlp-rdw

You might find TLP GUI handy:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linuxuprising/apps
sudo apt update
sudo apt install tlpui
`

Then go to Software app and search for TLP Extension. This will give you an easy way to switch between power management profiles without opening a terminal window and typing in something.

The TLP installs the default TLP profile under /etc/defaults/tlp. You might follow these steps to create your custom profiles.

• copy the /etc/defaults/tlp to ~/.tlp/<Your profile name> as many times as many profiles you want
• open the respective profile file in TLP GUI
• make all modifications to your liking and save it

What next?

In the next chapters I'd share my impressions of using Zorin OS as web developer.