It’s actually pretty easy to change your default terminal emulator. This post will tell you how to change your terminal to the terminal emulator your prefer.

Your Linux distro came with a default terminal emulator. It may have even come with a couple of terminals installed. That doesn’t mean it’s the best choice for you, it just means that the developers chose to include it.

For example, you might like XFCE-terminal, or you may prefer Terminator. The choices are endless, and Wikipedia has a ton of them listed.

Generally, you can press CTRL ALT T and open your default terminal. If you’d like to change the behavior, first you need to install a new terminal. For example, if you use APT and you want to install Terminator:

[code]sudo apt install terminator[/code]

Now, let’s make it the default. Either open a terminal or use the existing open terminal and enter the following:

[code]sudo update-alternatives –config x-terminal-emulator[/code]

It should look a little like this:

Just pick the number of the terminal emulator you’d like to be the new default and press enter.

To test this, finish up the tasks above and then press CTRL ALT T (or the keyboard shortcuts your distro has set up) and it should now open to your new default.

For any number of reasons, including bragging rights, you may want to know when you last rebooted your Linux computers. It’s actually pretty easy and I’ll show you how.

Crack open your terminal emulator, CTRL + ALT + T will often do it, and enter the following:

[code]last reboot[/code]

What will tell you when you last rebooted, who booted (system), the kernel used, date and time, and how long the system was up for.

For example:

[code]reboot system boot 5.4.0-52-generic Fri Nov 6 19:22 – 18:25 (9+23:02)
reboot system boot 5.4.0-52-generic Mon Nov 2 12:24 – 19:22 (4+06:57)
reboot system boot 5.4.0-51-generic Wed Oct 21 17:23 – 19:22 (16+02:58)[/code]

If you want to see the three most recent boots, you could just use the ‘head’ command.

[code]$ last reboot | head -3
reboot system boot 5.4.0-58-generic Thu Dec 31 14:56 still running
reboot system boot 5.4.0-58-generic Thu Dec 31 09:32 – 14:55 (05:22)
reboot system boot 5.4.0-58-generic Sat Dec 26 01:33 – 09:32 (5+07:59)[/code]

You can even use grep to see how many times you rebooted in a month, for example:

[code]$ last reboot | grep Nov
reboot system boot 5.4.0-54-generic Mon Nov 30 14:28 – 14:20 (3+23:51)
reboot system boot 5.4.0-54-generic Sat Nov 28 15:24 – 14:13 (1+22:48)
reboot system boot 5.4.0-54-generic Fri Nov 27 15:41 – 15:10 (23:29)
reboot system boot 5.4.0-54-generic Wed Nov 25 16:44 – 15:14 (1+22:29)
reboot system boot 5.4.0-53-generic Wed Nov 18 17:03 – 16:19 (6+23:15)
reboot system boot 5.4.0-53-generic Tue Nov 17 18:26 – 16:55 (22:29)
reboot system boot 5.4.0-53-generic Mon Nov 16 19:09 – 17:11 (22:01)
reboot system boot 5.4.0-53-generic Mon Nov 16 18:25 – 18:25 (00:00)
reboot system boot 5.4.0-52-generic Fri Nov 6 19:22 – 18:25 (9+23:02)
reboot system boot 5.4.0-52-generic Mon Nov 2 12:24 – 19:22 (4+06:57)[/code]

And there you have it. It’s much easier than you might think.

The default music player in Elementary OS is kinda lame. There are many better choices. Once you’ve chosen one, this is how you remove the default music player in eOS.

This was asked on a forum that I visit and I took the time to find the answer. I figured that I’d not been able to easily find the answer with a search engine, so I might as well turn it into an article. It’s actually pretty simple.

eOS lacks any handy GUI system monitor that I could find, so I installed one. You might as well do the same. With eOS, you’re eventually going to want it – though top or htop or even atop do the job just as well. Anyhow, I installed one and found that closing the “io.elementary.music” process closed the music player. Obviously, you can’t uninstall that. It’s part of some bigger package and eOS does things in unusual ways.

With further digging, I finally noticed an application called ‘noise’ in the list of running processes. Killing it would kill the music player, just like killing the io.elementary.music process would. Finding this out pleased me.

[code]sudo apt remove noise[/code]

It was actually pretty neat when I ran that command. It uninstalled the default music player but the dock still had the music player icon showing – and the command made that icon fade into a partially transparent icon. Slick move, eOS. Slick move…

At that point, I just decided I’d reboot. Y’all know how to do that already, but let’s do it from the terminal.

[code]sudo reboot[/code]

Or, if you want,  you can put them all together with one grand command that looks like this:

[code]sudo apt remove noise -y && sudo reboot[/code]

Press the enter button, type in your password, and go grab a snack – but just a quick one as it won’t take long before you’re back at the login screen without the default music player installed any longer.

If you, like me, appreciate clean and simple layouts. The Firefox Title Bar is a bit annoying, wastes space, and adds unneeded clutter. Here’s how to remove it.

If this site (and the rest) doesn’t make it obvious, I like my layouts to be simple. I don’t want to waste space that doesn’t give me information that I need. That’s one of the reasons I use Linux – I can make the OS get out of my way and get my work done.

So, what am I talking about? A picture is worth 1,000 words…

It’s actually easy to get rid of, if you know where to look.

In Firefox, look in the upper-left. You’ll see three vertical dots and those open the menu. Click that and then click on “Customize”. Then, simply scroll down and untick the box for Title Bar.

You don’t even have to restart the browser.

Got an app that needs a shortcut and you can’t make one trivially with your desktop environment? Want to make one manually? The .desktop file is easy to understand.

Create a text file, but name it <foo>.desktop. Save it. This is the format of the code you’ll be using:

[code][Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Exec=/path/to/executable
Name=Name of Application
Icon=/path/to/icon[/code]

That’s all you really need. This isn’t very complicated. Your desktop environment almost certainly has an easier way, but this is how you do it manually. It comes in handy for some folks who want to have desktop icons (I have none, ever) and install applications that don’t set a desktop file.