Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a linux distribution derived from debian. It's a very nice plug&play OS with all features I need.

cat /etc/os-release

cat /etc/lsb-release

lsb_release -a

Show the currently installed version. os-release has most information.

Modfications made

The few things I needed to tweak are listed here.

NetworkManager

NetworkManager is a bad idea, just use /etc/network/interfaces and /etc/resolv.conf to configure your network. Having a DHCP server to supply network configuration is fine, everything else is making things complex. You may need to install ifupdown and disable the netplan thing to achieve this.

• Uninstall dhcpcd
• Uninstall openresolv

snap

Another bad and confusing idea is snap. Remove it like described by techwiser.

Settings GUI

One day I could not start the settings GUI anymore. Removing the unity-control-center fixed the problem one time. On another install it didn't.

sudo apt-get remove unity-control-center

Display

When I connect a monitor to my laptop on HDMI automatically a 3^rd VGA display is found.

xrandr --listactivemonitors

Show all active monitors

xrandr --output VGA-1-2 --off

Turn off the VGA display. The name may differ on other configurations.

Add applications

To add an application to the 'Open with' list edit /usr/share/applications/<newapp>.desktop.

For opening jupyter notebooks I added jupyter.desktop that looks like below. I don't think everything is needed but it works.

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.0
Name=Jupyter
GenericName=Jupyter notebook
Comment=Prototyping and documentation 
Exec=jupyter notebook %F
Icon=jupyter
Terminal=false
Categories=GTK;Development;IDE;
MimeType=text/plain;text/x-python;
StartupNotify=true
Keywords=Python;Editor;

Autostart applications

To automatically start an application when a user logs in put a link to /usr/share/applications/<newapp>.desktop or a new <newapp>.desktop in ~/.config/autostart