Still working on Ubuntu 21.10? It’s time to upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, because it will reach end of life in next month.
Ubuntu 21.10, code-name “Impish Indri”, was released on October 14, 2021 as a short-term release with 9-month support.
Support of this Ubuntu edition will end soon. At that time, there’s no longer package updates and security fixes. Also, Ubuntu PPAs, software developers, as well as other software sources will (or has already) stop updating for 21.10.
To keep safe and get updated software packages, you may either upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04 or do a fresh install of Ubuntu 20.04. Both are long term support releases with 5-year support from their release date. Ubuntu 22.04 is recommended, though it still has various compatibility issues with old applications.
Download / Upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04
If you would like to do a fresh install of Ubuntu 22.04, download the iso image from the official website:
And, here’s a step by step guide that could help you to install Ubuntu 22.04 from an USB stick.
To upgrade from Ubuntu 21.10 to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, you may either follow the official documentation with basic info. Or, follow this step by step upgrade guide which’s written for Ubuntu 20.04 but also works for 21.10 and will upgrade directly to the final release of Ubuntu 22.04.
Want to zoom in or zoom out your screen content? It’s easy to do the job via the system built-in magnifier tool.
If you just want to magnify your web pages, press Ctrl and + key combination on keyboard can do the trick in the most web browsers. For others, Ubuntu has a built-in screen magnifier.
It’s definitely the GNOME feature that also works in Fedora Workstation, and other Linux with the desktop environment. Which, can be useful when recording video tutorials.
Enable/Configure Screen Magnifier
It’s easy to enable the feature in Ubuntu 22.04 since “Settings” (aka Gnome control center) now includes the toggle option.
1. First, open “settings” via the top-right corner system menu.
2. When it opens, go to Accessibility from the left, then click on “Zoom” option in right to open the configuration page.
3. In next pop-up dialog, turn on/off the slider icon to enable or disable magnifier. The magnification factor defaults to 1.00 which means no magnification. You may set the value from 0.1 to 32 to either decrease or increase screen size.
There are options to set magnifier position to either follow mouse center or keep centered. Crosshairs in custom color is available to make mouse pointer easy to follow. And, you may adjust the screen brightness, contrast, and color when magnifier enabled.
Keyboard shortcut to Enable/Disable Magnifier
Besides using Gnome control center or Accessibility indicator (the human body icon in system tray), there’s a global keyboard shortcut Super (Windows key) + Alt + 8 to turn on/off the function quickly.
The shortcut key is quite useful. You may change it to any other key combination by going to “Settings -> Keyboard -> View and Customize Shortcuts -> Accessibility”.
As you can see, there are 2 more shortcuts Super + Alt + = and Super + Alt + -. Using them will set “Magnification factor” to 1.00 automatically. So, Super + Alt + 8 will only turn on/off the function but NO magnification, you can then press the 2 shortcut keys at any time to zoom in/out.
Change Magnifier shortcut key via Linux command:
For those familiar with Linux command, it’s possible to change the shortcut key (to Alt+Super+7 for example) using command:
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys magnifier "['<Alt><Super>7']"
And, reset the key if you want by running command:
Since Ubuntu 22.04, you’ll find that the MPV media player does NOT have window border and title-bar out-of-the-box.
That’s quite annoying! You can no longer drag resizing the app window. And, title bar buttons (minimize, maximize, and close) only appear when you hover over the window during video playback.
MPV no window border and title bar
Why:
It’s NOT feature but a bug! Someone has reported the issue almost 9 years ago. Though, it’s still not been fixed due to GNOME Wayland protocol.
You know, MPV is a command line media player. It does not use the GUI toolkit for window borders, but the server-side protocol. However, GNOME developers do deliberately do not support the xdg-decoration protocol for server-side decorations in Wayland (via this FAQ).
Ubuntu 22.04 finally switched Wayland as the default session. So, the problem occurs.
Workaround 1: Switch back Xorg Session
Besides MPV, still many applications have compatibility issues with GNOME Wayland. Even the Night Light feature does not work in Ubuntu 22.04 with this session.
As a workaround, user may switch back to the classic Xorg session. To do so, simply log out, click your username in login screen, then select “Ubuntu on Xorg” via the bottom right gear button menu, and finally type password to log in.
To verify your current session either run echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE command in terminal or check in “Settings -> About -> Windowing system”.
Workaround 2: Run MPV via X11 backend
For those prefer GNOME Wayland session, it’s possible to run MPV media player via X11 backend without switch session.
1.) To start video playback from command line, use command:
Here --gpu-context=x11egl tells to use x11 backend for video playback. And, --hwdec=vaapi-copy is required to enable GPU hardware acceleration in this case.
Thanks to S. Likhitrattanapisal, you may try --hwdec=vaapi flag to enable hwacc. Though it may not work, it depends on your hardware.
2.) To enable this for global use, you may add the flags into MPV configuration file.
Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When terminal opens, make a copy of configuration file first via command:
sudo cp /etc/mpv/mpv.conf /etc/mpv/mpv.conf.bak
Then, edit the file via command:
sudo xdg-open /etc/mpv/mpv.conf
When file opens, add the following new line:
gpu-context=x11egl
After saving the changes, start playing your movie via MPV. The window border as well as title-bar should be back!
Workaround 3: Use GUI front-end
There are a few media players that use MPV as backend. As far as I know, there are SMPlayer and Celluloid (formerly GNOME MPV), both of which are available to install via Ubuntu Software (or App Center).
