Archives For Howtos

Want to round corners of windows in KDE Plasma Desktop? Here’s a KWin effect can do the job in recent Plasma desktop from v5.27 to v6.3.

There was a ShapeCorners KWin/5 effect can do the job to enable rounded window corners, which however discontinued. What I’m going to introduce is KDE-Rounded-Corners, a fork of ShapeCorners with optimization and recent Plasma desktop support.

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For NVIDIA users, Ubuntu finally backported the latest NVIDIA 570 driver for Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04, and Ubuntu 24.10 desktop.

NVIDIA 570 is so far the latest production branch driver for Linux that was initially released in February.

The driver features variable refresh rate (VRR) support on multiple monitors, systemd suspend-then-hibernate sleep method, application profile to improve performance on Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
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Installing Grub-Customizer in Ubuntu 25.04 from PPA will output “Depends: policykit-1 but it is not installable” issue. Here are quick workarounds until it’s fixed upstream.

As the name says, Grub-Customizer is a graphical application to configure the Grub boot-loader, such as set default boot entry, edit boot menu, and add kernel parameters.

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Want to protect from accidentally invoking power-off commands, or prevent multi-user or public use computers from being shutdown or restart by non-admin users? This tutorial may help by either hiding the power-off menu or adding password request.
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Ubuntu 25.04 was released! Here are some top things to do, after installed the new Ubuntu desktop release, to make it ready to use.

1. Enable “New Documents” Context Menu option

It’s been quite a few years, GNOME still does NOT have a graphical option to create new documents in file manager. Though, it’s easy to enable this feature by putting a file into user’s Template folder.
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This tutorial shows how to add openSUSE OBS repository and install/update app packages from it in Ubuntu.

Like Ubuntu PPA and Fedora Copr, openSUSE has Open Build Service (OBS) for software developers and community maintainers to build and distribute app packages. Not only for openSUSE itself, it also supports building packages for Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, and other Linux Distributions.

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Pinta, the popular free open-source drawing and image editing app, released new major 3.0 release yesterday. Here are the new features and how to install guide for Ubuntu users.

Pinta 3.0 features GTK 4.0 and Libadwaita for its modern user interface that’s well integrated in recent GNOME desktop environments. It now automatically switches between light and dark depends on desktop color style, and fits well in different screen sizes with adaptive interface.

Pinta 3.0 light mode

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For old Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 22.04 with Ubuntu Pro enabled for extended 5 years of Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) updates support, it might sometimes cause 3rd party apps refuse to install and even output unmet dependency issue.

This is because ESM apps have higher package priority 510, while most others are default to 500.
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Want to give more control of your graphics card in Ubuntu & other Linux? Here’s a graphical to do the job.

It’s LACT, a free open-source GTK4 application written in Rust. With it, you may monitor and control NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD GPUs with following options:

  • View detailed GPU information.
  • Control GPU fan speed.
  • Overclock / Downclock GPU, VRam speed.
  • Limit power usage.
  • Power states configuration (AMD only)

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This is step by step guide shows how to install the G’MIC plugin for GIMP 3.0 series in Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 24.10, and higher.

GREYC’s Magic for Image Computing, G’MIC short, is a popular free open-source image processing software. It can work as plugin for GIMP, Krita, Photoshop, etc. with more than 600 filters to alter the appearance of an image.

G’MIC for GIMP 3.0

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