pixeldesus elementary Survival Kit

Intro

This guide shows easily how you can start with a fresh-installed elementary OS-session and making it more usable just with some commands and tips to get rid of stuff that clutters your installation in the beginning.

Getting Rid of Pre-Installed Software

Requirements

elementary OS
A terminal (since you use a fresh installation it might be pantheon-terminal, the default one)

Steps

Open your terminal and type sudo apt-get install synaptic to install the Synaptic Package Manager
Start Synaptic with writing synaptic or opening it in the top-left application drawer

Now, since you have Synaptic running, time to get rid of the following software...don't worry, there are better alternatives out there for all the things we are going to delete!

If you search for a package you can simply right-click or click on the checkbox to add it to a process which will install and delete all marked packages.

Software you should delete

geary: Mailclient
midori: Webbrowser
scratch: Text-Editor
shotwell: Image-Viewer
totem: Video-Player
noise: Music-Player
empathy: Chat-Client
Optional pantheon-terminal: Terminal

Alternatives

Before actually installing those alternatives, look below, there is something important that you need to know while working with elementary OS

Mailclient: Thunderbird
Webbrowser: Firefox
Text-Editor: Kate
Image-Viewer: Gwenview
Video-Player: VLC
Music-Player: Clementine
Chat-Client: depends on what you use, so you could flag this as none
Optional Terminal: Konsole

Also, people from Twitter might actually take a look at Polly, which is a nice twitter client with multiple columns and streaming!

The Reason why you shouldn't replace Pantheon with your favorite desktop

Pantheon is sort-of the core shell of elementary and deleting or replacing it with, for example KDE, will break the dist-upgrade process completely. It's taking away a bit of the freedom-aspect which Linux is known for, but it's just the desktop

The Problem with elementary

A big problem of elementary is actually that is outdated. And with outdated I mean, packages from 2012 (the release date from the first elementary-release "Luna") and earlier that are fetched from the Software Center and PPAs, so you need to do a bit research on your own here, but not that much if you do it right!

So you need to learn how to get these repositories in your system, and it's really easy, just 2-3 lines in your terminal!

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:me-davidsansome/clementine
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install clementine

Have some PPAs that help you getting the software you want in the most recent versions:

Clementine: ppa:me-davidsansome/clementine
GIMP: ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp

After these steps you have a more-customized elementary than before, running with better-working software replacements giving you a better start with this OS.

pixeldesu/survival-kit.md