I'm generally not a fan of "X things to do after installing linux" articles but I still end up reading them and sometimes even implement one or two of the things. The VM I describe below is used for work stuff which includes the fairly typical systems engineering things: ssh, ansible, wiki editing, etc. At some point I'll write up the more interesting piece of my actual desktop configuration with libvirt, vagrant and other fun stuff, but it still has this same base set up. Earlier this year I moved from xfce to kde plasma and have been happy with it as its now mature enough to provide a good experience, I just hope they don't mess it up again like they did in the transition from 3.5 to 4.
It should go without saying but this is what I did and by no means a recommendation, do whatever you want. At some point I plan to move this into an ansible role, and this lays the groundwork for enabling that.
Virtualbox set up
- set up VM with at least 32 MB of video memory to support 2560x1440
- I use 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM and a 20 or 30 GB disk
- standard install of Fedora 27 kde spin
- virtualbox guest additions was supposed to be included automatically but copy/paste wasn't working even after enabling bidirectional clipboard
dnf install gcc kernel-devel kernel-headers dkms make bzip2 perl- run guest additions installer and boom copy/paste works (though it complained about some crap during the install)
- created virtualbox share folder on windows host and set to automount
- add user to vboxsf group
Fancy KDE is fancy
- enable kde unstable copr for plasma 5.11.3
dnf copr enable mkyral/kf5-unstablednf copr enable mkyral/plasma-unstablednf upgrade
- let's make things a little more pretty (this is by no means exhaustive, but just makes it a little nicer without adding 3rd party themes and what not)
- set the look and feel to breeze dark
- set window decorations to plastik
- set gnome application settings to Adwaita-dark for gtk2 and check box to prefer dark gtk3 theme
- set gnome application settings to use Sans Serif font
- install plasma-nm-fortisslvpn (the primary reason I wanted plasma 5.11)
- disable automatic screen locking since its not really needed in a VM
- add hack font
- http://sourcefoundry.org/hack/
- in kde add it to the personal fonts
- adjust applications as needed (atom, konsole)
- set solarized dark theme in konsole and atom
- create konsole profile
- set solarized color scheme
- set unlimited scrollback
- random note: 12 font in konsole is bigger than 14 in atom(pretty close to 16)...
Install and configure applications
- install atom: download rpm from atom.io
- minor but changed firefox's default search engine to duckduckgo
- install other applications:
dnf install libreoffice vim git sshfs keepass ansible- todo: fix terrible libreoffice theme (seems like its trying to use the light color but dark icon set), even better get it to just use qt natively
- stick to the classic keepass for now. keepassxc oddly doesn't seem to be as security focused and hasn't been audited yet
- install flash for firefox
dnf install http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpmdnf install flash-plugin
- customize atom
- install language-ansible, ansible-linter(get real package name)
- set atom autocomplete to use tab instead of tab/enter (seriously who thought enter was a good idea for tab complete)