focal, installed

I finally got around to installing Kubuntu 20.04 LTS ("Focal Fossa"). I went with the "Minimal installation" option, which gives me a fair amount of control over what goes into the installed system. I elected to "Download updates while installing Kubuntu" and to "Install third-party software for graphics and Wi-Fi hardware and additional media formats". I chose the "Manual" installation type and set up the partitions myself.

The installation itself went quickly and painlessly. After that, I spent quite a bit of time configuring and customizing things to taste, and now I've got a system that differs quite a bit from the default setup I tested out in the live session.

One thing that was bugging me was that I don't really want to mess around with Ubuntu's controversial snap packages at this time, and I didn't know if there were any snaps present in my new installation. I ran the following command to check:

$ snap list
No snaps are installed yet. Try 'snap install hello-world'.

No snaps, but then I ran the apt search snapd command, which showed that the snapd package was in fact present. I took care of that by running sudo apt purge snapd. Also, I did some other cleaning:

$ rm -rf ~/snap
$ sudo rm -rf /snap
$ sudo rm -rf /var/snap
$ sudo rm -rf /var/lib/snapd

I've removed some other things, like unattended-upgrades, vlc, snapd, muon, and plasma-discover. And I added some of my favorite apps: ntp, localepurge, geany, doublecmd-qt, audacious, nomacs, geeqie, mc, synaptic, inxi, libreoffice-writer, libreoffice-calc, neofetch.

I'm quite pleased with what I've seen so far. Kubuntu LTS releases have worked out very well for me in the past; as much as I love Debian and Arch, I've been running Kubuntu on my "primary" computer, and Focal Fossa looks even better than previous releases. Here's a link to a review of Kubuntu 20.04 LTS by the great Dedoimedo. Enjoy!