This is my next article in my “perfect” Garuda Linux install. Remember that I’m coming from Ubuntu and was looking for something different. If you haven’t followed along, here’s the articles so far:
In this post, I’m going to go through setting up my computer for my professional work tasks and different productivity apps.
Networking
I usually try to install all of the VPN’s. I found it uses Network Manager just like Ubuntu, and it has the same packages basically. If I’m not mistaken, they were already installed by default.
I have to add at this point, that restoring a couple of directories can restore these connections from backup:
- /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections: place where the connection settings and properties are stored
- ~/.cert: place where secrets and certificates are stored for VPN settings
Remmina is another tool that is really helpful on the network side. It makes it easy to connect to remote connections such as ssh and remote desktop. I usually just use it for remote desktop because ssh is just as easy to do from the terminal.
To install it, I just checked the box on the Welcome wizard under the Internet section. For all the connections, I could restore them in the ~/.remmina directory. Searching in Octopi, there are a few plugins as well, but I haven’t explored them yet.
VMWware Horizon
I was a little worried about this connection. Officially, I found Ubuntu deb packages, but I don’t remember seeing a package for Arch. I was worried that I would have to install the tarball and then have to keep it up to date manually. Instead, I found the package “vmware-horizon-client”. I think it talks about an updated package from Omnissa. It turns out it was sold by Broadcom back in July of 2024 (see Wikipedia for more information).
Then, I just found this thread suggesting that I could use the Remmina Web Browser plugin. It worked! I just took the https URL that I used with the Horizon client. It asked if I wanted to install the client or continue with the web interface, and I just chose to continue. Then, it connected in a Remmina window.
This is the screen where I select to stick with the HTML:
Note, I did find that my clipboard wasn’t shared through the Remmina connection. I didn’t troubleshoot to see if it was a setting in Remmina, something specific to this remote machine setup, or something the web connection just doesn’t offer.
Teams
Teams is the next important application that I need to communicate. Microsoft used to have an official client, but I have dropped back to using “Teams for Linux”. It’s basically the Teams website wrapped in an Electron shell. I just installed the teams-for-linux package, and I was good to go.
Productivity
LibreOffice I installed from the Setup Assistant during installation. At some point, I did run into an issue where it complained about not having a JDK installed. Either some update uninstalled it, or something changed in the packaging. I just installed the jdk-openjdk package and that fixed it.
Back on Ubuntu, I used to install a repository to make sure that I kept on the latest version. The advantage to Arch-based is that I don’t need a special repository. I stay up to date, and currently have the latest version.
Xiphos is the app that I used for Bible Study, etc. It was an easy install by just installing the xiphos package in Octopi. I could have restored my ~/sword directory to get all of my content back, but I decided this time to go to the ModuleManager (Edit > Module Manager) and re-download all of the content.
Joplin, Logseq, and Zotero all fall under this category, but I covered those on the previous post. I won’t duplicate that here. Kate or gVim also sort of fall under this as well when I need a place to work with just simple text. Kate is KDE’s version of gEdit, and it just came with KDE.
Xournal was a tool that I used to use for annotating PDFs. I don’t know if you call it annotation or filling them out instead of printing them. Anyway, Okular supports annotation so I am going to see if I can get away with using it instead. It is the default PDF app in KDE. You can see the annotation tools in Okular below.
