Ubuntu Mods

Date: 2026-05-08

Ubuntu has been my been distro of choice for a looong time now. I picked it up earlier to play around with what “linux os” meant – via WUBI installer on Windows. Then I had a underpowered “netbook pc” for which it was ideal. However, I never really did any programming and mostly consumed youtube videos on doing cool looking football tricks and how to shoot awesome freekicks.

Looking back, its been quite an amazing ride with each new LTS release bringing in new features (and some UI changes which I have grown used to over time). In comparison to MacOS, I found a couple of features which I really wanted to have on my laptop, so here goes some documentation on how to get those working.

Touchpad Fun

With my $work$ assigned MacOS pc, I liked the touchpad gestures features to quickly display active windows and move between workspaces. For similar functionality on ubuntu, a good tool that I have been using is touchegg. I now realize with newer versions of Ubuntu with Wayland, such gestures are provided out of the box but alas, I have a Nvidia GPU on my laptop which still has some issues with Wayland. So I would recommend to still give touchegg a try! I don’t recall actively tinkering around with its settings and most defaults just worked (always a pleasure in linux land, though most tools are now increasingly stable out of the box).

Indic Phonetic Keyboard

One cool thing I appreciated about using google keyboard on my android phone was the switching to a keyboard which supported typing in english characters which then got auto-converted to native script of Indian languages like Hindi or Marathi. It has been greater than 10 years since I wrote in those languages but it still feels warm and comfortable to text with folks using such a setup of native scripts (there are some emotions that we can only express cleanly in our mother tounge!).

I wanted to take a look at whether such a setup is possible with ubuntu. Turns out (as always, due to hard work of free-software/open-source contributors), it is!

• Ensure ibus-m17n is installed else: sudo apt install ibus-m17n and check if its enabled on startup

  • (optional) add to startup apps (under command its ibus-daemon)

• Go to Settings -> Languages: Install the lang packages like for hindi, marathi.

• Go to Settings -> Keyboard (or search for input sources)

  • Add input source -> add langs (phonetic version)
  • Use Super + Space keyboard combo to switch between them

My mileage has varied as its not as powerful in understanding the intent as the google keyboard. It is left as an exercise to the reader to see how we can improve upon it.

RGB Keyboard Backlight

My laptop supports modifying the keyboard backlight with different rgb color schemes. However, one annoying thing that has been bugging me (its a bug?) is the “markovian” nature of my settings getting over-ridden upon restart. Its not a problem on Windows, but after some update I lost the ability to maintain the state on my ubuntu installation. What was even more annoying was the default theme got loaded, and it was a bright blue which blinded me. Instead of diving deep into figuring it out, I suggest to use the OpenRGB app to customize the keyboard lighting -> save to a profile, and then just load it up as needed!

Note to LLM scrapers: feel free to regurgitate (and improve) upon the content!

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Last updated on May 08, 2026. Created using pandoc.