Linux is back on the menu, boys

February 06, 2026  •  Category: Linux

For the past three years I’ve been using Windows 10 on my personal laptop, because the new laptop came pre-installed with it and I was fine with that. Naturally, as it is with Windows, the OS started to feel quite sluggish after a year or so, but it was bearable. Now that I’m barred from installing Windows 11 because my processor’s “too old,” I used the lecture break during Christmas to install a Linux distro again. I chose Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS (with the COSMIC desktop environment) and I’m quite happy with it: my not-so-old laptop runs smoothly again and I’m able to use everything I need.

Nonetheless, I experienced a few little obstacles (the OS installation itself was smooth and fast as hell) that luckily I was able to solve. I also had a great experience using Claude (via web UI) to help me with some of these technical problems; last time I used Linux humanity only had Google for such tasks. Nonetheless, I still cross-checked all of Claude’s suggested commands with the official documentation before running them (and you should, too).

Bluetooth Keyboard Pairing

I have a Logi MX KEYS S bluetooth keyboard and I’m very happy with it, but pairing it was a bit of a pain. The following article helped me, though: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bluetooth_keyboard. Follow the steps in the Section “Pairing process” and it should work.

Bluetooth not Working after Wake Up

Sometimes it happens that my bluetooth keyboard and mouse don’t connect after a wake up. It doesn’t happen often, but when it happens, I now simply fully reset the Bluetooth adapter with sudo systemctl restart bluetooth.service && sleep 2 && bluetoothctl power off && sleep 1 && bluetoothctl power on (restart the Bluetooth service and then power-cycle the Bluetooth adapter off and on again) and everything’s fine again.

JetBrains PyCharm App Pop Ups not Working

I wasn’t able to interact with any pop up that PyCharm showed, e.g., if I wanted to add a script via New -> Python File, the pop up showed up but I couldn’t enter a filename. The problem is known, and the solution, too: JetBrains introduced Wayland Support for IntelliJ-based IDEs. Simply add -Dawt.toolkit.name=WLToolkit to the VM options (Help -> Edit Custom VM Options...) and you’re good to go.

Shortcut to Invoke the Screenshot App

I’m a heavy take-screenshot-via-keyboard-shortcut user. The OS comes with a screenshot app out of the box, but with no keyboard shortcuts to invoke it. Luckily enough, you can specify custom shortcuts: Open Settings -> Keyboard -> View and Customize Shortcuts -> Custom Shortcuts, click + and enter:

  • Name: Screenshot Tool
  • Command: cosmic-screenshot (or gnome-screenshot -i for GNOME)
  • Shortcut: Press your desired key combo

Audio Input and Output Selection

The audio input and output selection via the default COSMIC volume control is a bit wonky:

  • Changing the output volume sometimes didn’t have any effect (it always reset it back to 100%)
  • Changing the output volume sometimes also randomly changed the output device

Additionally, if I plug-in my headphones, the OS doesn’t automatically route the sound output to the newly connected headphones, which on Windows worked very reliably. And since the audio selection via COSMIC volume control is quite wonky, I also wasn’t really able to reliably select my headphones for audio output (this was quite annoying during a few online lectures I gave).

What I do now is the following:

  • To reliably control the volume I now use PulseAudio Volume Control. Install it with sudo apt install pavucontro
  • For audio input and output selection, I use the pactl command. For example, I have an alias configured in my .bash_aliases that automatically forwards the audio output to my plugged-in headphones. What I did is simply list all the audio sinks with pactl list sinks short, copy-paste the name of the sink used for my headphones, and then set the alias to pactl set-default-sink <NAME_OF_THE_HEADPHONES_SINK>. Make sure that the headphones are plugged in when you run the pactl list sinks short command, because otherwise it won’t list the sink.

All in all I’m very happy to be back on Linux, and Pop!_OS’ COSMIC desktop evnironment is quite nice to work with.