Initial Setup Tweaks for Cinnamon

As of this writing, I’m installing Linux Manjaro Cinnamon on a 2017 13” Razer Blade Stealth. These are some tweaks I like to remember for future installs so I don’t need to try and remember what I do. These aren’t everything I tweak, but they are the ones I forget and have to go look up each time.

I don’t use Bluetooth on my laptop so there is no use wasting battery by keeping the hardware enabled.

Add a new Custom Command to the Preferences => Startup Applications list. Name it something like Disable Bluetooth with the command rfkill block bluetooth.
I add a 10s startup delay but am not sure it was necessary.

I like remapping the caps-lock key to be an additional key that triggers the Cinnamon menu / application launcher. I find I can use this key to get similar application launcher functionality on any OS I happen to be using.

To accomplish this, first remap the caps-lock key to be a “Hyper” key. Preference => Keyboard => Layouts => Options => Caps Lock Behavior => Make Caps Lock and additional Hyper.
Now, right-click on the Cinnamon menu icon and choose Configure. Leave the first keyboard shortcut as Super L, which for this laptop is the Windows key. Click the second shortcut and hit the caps-lock key to configure it to Hyper L.

Done. Now the menu appears by hitting the Windows key or caps-lock. Click and start typing to launch any installed app.

The default touchpad driver is really jittery with the Razer Blade Stealth. Go to the package / software manager and install the xf86-input-synaptics driver. A reboot may be necessary.

To see which driver is being used, install the xorg-xinput package and then execute xinput list to determine the touchpad device ID. Mine is currently 17. Then execute xinput list-props 17 to see which driver is being used.

note: the above was for a Manjaro-Cinnamon install. For a Mint-Cinnamon install use the xserver-xorg-input-synaptics-hwe-18.04 package instead. Also, under Mint, the xinput package is already installed.

After switching to the Synaptics touchpad driver, the twitch is gone, but now there is a Right Click Zone in the bottom right that I always hit by accident. I prefer right-clicking by clicking with two-fingers.

To disable this hot zone, edit the file /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/##-synaptics.conf
and comment out this entire section. The ## number will be different for each distro.

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Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "Default clickpad buttons"
        MatchDriver "synaptics"
        Option "SoftButtonAreas" "50% 0 82% 0 0 0 0 0"
        Option "SecondarySoftButtonAreas" "58% 0 0 15% 42% 58% 0 15%"
EndSection

Reboot to apply the changes.

I want windows to maximize when I drag them to the top. Change this in Preferences => Window Tiling => Maximize, instead of tile, when ...

I like my date/time in the panel to appear like macOS: Wed Mar 25 9:21 PM

Right-click the time in the panel and select configure. Enable a custom Date Format and enter this: %a %b %e %l:%M %p

Change Cinnamon app-launcher menu icon to “cinnamon-symbolic”.

I don’t use the touchscreen on this Razer laptop so prefer to just disable it to maybe save on battery life, but also just avoid mis-touches.

I install the following disable-touchscreen.sh into /usr/local/bin.

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#!/bin/sh
ID=`xinput | grep -Eio 'Touchscreen\s*id\=[0-9]{1,}' | grep -Eio 'id\=[0-9]{1,}'| grep -Eo '[0-9]{1,}'`
STATE=`xinput list-props $ID|grep 'Device Enabled'|awk '{print $4}'`
if [ $STATE -eq 1 ]
then
    xinput disable $ID
    echo "Touchscreen disabled."
fi

I then execute that script via Preferences => Startup Applications with a 10s delay.

Change the alt-tab style to Preferences => Windows => Alt-Tab => Icons and Thumbnails.

Linux Mint Cinnamon 19 sets the number of inotify watches to 8192 by default. This causes problems with my Nextcloud sync because of the large number of files. Upping the watches to 100,000 fixes it. Manjaro-Cinnamon uses a larger number by default so doesn’t run into this issue.

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echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100000 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf; sudo sysctl -p

I may update this as I remember more…