Recently I decided to give Ubuntu 18.04 a go as my daily driver. I have slowly been finding things that do not work as expected, and will blog about them here.

So far I’ve found there was no date in the top bar, my printer doesn’t work, and sudo didn’t curse me if my password was entered incorrectly.

This time my issue is the calculator keyboard shortcut on the Microsoft Wired Keyboard 600, doesn’t open the Calculator. I use this key many times a day, and eventually got sick of searching calc in the Application menu.

I did a bit of Googling and found this post on askubuntu.com, It appears to be a common issue on Ubuntu 18.04 – and fortunately it is a simple fix. Here is a link to the bug report.

The issue looks to be with the gnome-calculator snap package. To fix the issue, first we need to remove gnome-calculator and reinstall it using apt. Type the following commands into a terminal window.

sudo snap remove gnome-calculator

followed by

sudo apt install gnome-calculator

The keyboard shortcut for the fancy abacus will now work as the mighty Sumerian and Egyptian empires intended.