Samsung Magician on Ubuntu 14.04

Installing Samsung Magican on Linux

There is something called samsung magician dc that you can install in linux. It can be downloaded from this link. The manual can be found in that dropdown list. Extract the tarball from the first link, and open the resulting folder. There will be two directories, 64-bit and 32 bit. Open the one corresponding to your operating system. The samsung magician executable is in this folder. The file is a simple binary so make it executable and run it.

Using Samsung Magician On Linux

The usage of samsung magician is described in the manual. Also some information on how to use the software can be obtained from sudo ./magician --help. One thing to know is that you pretty much always have to run magician as superuser. For example to list the samsung disks attached to your system you would use the command
sudo ./magician -L There are many more operations desribed in the manual.

Installing firmware

The Samsung magician dc manual is vague on how to install firmware (specifically on how to lay out the directory containing the firmware). To see how to install firmware see this answer.

Perfomance update

The 840 evo has a performance update which (I think) is independent from firmware and cannot be done with samsung magician dc. I think this performance update was the original goal of your question, so I will address it. The performance update can be found here. I have not done this update, but the installation guide is there.

Samsung (Disk) Magician is a firmware update tool to notify you about new firmware releases and installing them. The firmwares are also offered as ISO images on the Samsung website.

Complementary features to the core functionality:

• Display S.M.A.R.T data and total bytes written
• Run a non-comparable Samsung-specific benchmark
• Run TRIM manually
• Debatable Windows-specific "OS Optimization"
• Customize Over Provisioning
• Create media to execute Secure Erase
• Setup RAPID Mode - a feature that may lead to data corruption or decrease in IOPS
• Manage hardware encryption settings

To summarize: A bloated LCARS-like firmware updater with no secret sauce.

If you really want to install it, you can follow Brian Moths's answer. But the software does not seem to offer anything that you cannot do already on Ubuntu (other than Windows-specific features that would not work on Ubuntu anyway). It's simply a GUI.