Canadian software engineer living in Europe.

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  • 59 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Don’t think too hard on it. Just use git. For example, I have a repo called handy-scripts that hosts all my dotfiles. I just check that out into ${HOME}/projects/handy-scipts and then symlink everything from where it’s expected to its corresponding place in the repo.

    As you make modifications, remember to occasionally do a git pull --rebase && git commit -m WIP && git push so that all your devices are synced up.





  • The bit of information you’re missing is that du aggregates the size of all subfolders, so when you say du /, you’re saying: “how much stuff is in / and everything under it?”

    If you’re sticking with du, then you’ll need to traverse your folders, working downward until you find the culprit folder:

    $ du /*
    (Note which folder looks the biggest)
    $ du /home/*
    (If /home looks the biggest)
    

    … and so on.

    The trouble with this method however is that * won’t include folders with a . in front, which is often the culprit: .cache, .local/share, etc. For that, you can do:

    $ du /home/.*
    

    Which should do the job I think.

    If you’ve got a GUI though, things get a lot easier 'cause you have access to GNOME Disk Usage Analyzer which will draw you a fancy tree graph of your filesystem state all the way down to the smallest folder. It’s pretty handy.


  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.catoLinux@lemmy.mlWhy?
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    4 months ago

    I was a Windows user as a kid in the 80s & 90s doing pirate installs of 3.11 and later 95 for friends and family. I got into “computers” early and was pretty dedicated to the “Windows is the best!” camp from a young age. I had a friend who was a dedicated Mac user though, and she was bringing me around. The idea of a more-stable, virus-free desktop experience was pretty compelling.

    That all changed when I went to school and had access to a proper “Mac lab” though. Those motherfuckers crashed multiple times an hour, and took the whole OS with them when they did it. What really got to me though was the little “DAAAAAAAAAAA!” noise it would make when you had to hard reboot it. It was as if it was celebrating its inadequacy and expected you to participate… every time it fucked you over and erased your work.

    So yeah, Macs were out.

    I hadn’t even heard of Linux in 2000 when I first discovered the GPL, which (for some reason) I conflated with GNOME. I guess I thought that GNOME was a new OS based on what I could only describe as communist licensing. I loved the idea, but was intimidated by the “ix” in the name. “Ix” meant “Unix” to me, and Unix was using Pine to check email, so not a real computer as far as I was concerned.

    It wasn’t until 2000 that I joined a video game company called “Moshpit Entertainment” that I tried it. You see, the CEO, CTO, and majority of tech people at Moshpit were huge Linux nerds and they indoctrinated me into their cult. I started with SuSe (their favourite), then RedHat, then used Gentoo for 10 years before switching to Arch for another 10+.

    TL;DR: Anticapitalism and FOSS cultists lead me into the light.



  • Most of the comments here seem to be from the consumer perspective, but if you want broader adoption, you need to consider the corporate market too. Most corporate software these days is web-based, so the problem is less with the software and more with the people responsible for it.

    The biggest hurdle is friction with the internal IT team. They like Windows because that’s all they ever learnt and they’re not interested in maintaining a diverse set of company laptops. They won’t entertain Linux in a corporate environment unless it’s mandated by management, and even if the bosses approve it, IT will want a way to lock you out of your laptop, force updates, do a remote wipe, etc.

    There are (proprietary) tools to do some of this, but they generally suck and often clash with your package manager. Microsoft is just way ahead of Linux in the “bloatware that tours your hands” department.




  • Granted, sudo isn’t in coreutils, but it’s sufficiently standard that I’d argue that the licence is very relevant to the wider Linux community.

    Anyway, I answered this at length the last time this subject came up here, but the TL;DR is that private companies (like Canonical, who owns Ubuntu) love the MIT license because it allows them to take the code and make proprietary versions of it without having to release the source code. Consider the implications of a sudo binary that’s Built For Ubuntu™ with closed-source proprietary hooks into Canonical’s cloud auth provider. It’s death by a thousand MIT-licensed cuts to our once Free operating system.





  • I’ll likely be downvoted for this, but if you’re committed to Linux, you might want to reconsider using Ubuntu (or Fedora for that matter). Ubuntu has a well-earned reputation for trying to make things “easy” by obfuscating what it’s doing from the user (hence that useless error message). They’re also a corporate distro, so their motivations are for their profit rather than your needs (wait 'til you had about Snap).

    A good starting distro is Debian (known for stable, albeit older) software. It’s a community Free software project and the 2nd-oldest Linux distro that’s still running as well as the basis for a massive number of other distros (including Ubuntu). The installer is straightforward and easy too.

    Or if you’re feeling ambitious, I’d recommend Arch or Gentoo. These distros walk you through the install from a very “bare metal” perspective with excellent documentation. Your first install is a slog, but you learn a great deal about the OS in the process, ensuring that you have more intimate knowledge when something goes wrong.


  • Do AI bots really spam Lemmy of all places for this sort of thing? Ick. Well thank you very much, this is very useful. My intent is to drop Tilix in favour of GNOME’s default terminal (or maybe one of the sexy alternatives that the cool kids keep talking about like Kitty), but I couldn’t switch without understanding this first.

    Your config works for me with one exception: bind -n M-| effectively means that I have to hit Alt+Shift+\, since | is only available via Shift+\. I amended this to be bind -n M-\\ and it works gloriously. Thank you so much!

    It turns out that I didn’t need to use set -g xterm-keys on, but I’m curious: what does it do?


  • There’s no need to get snarky. I did in fact do multiple searches, but as you might note from the question, this is a hard thing to search for. The GitHub wiki has this page which looks promising, save for the disclaimer at the top claiming that it’s no longer relevant due to something called extended-keys, but searching the same wiki for that returns nothing. Similarly, a web search for it returned a bunch of news sites talking about how tmux does extended-keys now, but none of the ones I found explained what this was, how to use it, or even if it was relevant to my question.