palordrolap

You need to lay at least some blame on Logitech for that one.

They’ve sold drivers to Microsoft, but since no-one writing Linux would give them any money, they wouldn’t provide drivers for their proprietary hardware.

This then lead to early Linux adopters buying non-Logitech devices and not seeing a use-case for rolling a reverse-engineered driver into the kernel.

Logitech still haven’t written their own Linux driver. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the money from Microsoft is so that they don’t.

Pretty sure Cinnamon panels are designed to fit to the width (or height if they’re attached to the side) of the screen and can’t be altered. (The depth/breadth/“thickness” of the panel can be changed, but that’s not particularly relevant here.)

The same may also be true of panel-like features in XFCE and MATE too, but I can’t easily confirm.

Do. Take a boot USB for a spin. Try a few distros.

I’ve been on Linux (Mint) for years and never had a mouse-wheel not work or any problems with sound (hardware failure notwithstanding). The computer’s been the same all the way through, but it is a bit of a Ship of Theseus at this point. Mint has had no problem with new (and old) parts that I’ve thrown in. Or new mice, as I implied before.

Getting old Windows games to work has been the biggest non-starter, which is pretty much where OPs friend was having trouble too.

Minecraft (Java) runs fine with the standard launcher, but I do get FPS problems if I’ve had an Xorg update. That’s more of a “your graphics card is so old Mint doesn’t really support it any more” problem, which I know how to work around.

I did have problems getting Linux to run on a laptop once, but then it was 1998 and Linux drivers weren’t quite so plug and play. I had no idea what refresh rates my TFT screen needed and neither did Linux, boldly warning that if I set them wrong I could burn out my screen. Since I needed a GUI, I went back to Windows 95.

True. There are various legitimate tools that are only really one step away from malware, so it’s not too hard to imagine going that one step further.

Thinking specifically of the fact that a new process is allowed to change its apparent name, as well as creating secondary process pools, but there are bound to be other, deeper ways.

Be aware that for some removable (or otherwise non-local) media, some systems will create a .Trash-### directory on the media itself in the root directory.

This prevents unnecessary copying of files from the media to a local disk, and only a few media-specific location indicators actually need to be changed for the Trashed file(s).

The ### is generally the user’s ID number as stored in /etc/passwd, and, on Debian derivatives at least, is usually 1000 for the first user, 1001 for the second, etc., but I have heard of some systems that just use .Trash with no suffix, or did so at some point in the past.

They need to update that. They jumped to version 24 for 2024. 24.2.3 is the current version.

Ones I have used: GNOME Disks’ create and restore image features. Possibly Mint’s mintstick for writing a distro’s .iso out to a USB stick. I am not too sure on that.

I assume old-school dd still works as well, which might be a better option for scripted backups or minimal systems.

named myself

Programmer error: I totally missed a bunch of edge cases there. Cases 32 to 35 for sure

Buuut I’m guessing you didn’t name yourself after the editor.

A wild username reference appears!

There’s an editor called Kate. It’s probably not named after you, but if you’re young enough and the person who named you was into tech, you might be named after it.

So, it’s trying to replace Emacs?

I was counting WebKit and Blink (Chromium) as cousins, both descendents of KHTML, but maybe they’ve diverged enough as to not easily be able to borrow from each other any more and it really is three.

This is pretty big if it has a completely separate browser rendering engine to the two remaining families, even if the feature set is small.

The more current alternatives we have, the better.

The gsettings command can change things on the fly in the dconf, assuming that’s where the setting actually resides. It’s a pain to do, but that means it’s possible to write a script that makes the necessary change(s) and that can then be assigned to a keyboard combo.

For example, I have one that toggles a Cinnamon panel between the top and the bottom of its screen (I won’t get into why) and currently have it bound to Ctrl-Alt-Space.

It’s currently a hack that uses a couple of hardcoded values that I pulled from the dconf by observing what it was set to with the panel in each location. If it finds the first value it changes it to the second, and vice versa.

(In the unlikely event I come to change the layout to something it doesn’t recognise, it bails out, doing nothing.)

Anyway, you could probably do something similar to toggle the dark/light mode.

Most shells will issue $PS2 as the continuation prompt if you quote a filename and try to insert a carriage return.

Ctrl-V Ctrl-J is the explicit keypress pair to insert a carriage return without triggering $PS2, but beware: If the carriage return is outside of quotes, that’s equivalent to starting a new command in much the same way a semicolon or a new line in a shell script would.

echo "hello^V^Jthere" [Enter] echoes hello on one line and then there on the next, but echo hello^V^Jthere [Enter] will echo hello then try to run a command called there

We’d have to assume that whatever fixes spaces in filenames would also have an option to fix this subtlety. And I say to whoever tries: Good luck with that.

This is the sort of thing I was talking about with “Don’t go running commands […] unless you’re sure what they’re going to do […]”

I did a breakdown of this one on the snoosite back in the day. Searching “fork bomb” on YouTube is probably a better way to get that breakdown these days.

Most terminals start a shell as the first program, so you’re not really learning “Terminal” so much as whatever program it starts first. Bash is a pretty common shell, so you might want to search for things like “Bash examples” to get a feel for it.

If that’s too simple, or you blast past that, then reading bash’s manual might give you some more ideas. The man command is your friend. The manuals are not necessarily quite so friendly, but they’re aimed at someone who’s already somewhat competent.

Anyway, here’s one link from a Bash examples search I did: https://linuxsimply.com/bash-scripting-tutorial/basics/examples/

If Bash isn’t what you have where you are, substitute its name instead. Zsh and Fish are pretty popular. There are others, but I don’t think any mainstream Linux uses them by default.

To check what shell you’re using try an echo $0 or echo $SHELL.

Finally, a bit of advice: Don’t go running commands you see on the Internet unless you’re sure what they’re going to do is something you have no problem with. And be careful with copy/pasting from web pages you don’t know or trust - I can’t vouch for the examples in the link I gave earlier, for example. It’s possible to make things look like a completely innocent command but when pasted does something else entirely.

I remember using Pico, Nano’s predecessor, in the mid-to-late '90s. Nano was created because there was a desire to distribute Pico with Linux. Unfortunately, the licensing was unclear so a clone had to be made. Fortunately there was no argument about editor appearance and behaviour.

As shocking as the 2001 date might be, it seems like Pico might have ceased development as recently as the end of 2022 along with its e-mail reader parent program Alpine (formerly Pine).

If true, Nano still has a few years to go before it will overtake its parent for longevity.

(Both vi and Emacs are far older, of course.)

Eh. Not quite. Yes, the main editions use Ubuntu as a starting point, but they remove a load of Canonical’s cruft, like Snaps. They have their own suite of applications, the XApps, that are forks of other tools, as well as a number of other improvements and changes.

I couldn’t say whether it’s as far from Ubuntu as Ubuntu is from the original Debian, but it’s some distance removed for sure.

And LMDE is based on Debian, skipping Ubuntu entirely.

You could probably rig something up to periodically check RAM usage and if it’s dangerously high, send a system notification - or make an xmessage popup - to tell you to restart Brave ASAP. That is, before the death loop begins in the first place.

You might also want to install an extension that unloads tabs that haven’t been accessed in a while, especially if you’re a tab hoarder.

I don’t use Brave, so I’m making assumptions that such an extension exists and that Brave can be restarted without losing all tabs, etc.

Statistics. It’s a menu option.

If you look, be thankful it only shows per-world information. And there’s no count of server time once you lose access to a server’s world.

No-one can know.