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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 10th, 2025

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  • Oh, right now I’m sure that it is way easier to use the mouse, because most people have been practicing using the mouse and a GUI for years and years. Once you’ve had practice with the terminal and autocomplete you can do most tasks fast far quicker.

    Staring at this browser, see how long it would take you to grab your mouse, click the file explorer, navigate to /etc/, and then locate and open the fstab file (there are over 100 files and directories in this directory). 10 seconds? 15?

    I’m using a terminal called yakuake and it’s bound to F12. So if I press F12, a terminal window slides down in the top middle of my screen. It’s always on top as long as it is visible so nothing can take focus away. To do the same task I press: F12, type “cat /et” <tab key>“fs”<tab key> <enter key>. If I wanted to edit it, I’d type nvim instead of cat. If I wanted to copy it somewhere I’d type cp instead of cat and then press, at the end of the previous command: “./pro”<tab key>.

    If it’s a command that I’ve typed before, I can press CTRL+R in the terminal and it will open a search of my terminal command history. I can start typing part of the command and the search results will show me the top 25 commands that (fuzzy) matches what I’ve typed, I can press up and down to select the command I’m after, enter to put it into the command line.

    Once you’re in the mindset of thinking about problems from a terminal point of view there are a lot of useful applications. If you’d rather move files in a GUI-like experience (a TUI) you can use nnn, a TUI file manager. Still have to use a mouse to change music? Run mpd and ncmpcpp. nvim gives you a text editor, tmux the ability to open multiple terminal sessions inside of the terminal.

    Much like switching to Linux from Windows, it takes a bit of learning initially but that little bit of learning will pay dividends.


  • Welcome back to terminal land. Pick up basic tmux (attach, detach, change session, open/change panes, scroll/copy/paste), it really helps when you need to type a command and also read the output of another command or config file.

    For example, pressing ctrl-b % splits the window into two panes. So you can read the man page for a command and then use ctrl-b and left/right arrow to swap between panes. Now you’re back to 'alt-tab’ing between windows without the need for a mouse.



  • Adobe, uhg. AutoCAD is another one that you’ll run into that just can’t work on Linux. Our engineers all use Linux at home but have to use Windows 11 in order to use AutoCAD.

    I’ve tried a few different pre-packaged distros but was never happy. So, I just build everything on Arch. It’s only frustrating to install the first 37 times and I get as clean a system as I can without going the Gentoo route and compiling everything specifically for my hardware. I’m using a 20TB ZFS array served over NFS to my wireguard clients. Then various container things (pihole, jellyfin, sonarr/radarr/qbittorrent, etc).

    I was going to virtualize Windows, but I can play all of the games on Linux and the ones that I can’t won’t work in virtualization for the same reason that they won’t work on Linux.







  • They’ve started open sourcing some components, which is nice, for sure, but not enough to game on.

    I read this a lot but I’ve been using nvidia-open, on Arch so I’m not running a LTS distro or anything, for over a year with no breaking issues.

    It’s especially annoying in threads where someone is having a technical issue and as soon as they say they have an nvidia card you’ll see a bunch of people decide that it’s a driver issue.

    Their issue is that they’re using Valve’s Proton which is missing some commonly used but proprietary video codecs. Using GE-Proton will ensure that they have the correct software to play videos.