Thanks Mikael.
Enjoyment is sufficient reason for distro hopping, even if it is illogical.
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We disagree on first principles, not on logic
Playing games is illogical, but it is fun. Distro hopping is a game.
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If you have the time to do so, I don’t as of now.
To find the distro I want to use, I tried many with virt-manager before deciding.
To my mind a VM install will (in most cases) be not far off the experience of a hard install.
I also prefer to use Xfce or IceWM if that comes with the distro of choice.
I’m basically saying I try, not hop.
Horses for courses.
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Which distro did you did you decide on?
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MX Linux ahs (Advanced Hardware Support).
I own relatively recent hardware.
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Usually. If my hands are on the mouse, I’ll use the mouse way. If my hands are on the keyboard, I’ll use the keyboard way. At least ideally, assuming I know the method for both keyboard and mouse, and one is not much quicker than the other.
I would sure think it could. Icon ONE starts R or whatever program in directory ONE. Icon TWO starts R or whatever program in directory TWO.
The typical apps we install like a browser or office suite are only installed once and there is only one icon. But you can customize an icon to start exactly what you want.
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Yeah, but that is clumsy. I move R work directories around regularly, and I have dozens … one for each task. I am not going to make an icon every time I start a new project.
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My preference too. They are both easy to install if not present.
I understand stopping distro hopping to get some actual work done.
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Even on a desktop PC with keyboard, 'cause I use one with a trackpoint - I have mouse navigation and keyboard within easy reach…
Having said that - I do all my updates and software installs by CLI…
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Hooray for that. I hope you script it .
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Nope… Why?
It’s a single command - or two at most…
sudo apt install $PKG
- or -
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
I guess I could put a “y” in the upgrade - but - I prefer to see, and agree, with the summary of what’s its going to upgrade - e.g. is there a kernel update included?
I prefer the Debian way too - i.e. “apt update” only shows what might get updated - it doesn’t do anything (except maybe update your apt cache)…
On Red Hat based : “yum update” (or “dnf update”) actually upgrades - the approximate equivalent of “apt update” is “dnf check-update” (or yum) - which I usually run before an update anyway - so I can verify it’s able to connect to the remote repo…
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Not the command … I meant script the terminal in which you run it … to save the output. ie use the script <ttyfile> command.
It is amazing how often you need to check back and see what a screwed update has tripped up on.
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I like the way Mint does the upgrades thru their GUI. It gives a summary of the update if you care to read it, shows every upgrade and if it is a security vs a regular update and also of course the kernel updates. In addition, you can choose which upgrades are to be applied.
It is a bit funny because I don’t know that much about the internals of Linux, so the information provided means little to me. I think it is a carry over from my mainframe days when I knew more about what changes where going to applied to the software.
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I also use cli only. Learned that from the beginning with Ubuntu ages ago. Now I use Gentoo and my update includes --ask and --verbose. So it’s like Ubuntu/Debian without “y”. There’s also option to --pretend when you can be a normal user (without root access) to check what would be updated.
When I tried OpenSUSE I didn’t really get the zypper/other commands to update/upgrade the system but the BTRFS filesystem with automatic snapshots before and after any update was an eye opener. I still use ext4 with my stuff but did try to learn BTRFS and ZFS file systems. Still am but not with anything important.
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Today, I finished up the installation of 2 websites and a forwarder on one of my Raspberry Pi’s. Not much bandwidth but I only share stuff with family. I put my mp4 converted super 8 movies on it, with password. Fun stuff.
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Nah, it’s fun, sometimes frustrating. Had to ditch Enchantment, and some other distros didn’t play nice. Garuda, Nobora, Ludora, and OpenSuse Exton’s take, didn’t load. Went back and loaded up Ezarcher and Kubuntu, the latter always installs ez. I have a Void, a Ubuntu, an MX, and I think a Gentoo running on same pc on diff partitions. Old laptop has MX, an old Intel Lenovo has Windows 10 and Kubuntu, and my third pc has Shadowfetch, Zorin, Solus, Debian and lost track now.
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My Sunday nerd stuff :
Was listening to one of my favourite bands yesterday (while cycling) : The Nine Inch Nails - their sophomore recording “Broken” (actually an EP) - then the 1994 album “The Downward Spiral” (which has the song “Hurt” which most people recognise as a Johnny Cash song because he covered it) - then 1999’s “The Fragile”…
Got home and realised I didn’t have the Fragile in FLAC format on my fileserver - DOH! Being Lazy - I went and looked for a Torrent of it… The torrent was there this morning - but - it was some “deluxe edition” and ALL the songs were in different order than the original album! I HATE THAT! I also hate it when they figure out they’ve got enough room on a 70 minute audio CD to whack on some other rubbish (e.g. studio out-takes) at the end - I don’t want to hear that! I want to hear the songs how I remember hearing he vinyl rekkid playing in the 1970s or 80s (didn’t get a CD player till 1989)…
So - I hunted down my physical CD of NIN’s “The Fragile” and ripped it to FLAC using “abcde” on my linux system - too easy :
Plonk an audio CD in the drive (have a SATA bluray / DVD / CD drive in my Linux desktop machine) - and run “abcde -o flac” - it then goes off to MusicBrainz to get the tracklist - and I let it rip!
Couple little niggles with abcde - it uses “underscores” between the words in a track title, and a “.” between track number and song title (no space)…
01.The_Way_Out_Is_Through.flac
02.Into_the_Void.flac
03.Where_Is_Everybody.flac
04.The_Mark_Has_Been_Made.flac
05.Please.flac
06.Starfuckers,_Inc..flac
07.Complication.flac
08.I’m_Looking_Forward_to_Joining_You,_Finally.flac
09.The_Big_Come_Down.flac
10.Underneath_It_All.flac
'11.Ripe_(With_Decay).flac'
Unacceptable!
I prefer spaces actually - or - CamelCase…
So I then have to break out perl (p)rename :
╭─x@titanii ~/tmp/rippy/Right
╰─➤ rename 's/_/\ /g' *
╭─x@titanii ~/tmp/rippy/Right
╰─➤ rename 's/\./\ -\ /' *
╭─x@titanii ~/tmp/rippy/Right
╰─➤ ls -1
'01 - The Way Out Is Through.flac'
'02 - Into the Void.flac'
'03 - Where Is Everybody.flac'
'04 - The Mark Has Been Made.flac'
'05 - Please.flac'
'06 - Starfuckers, Inc..flac'
'07 - Complication.flac'
'08 - I’m Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally.flac'
'09 - The Big Come Down.flac'
'10 - Underneath It All.flac'
'11 - Ripe (With Decay).flac'
I also hate having things like “(” or “)” or “’” (that’s not even a single quote - it’s a glyph like an “outer quote” or right side quote) or “,” in file names!
╭─x@titanii ~/tmp/rippy/Right
╰─➤ rename 's/\(/-\ /' *
╭─x@titanii ~/tmp/rippy/Right
╰─➤ rename 's/\)//' *
╭─x@titanii ~/tmp/rippy/Right
╰─➤ rename 's/\’//' *
╭─x@titanii ~/tmp/rippy/Right
╰─➤ rename 's/\,/\ -/' *
╭─x@titanii ~/tmp/rippy/Right
╰─➤ rename 's/\.\./\./' *
'01 - The Way Out Is Through.flac'
'02 - Into the Void.flac'
'03 - Where Is Everybody.flac'
'04 - The Mark Has Been Made.flac'
'05 - Please.flac'
'06 - Starfuckers - Inc.flac'
'07 - Complication.flac'
'08 - Im Looking Forward to Joining You - Finally.flac'
'09 - The Big Come Down.flac'
'10 - Underneath It All.flac'
'11 - Ripe - With Decay.flac'
Track 06 came out with a double dot “..flac” - I always escape “.” in regex - because sometime a dot, isn’t a dot, it’s some kinda wildcard or whatever - but it’s inconsistent and I don’t understand why it is sometimes, and other times isn’t!
That’s my morning nerd stuff 
OH - also resizing a 4GB video file to a more reasonable size using ffmpeg, ffpb and my AMD GPU :
ffpb -hwaccel vaapi -hwaccel_device "/dev/dri/card1" -threads 4 -i TheBrutalist-1080p.x264.mp4 -map 0 -c:v copy -c:a ac3 -c:s copy -c:v h264 -crf 30 "TheBrutalist-1080p.x264-h264-crf30".mkv
Before : 3,979,076,607
After : 2,020,159,829
Also - my kids (adult daughters) know me - and my “paleo nerd” nature :
Happy Fathers Day to all the Dad Nerds / Geeks out there!
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You are like me except I have Devuan instead of Ubuntu. I also play with antiX.
Multiboot suits me.
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Too difficult … it is uppercase on most keyboards.
I would like to replace all underscores with minus.
Dont like CamelCase ( or is it camelCase or Camelcase?) .
R seems to have started a fashion to not capitalize the first letter … leads to endless retypes.
Spaces are a pain in Linux.
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