The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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KDE global themes in particular have some pretty powerful permissions, they change behaviour as well as appearance of the desktop environment, so they have the capability to run bash commands during installation across the entire system. This one was bunged on the store with rm -rf in there. Install the theme, command runs, goodbye files.

In terms of uninstallation for globals I believe that is handled at an OS level, but it would likely change on a theme by theme basis given how it's currently set up. I might be compeltely wrong about that though so please take what I've said with a grain of salt, personally I don't touch global themes and prefer to make my own shit if I want to rice something because everything on the store fucking sucks
It wasn't even malicious behavior by the theme developer, simply dumping KDE5 code into KDE6 caused this. Doesn't Valve use KDE for the Steam Deck? Their client also had an infamous, root wiping bug. Great crossover.
 
I'm gonna reignite the Bash vs. Powershell flame war. The example that Overly Serious brought up was about writing a command to look for a specific string in specific files recursively in a specific directory and the discussion heavily revolved around the syntax, where Powershell was longer but more coherent and Bash was shorter but more chaotic.

My question is: why the fuck would you type out a Bash/Powershell command to do something like this instead of using a file manager that has proper features to do advanced searches like this?

For example Total Commander on Windows:
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I can search for a specific file string, use RegEx in the search, use Everything, an NTFS indexer to instantly look through that, look for files in archives, look for specific content in the files that I look for, I can flexibly specify the date of the files I'm looking for, the attributes, the file size, duplicates, and even plugins, so I can really finetune my search. Maybe I'm looking for an MP3 file with a specific artist metadata tag? Or for specific symbolic links? All in a nice readable GUI where I can tell what my parameters are without having to figure out if I have the right switch or if I put the search phrase in the proper quotation, and 99% of the time I'm gonna be doing one specific search and then never doing it again, so something like this makes my life a lot easier.

And hey, if you despise GUI's you can always use/make a CLI file manager, though last I checked Midnight Commander barely has the amount of search features that Total Commander has. But if you're open to GUI's there's still Double Commander or Krusader for Linux.

Both Powershell and Bash, as well as Batch, the ugly duckling that's left over from MS-DOS days that's like a worse Bash. These are scripting syntaxes. It means you type out what you want to do as a script, save it, and then run it whenever you need it. It's a stop gap between writing a program to do something and doing it by hand, but it still benefits from readability for the sake of debugging, where Powershell does a better job than Bash. The syntax is uniform and each command is written out in English. So if you're typing out Bash commands by hand, you're doing something wrong. Chances are what you really want to do is to write a Bash script to which you can pass variables, essentially writing custom commands, then you're actually being more efficient and making your life easier. And every scripting syntax can do that, that's their point.

And Bash being oh so powerful you can write a Minecraft server in it? Why the fuck are you just not writing a C/C++ program at that point? What you want to accomplish exceeds what Bash was meant to fulfill and you should just write a classic program for the sake of your own sanity. Yeah, cool, you can do it, but it doesn't mean you should, unless the average Linux user hates making life easier for him for the sake of showing off that he can.

tl;dr if you're using a scripting syntax by typing the scripts manually from memory or using them as a replacement for programming languages you're severely misusing them, no matter if it's Powershell or Bash. They are meant for writing scripts to save your time by typing less, so just write those fucking scripts.
 
My question is: why the fuck would you type out a Bash/Powershell command to do something like this instead of using a file manager that has proper features to do advanced searches like this?
The long and short of it is that any such file manager, even a very good one, will soon present me with hard limits on what I can do with it, so I tend to use them only for fairly simple purposes. I believe I mentioned elsewhere that I kind of wanted to start using nnn as a console file manager but in practice I end up using regular CLI tools for almost everything. That isn't me trying really hard to be an r/masterhacker; it's really just the path of least resistance at this point.
 
I believe I mentioned elsewhere that I kind of wanted to start using nnn as a console file manager but in practice I end up using regular CLI tools for almost everything. That isn't me trying really hard to be an r/masterhacker; it's really just the path of least resistance at this point.

I agree with you on that. Once you learn how to maximize "cd" functionality in your shell of choice, nothing compares.
 
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I agree with you on that. Once you learn how to maximize "cd" functionality in your shell of choice, nothing compares.
I assume that's sarcastic but what I'm saying is true. I'm reminded of looking at Quora threads comparing SPSS to R. Besides the insane licensing costs that are really only fit for institutions, what's consistently brought up as an advantage of R over SPSS is how much more flexible it is to have an actual programming language, even if it is janky, at your fingertips vs. doing everything through a GUI.
 
I assume that's sarcastic but what I'm saying is true. I'm reminded of looking at Quora threads comparing SPSS to R. Besides the insane licensing costs that are really only fit for institutions, what's consistently brought up as an advantage of R over SPSS is how much more flexible it is to have an actual programming language, even if it is janky, at your fingertips vs. doing everything through a GUI.

No sarcasm intended, just set your shell configuration with aliases and functions you need and want, and forget the graphical or console file managers for a while.

It's what I did while learning my way around the Linux filesystem.
 
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My question is: why the fuck would you type out a Bash/Powershell command to do something like this instead of using a file manager that has proper features to do advanced searches like this?
Because you're a command line autist?
No sarcasm intended, just set your shell configuration with aliases and functions you need and want, and forget the graphical or console file managers for a while.
I've known more than a few utter wizards who could just instantly type a line of what looked like line noise with shit like sed and awk to do absolutely insane shit, without even visibly thinking about it. They would get frustrated with some GUI where they'd have to click around and switch tabs and a bunch of other mouse shit that took up more time than just nearly instantly one-shotting it in one line.
 
No sarcasm intended, just set your shell configuration with aliases and functions you need and want, and forget the graphical or console file managers for a while.

It's what I did while learning my way around the Linux filesystem.
Well in that case learn about pushd and popd, if you haven't already. Basically it's a memory aid. "I was doing something here; now I want to do something somewhere else, then return to what I was doing a bit earlier."

 
I assume that's sarcastic but what I'm saying is true. I'm reminded of looking at Quora threads comparing SPSS to R. Besides the insane licensing costs that are really only fit for institutions, what's consistently brought up as an advantage of R over SPSS is how much more flexible it is to have an actual programming language, even if it is janky, at your fingertips vs. doing everything through a GUI.
Personally, I don't see why people get to the point where they swear by doing everything by typing out commands. John Socha came up with the perfect solution almost four decades ago with Norton Commander and it still holds up to this day. Two file listing panels, one command line at the bottom, everything can be done efficiently with keyboard shortcuts.
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For example, instead of typing out ls to list all the files in the directory you're at, finding the file you want to copy, and then doing a cp command and entering the name of that file and the path of the folder I want to copy it to, I could cut this by simply navigating to that folder in Midnight Commander, hit Ctrl+S, type the first few letters of the filename to navigate it, then pressing F5 and either copying it to the target directory in the right panel or just typing out the path if I know it.

There's nothing stopping you from doing some operations via command line and some via the CLI of mc to optimize your workflow, you still have your shell running and all the commands work just fine. And in my opinion, having this form of keyboard based file managing CLI will be more efficient when it comes to the basic functionality than doing cp and ls over and over again. And there are many QoL features within mc that make file managing easier.

Unless, of course, it stems from the stubbornness to learn something new, even though OFM's is the closest you'll get in coherent unofficial software standards. Midnight Commander in Linux CLI and Total Commander in Windows GUI share the same main keyboard shortcuts as Norton Commander for MS-DOS, so if you're hopping from system to system you have this one sense of familiarity, F5 copies, F6 moves, F8 deletes, Ctrl+PgUp/PgDn navigates the file tree and so on.

Personally, I've been using Total Commander for so many years, using OFM's comes natural to me. So when I do something in Linux CLI, the first thing I'll do is install mc and use that, because despite it using mnemonic keyboard shortcuts, the main functionality is still the same, and it helps me to have two independent file lists that I can navigate, it just makes sense. I will never see typing out ls and cd all the time when I can fire up mc and just navigate everything like this. The command line is right there if I need to run something too, all regular keystrokes get redirected to it. Unlike in something like ranger that acts as a file manager first and foremost, and not a shell that's an addition to a regular command line.

Actually, now that I think of it, how many Linux users that tried console file managers and went "actually fuck that I'm gonna use the command line", because they've used some fancy modern file manager like nnn or ranger that hid the command line away from them? Because those are indeed fucking retarded. mc isn't because it was designed more as a shell, like NC was.

I don't know, if you swear by the command line and you've never tried mc, give it a try, maybe that's what you were looking for that you never got with other CLI file managers.
 
I don't know, if you swear by the command line and you've never tried mc, give it a try, maybe that's what you were looking for that you never got with other CLI file managers.
See, that's the point. I've used Midnight Commander to the point of customizing ~/.config/mc/mc.ext to open .pdf.xz files automatically. I'm not at all unfamiliar with this file manager. I just prefer the shell.
 
Wouldn't it make more sense to launch byobu and open another tab?
I use this fantastic thing called a Graphical Desktop Environment. At any time I can hit Control-Shift-N and pop a new terminal, do stuff and then hit Control-D and it goes away. Apparently they do tabs too.

My only problem is figuring out why I have 25 terminals open at the end of the day, and where they all are so I can close them,

Of course screen and tmux are nice to save a step if it's a remote system, or if you're using one of these:

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It's because you are not a command line autist. :smug:
On a serious note, it depends on a specific person's workflow: I usually prefer to use cd, find, locate rather than use a file manager.
But again, different people, different workflows.
I do quite like Midnight Commander but Ranger and NNN or FFF are nice alternative terminal-based file managers.
 
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