The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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Susanna said:
Drive labels are the correct way to handle this. You can easily swap out a drive by just swapping the names around, and everything is perfectly human readable.
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For fucks sake I should’ve realized that labels could be used like that.
Eternal Gopnik said:
I haven't seen a distro that has had an issue like this out of the box in at least a decade, and on top of that, fstab syntax is really simple, so I don't know what's stopping you from fixing it yourself if your install is extremely old and specifies drives by how they're enumerated in /dev - or if your fstab is just missing entries altogether for some reason. Seriously, just run "sudo blkid", identify your drives, and then put the UUIDs or LABELs in your fstab.
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It helps to use a gui text editor where you can copy and paste things easy enough. Nobody is typing a uuid by hand.
 
Realistically I have a vague idea of what to do; I identify the drives, I go into /etc/fstab using whatever fucking notepad equivalent I have and then when that's done I hit a command to update configs so the system is aware that fstab has changed.

But that's the thing, I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS. I know it's piss easy if you're experienced with the terminal, my issue is that almost everything major has been automated over the years APART FROM THIS. AMD drivers install automatically, sound drivers install automatically with no fucking fuss, we've got the entire fucking flatpak system that has removed the banging your head against the wall feeling with compiling software, we've got software tools for almost every issue you could possibly think of... yet something as simple as having TWO FUCKING DRIVES IN YOUR COMPUTER requires fucking with the terminal.

I just don't see how this is acceptable at all.
 
Tom Nook's Gloryhole said:
Realistically I have a vague idea of what to do; I identify the drives, I go into /etc/fstab using whatever fucking notepad equivalent I have and then when that's done I hit a command to update configs so the system is aware that fstab has changed.

But that's the thing, I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS. I know it's piss easy if you're experienced with the terminal, my issue is that almost everything major has been automated over the years APART FROM THIS. AMD drivers install automatically, sound drivers install automatically with no fucking fuss, we've got the entire fucking flatpak system that has removed the banging your head against the wall feeling with compiling software, we've got software tools for almost every issue you could possibly think of... yet something as simple as having TWO FUCKING DRIVES IN YOUR COMPUTER requires fucking with the terminal.

I just don't see how this is acceptable at all.
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Does your distro not have gnome disks? Even Linux Mint has it and setting up mounting options in it is ez

Even kde had something similar that works well. I thought you were doing a ssh into a server with how you were going on.
 
Tom Nook's Gloryhole said:
Realistically I have a vague idea of what to do; I identify the drives, I go into /etc/fstab using whatever fucking notepad equivalent I have and then when that's done I hit a command to update configs so the system is aware that fstab has changed.

But that's the thing, I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS. I know it's piss easy if you're experienced with the terminal, my issue is that almost everything major has been automated over the years APART FROM THIS. AMD drivers install automatically, sound drivers install automatically with no fucking fuss, we've got the entire fucking flatpak system that has removed the banging your head against the wall feeling with compiling software, we've got software tools for almost every issue you could possibly think of... yet something as simple as having TWO FUCKING DRIVES IN YOUR COMPUTER requires fucking with the terminal.

I just don't see how this is acceptable at all.
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KDE and GNOME have GUI tools for this but learning how fstab works will be good for you in the long run
Personally I leave all of my disks off automount and get errors that soulseek can't find my drive and my dolphin pops up saying no directory and I have to enter my root password to unlock the drive every time I reboot
 
Just because I’m an annoying contrarian, fstab is the easiest shit to fix, point blank. Maybe it’s because I have certain traumatic experiences with fstab breaking five million times but I’ve done it so many times I know the syntax by hand.

/dev/nvme0n1p1 / ext4 default 0 1

If you’re not a power user, aka, a massive faggot, go use your GUI partition editor and be the faggot you were always meant to be.

Betonhaus said:
Nobody is typing a uuid by hand.
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When bad comes to worse…
 
SchizoDaemon said:
You can copy and paste things in the terminal and copy things to the terminal.

There are quite a number of cheatsheets online that are well worth learning.

e.g.

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I’m never going to remember the magical commands to select text from the output of thr command to get uuid, much easier to use the mouse to highlight the text and copy and use a notepad to move text around. I know it’s doable but for the amount of times I need to do it I’m not going to remember
 
You are just pretending it is more difficult than it is. Keyboard shortcuts are in almost every GUI program, and people manage to use them fine, but if you suggest people look up a cheatsheet for a terminal, for whatever reason that is too much of an ask. I find it tiresome.

I have to deal with these two mongoloids at work; if I ask them to do something they can Google, they want me to show them. At first I was nice to them and did so. Now I just tell them to fucking google it or read the fucking README that I wrote for them.

Part of the whole philosophy of using Linux and open source in general is that you are in control and you take responsibility, not hand it off to a third party to do it for you.
 
Tom Nook's Gloryhole said:
I just don't see how this is acceptable at all.
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Real talk: no one [with an iota of common sense] jumps ship from Windows to Linux and expects a completely painless experience. You are literally transitioning from a Windows NT-based operating system to a Unix-like operating system. The underlying assumptions for each operating system family are wholly distinct from one another. They handle filesystems completely differently from one another. Stuff that's possible in Windows NT is either wholly impossible or possible with any number of caveats in Linux. The reverse is also true, and there's no shortage of stuff that's easier to do on Linux that you need to cut against the grain on Windows to accomplish.

Windows NT has graphical windows, buttons, mouse, and keyboard fundamentally baked into the core operating system itself (or more accurately: the graphical stuff doesn't run in userspace, runs at the kernel level, and is a baseline assumption for Windows developers). All Linux distributions and other such Unix-like operating systems (including OSX) do not have this capacity on a core operating system level, let alone a baseline assumption of your OS being graphical by default. On Linux, you need a combination of a display server (re: X11 or Wayland), a desktop environment or a window manager, underlying software suites that provide additional primitives like Mesa, the relevant graphics drivers and/or firmware+kernel modules installed, etc etc. On OSX, Apple controls the entire software and hardware stack. Darwin, the core operating system shared by OSX, iOS, and so on, is text-only. Quartz is the graphical substrate that exists on top of Darwin, with GUI applications being written in Cocoa or whatever other toolkit that Apple gives you.

This is all to say that jumping ship from Windows to Linux will cause friction at some point. The scale of the friction, the degree to which it frustrates you, the impact it has on your day-to-day life? All of that shit will differ from person to person, but they're all pains that every Linux user wholly identifies and sympathises with. The reason why it's "acceptable" isn't because these trade-offs must be tolerated in perpetuity; it's because the cost/benefit analysis of using Linux over Windows still works out in Linux's favour despite all the pain. It's directly in our best interests as end users of a Linux distribution to learn how our shit works so that we can mitigate future pain.

Tom Nook's Gloryhole said:
Realistically I have a vague idea of what to do; I identify the drives, I go into /etc/fstab using whatever fucking notepad equivalent I have and then when that's done I hit a command to update configs so the system is aware that fstab has changed.
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This is exactly the process. What's daunting about fiddling with a file like /etc/fstab is that you'd be blown away just how much power is given to what effectively amount to plaintext files. /etc/fstab is particularly annoying (for me and definitely you) because screwing up with /etc/fstab means your disks are either incapable of mounting or you used the wrong options and there's now some filesystem fuckery happening.

In a pre-ChatGPT world, this is where the man pages come into play. Normally, man pages exist to give you context on commands. However, man pages also exist for critical system files like /etc/fstab. Open up the terminal, type man fstab and then you get the whole man page that outlines how it works, what each parameter does, and a basic example. In the past, we'd just use the raw device (re: /dev/sdaX, but nowadays it's "best practice" to use a UUID or a LABEL for accuracy, flexibility, or both. fstab(5) embedded in this post as a text file for your convenience if you're willing to get jiggy with it.

Post-ChatGPT, this is one of those "safe" configuration questions you can generally chuck into any LLM and get a workable solution right out the gate... but there's something kinda crap and unrelaxed about relying on an LLM doing the guesswork while you only have a vague idea of what's going on. Don't get it twisted: I wish that all Linux distros had a robust, universally endemic tool like Windows Disk Manager to do all this crap for me. Sadly, that ain't the reality we live in, and the solutions we have available are just graphically streamlined and less robust versions of what you could do by hand with the terminal, a text editor, and a man page.

Tom Nook's Gloryhole said:
But that's the thing, I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS. I know it's piss easy if you're experienced with the terminal, my issue is that almost everything major has been automated over the years APART FROM THIS. AMD drivers install automatically, sound drivers install automatically with no fucking fuss, we've got the entire fucking flatpak system that has removed the banging your head against the wall feeling with compiling software, we've got software tools for almost every issue you could possibly think of... yet something as simple as having TWO FUCKING DRIVES IN YOUR COMPUTER requires fucking with the terminal.
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Homeboy, we know damn well you don't wanna do the fstab fuckery. None of us want to. The catch is that everyone uses different graphical tooling, there's absolutely zero fucking standardisation among graphical tooling that handles partitioning, labelling, mounting, etc, and there's a non-zero risk of being SOL if your graphical tool shits the bed during a non-trivial process and you have zero diagnostic information to go off. Rolling up your sleeves and firing up the terminal to get busy is the "default" for most long-term Linux users precisely because it doesn't matter if I'm using Ubuntu/Debian, SUSE, Fedora, Arch, or even Gentoo and Slackware: /etc/fstab is /etc/fstab. Again: don't get it twisted. If the option for a pleasant GUI alternative with robust options and workable troubleshooting information in case of failures existed, 9/10, we'd go for that option. Sadly, such an option (if it exists) ain't universal.
 

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Yet again getting that weird thing where guix wants to update everything on my system
This time its letting me upgrade instead of forcing a downgrade but like I just reconfigured why is my second reconfigure where I added a font doing this
My cat also just stepped on my keyboard and crashes gnome and my system froze.
 
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