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Activity for matthewsnyder‭

Type On... Excerpt Status Date
Comment Post #291964 I would assume that when it's busting the cache for `/` for example, it would only re-scan the parts that changed. It would be very silly if it scanned the whole drive because just one file changed. I guess baobab doesn't solve your problem then, sorry. Hopefully someone else will find a solution....
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5 months ago
Comment Post #291974 I don't use the out of repo tree, I have symlinks from ~ pointing to the repo itself. I could probably could get the same effect as you say by listing all files in my ~ and then filtering out those which are symlinks pointing to my dotfiles repo.
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5 months ago
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Question How to clean up junk files in my home directory?
After many years of using Arch, and many applications, my home directory is completely cluttered with junk. Of course, much of this is useful and needed for the normal operation of programs. For example, Chrome and Firefox create thousands of files in your `.config` in "normal use". There are also ma...
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5 months ago
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Question How to find all files not part of a package on Arch?
How do I find all actual files (not devices, sockets, etc) on my system that are: Not part of a package Not under `/home` (I assume that packages are supposed to never put files there) on Arch Linux? I've been using this install for a while and I suspect there's been a lot of cruft, like ...
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5 months ago
Edit Post #291964 Initial revision 5 months ago
Answer A: Efficiently determining disk usage of a folder (without starting from scratch every time)
Gnome Disk Usage Analyzer is a GUI program with similar purpose as du and ncdu. I haven't used it in a long time, but I believe caches scan results. Subsequent scans should become faster, barring unexpected cache invalidation (which, granted, is "hard CS problem").
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5 months ago
Comment Post #291925 Actually, maybe that's an answer, so I'll post it.
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5 months ago
Comment Post #291925 It is in fact ext4, but I just realized it's an nvme drive and gets over 1 GB/s. But when you say "internal SSD", is that also nvme? It seems a bit odd it's taking so long for you. Can you try testing the drive speed? You might need `fio` or `nvme-cli`, or Gnome Disks might be able to do it. As fo...
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5 months ago
Edit Post #291963 Initial revision 5 months ago
Question Mute sound on boot
When I boot my computer, I want the sound to start out muted, even if it wasn't before. For bonus points: It should also reduce volume to 0% This should also happen when coming out of hibernation I am using Arch Linux, so this will probably need to be done through a systemd solution.
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5 months ago
Comment Post #291263 Andreas, this is a very common approach in Unix (it is trickier to do on Windows so it's less common there). If you search online for "dotfiles" you can find lots of information. You can also ask here (and use the `dotfiles` tag). It is a somewhat extensive topic, and it would difficult to cover i...
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5 months ago
Comment Post #291925 `du` which you have mentioned has switches like `--no-dereference`, `--count-links` and `--one-file-system` for dealing with links as well as mounts. Are these enough for you, or do you want something more sophisticated?
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5 months ago
Comment Post #291925 For me, `ncdu` can do ~1 million files in 5 seconds. `du` on the same is 2 s. This already seems pretty fast.
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5 months ago
Comment Post #291597 In Gnome? Or in KDE?
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5 months ago
Edit Post #291881 Initial revision 5 months ago
Answer A: Basic GPU usage monitoring
This doesn't really answer the question as posed, but IMO it's a useful footnote: If the primary interest is to monitor GPU usage specifically during a 3D application that uses Vulkan, MangoHud can provide a lot of data through its overlay. This is often more convenient than using system utilities...
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5 months ago
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Answer A: What's the "big picture" of how my operating system is put together?
This varies because, being modular, Linux will have different components according to what it's used for. I'll write mainly for a mainstream desktop distro. Systemd manages most of the stack these days. At boot, kernel and systemd are started automatically. You can replace the kernel with a varian...
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5 months ago
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Edit Post #291818 Initial revision 5 months ago
Question How can I fill out PDF forms?
I often need to fill out PDF forms, like government paperwork and stuff for banks. How can I do this on Linux? Best I could find was Foxit, but it has strange limitations in the Linux version, like not being able to use black text (only navy). Also the software is quite low quality and poorly made...
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5 months ago
Comment Post #291786 Yeah, I think it's much better now.
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5 months ago
Comment Post #291800 I'm on Arch Linux. I guess I mentioned two concerns: 1) Grub will erase my manual grub.conf changes 2) The syntax of grub.conf is bad. I guess I'm actually more concerned about 2, while 1 is a minor problem. When I check my `/boot/grub/grub.cfg`, one of my entries is ~10 lines and looks very complex....
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5 months ago
Edit Post #291802 Initial revision 5 months ago
Question Confused about what "Linux" means
I've heard people say that Linux is a misnomer. Supposedly, the operating system is not Linux, Linux is just a part of it called a kernel, and the operating system should be called something else. But other than times when people are pointing this out, everyone seems to say "Linux" and mean the op...
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5 months ago
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Answer A: What are the most active distros without systemd?
I can't answer this question fully, but I'll try my best. A reasonably comprehensive list of non-systemd distros can be found at https://nosystemd.org/. There might be some which are not on that list, but if they're not on that list they're probably not very active, so it doesn't matter in this ca...
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5 months ago
Comment Post #291778 That curiosity can be readily satisfied by clicking the button saying "Ask Question", surely...
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5 months ago
Comment Post #291786 Also, I feel like this invites the *interjection*. It would be better if the question sounded like it understands the difference between Linux and an OS, and maybe there could be another question like "Why do people say Linux is just the kernel, not the OS?" if it's really necessary.
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5 months ago
Comment Post #291786 This is an interesting topic but there's multiple questions here. I tried to write an answer, but even though I stayed very superficial, it ended being long. I gave up because I don't want to keep up with the maintenance of such a long post. IMO this should be split into: * How do I analyze the...
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5 months ago
Comment Post #291778 This question is not the place to ask that. Maybe you can ask a new question, like "What are the drawbacks of systemd?".
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5 months ago
Edit Post #291800 Initial revision 5 months ago
Question Adding new entries to Grub with alternate kernel parameters
I installed Grub in the normal way and now I have entries in the Grub menu for linux, linux-lts, and the fallback versions of them. I want to add more entries to this. For example, I want to add `linux-lts nomodeset` that is the same as `linux-lts` but without `nvidia-drm.modeset=1`. Do I have ...
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5 months ago
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Question Dual booting without rebooting
Suppose you have two Linux distributions installed in a dual boot situation. One issue that can happen is when you need to frequently switch. Rebooting is disruptive if you have a bunch of things going on. You also can't copy/paste or move things between them in a second. Yes, you can mount the ot...
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5 months ago
Edit Post #291779 Initial revision 5 months ago
Question Can you reuse your home directory while distro hopping?
I want to install additional Linux distributions on my computer, so I can try some new ones and see if they're better than my current ("old") one. I've been using my current distro for a while. I've figured out most things. Generally most everything works and if not I have a way of fixing it. When...
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5 months ago