Posts by matthewsnyder
I see that this is self-answered, but I disagree that the answer provided is the best way. The best way is to properly utilize the Unix philosophy, by decomposing the problem into simpler sub-probl...
I saw another post recommend using Fedora if you want cutting edge features. Is Fedora really a "cutting edge" distro? I am not very familiar with Fedora, I know it's a community counterpart to R...
I have a systemd unit that does some stuff on the internet. Sometimes this gets fired at startup. I want to make sure it's delayed until the computer is connected to the internet. In my notes I fo...
When PSF says Python 3.8 is not supported, they are simply saying they will no longer bother fixing bugs in or adding stuff to that version. It's not like Python 3.8 will start automatically explod...
When I create the initramfs, I sometimes see messages like: ==> WARNING: Possibly missing firmware for module: 'xhci_pci' I get many for different modules. What do they mean? Should I in...
From the average user's perspective: Back in the day when people were figuring out how to do shells, there were as many shell syntaxes as shells. Everyone made up their own little language to go w...
Suppose I want to get random numbers from /dev/random with basic CLI tools. Is there a way to do it, that's easier to type and read than python -c 'import random; print(100 + 200*random.random())'?...
Wine has options for "Synchronization", like "Esync" or "Fsync". What do these actually do? What is the purpose of such an option? What is the impact to normal usage of a Windows program in Wine?
What is a modern and practical way to handle scheduling tasks on a Linux desktop? Modern means basic features should not rely on obscure or convoluted commands and standards Practical means you...
Gnome should have a Settings app with a Keyboard shortcut section. Here you can click Add Custom Shortcut which will let you bind any key to any shell-style command. source Unless you are very sur...
From what I can tell, both NixOS and Guix are built around a package manager which, instead of installing package into the "common environment" as is traditional, isolates them to mitigate issues a...
tl;dr: Find the .desktop file that you are currently running It is probably in a system location, so copy it to a user location Modify the file contents The normal way to create icons for...
The ancient utility find should come installed on the majority of distributions. Technically, find recursively locates all files and directories under a path, and prints their full paths. It is of ...
Restarting NetworkManager should be enough: sudo systemctl restart NetworkManger
I have some bookmarked folders in GtkFileChooserDialog. I want to add these to my dotfiles. Where are the bookmarks stored?
How can I run a command later? I'm looking for a CLI way to schedule a command to be run later. I know that I could create a systemd timer, install it, activate it... That is too much work. I want...
I have an image (a photo) and I want to highlight certain parts of this. I want to do this from the CLI. I am planning to store the pixel coordinates of polygon vertices in a file, and when I run ...
I want to have a local DNS server on my home LAN, say at 192.168.1.123. All of my machines will use 192.168.1.123 as their only DNS server when connected to my home network. By default, my DNS ser...
What is the simplest shell idiom for stripping leading and trailing whitespace from a file or program output? Ideally I am looking for the equivalent of trim or strip methods in some languages. Th...
My keyboard has keys for mute, volume up, volume down. In i3wm, I used to have these bound with: bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec --no-startup-id pulsemixer --change-volume +10 --max-volume 100 ...
I can easily run Windows games with wine by running: wine game.exe However, if I want to use Proton I have to run Steam, add the game as a non-Steam game, and run it that way. Since Proton is ...
The basis of the Unix philosophy is to decompose complex tasks into simple sub-tasks, so that one can easily choose a combination of simple Unix tools to solve the problem in an intuitive way. Oft...
Why does XDG_DATA_HOME default to ~/.local/share? Why not something less cryptic, like ~/.data? Why did they decide use that path?
Suppose I have a PDF which is 2x3 in. I want to create a PDF with a single page, which has multiple copies of this. For example, if the small pieces are in landscape, and the large page is in portr...
Is it practical to use libostree for user files? Or is it too specialized for tracking an entire OS? I am not familiar with libostree, but sounds like it's "Git for filesystem trees". Seems like t...
