Posts by matthewsnyder
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...
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...
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...
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?
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...
Do any of the cron implementations allow you to manually trigger cron jobs (stuff in your crontab) right now, in the exact same manner as they would have when triggered on their usual schedule, exc...
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 l...
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 ...
Ever since systemd was adopted by mainstream distros, there's been many reactive projects aiming to provide a distro without systemd. I've often had the impression that a lot of these were motivat...
Suppose you currently use the partition /dev/sda1 for everything, and you create a new partition /dev/sda2 to use for /home. It doesn't matter if the partition is on a different physical drive, sam...
I added IdleAction=hibernate IdleActionSec=30min To my bat /etc/systemd/logind.conf. Then I waited 31 min, but nothing happened. It didn't hibernate. Presumably, the config changes are not loa...
You can use Wine, or a VM. With a VM, it's pretty straightforward - install Windows in the VM, and then run the program as you would normally inside the VM. With Wine, the "basic" way (which you s...
On X, open a terminal and run xev -event keyboard. You'll get a white box. Make sure this is focused and press the key. You should see some output in the terminal about what the key is. Particularl...
If you are using KDE/Plasma, there should be a widget for the taskbar that shows GPU usage. Go to the same screen where you normally add widgets and look for a "system monitor" widget. In the confi...
For a TUI solution: https://github.com/Syllo/nvtop Install it and type nvtop in a terminal.
How do you monitor GPU usage on Linux? I am most interested in a "% GPU usage" and maybe "GPU temp" statistic, not so much very detailed stuff.
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...
Gnome disks can create a disk image, and then restore it to the new one. The new drive has to be same size or larger, although this is obvious. If it is larger, the partition will still be small, ...
Not a real answer, but these days there are some nice LLM models and they're good at summarizing text. If you have the CLI scripts to interact with them, you can submit the man page as the "system ...
You often have to read man pages to use Linux/Unix software. However, many man pages are not easy to read. They are very long, not always conveniently arranged, and man does not appear to have any ...
I have an Arch Linux machine connected to a LAN by ethernet. The router runs OpenWRT. DHCP assigns IPs to this machine like 192.168.1.* - quite typical. I want the IP to always be 192.168.1.10. I...
When formatting drives with Gnome Disks, there is an option to "Erase". The help text says this takes longer, but "completely" erases data. What exactly does this option do? Is there a CLI equival...
I don't use Gnome, but I'm guessing it relies on xdg-open to figure out what program to use. Your first step would be to do xdg-open ~ to see if it uses the same incorrect program. If so, great - ...
I can start services with systemctl start. I can see logs with systemctl status or journalctl. But by the time I run the second the process has already started. I'd like to start a service and imme...
I'm going to write some systemd services. All of these can only be run if a certain website is up. I thought I could create a ~/.config/systemd/user/website.service this: [Unit] Description=Confi...
