I’m about to jump from Ubuntu back to good ol’ Debian. I was planning on testing, but I’ve heard a few times recently that people are running unstable for day-to-day desktop use. Is there any particular reason you went with unstable instead of testing? Any issues so far?
I’m using debian unstable as a desktop OS on all of my 3 regularly used systems: 2 notebooks and 1 desktop. And debian 11 on citrix virtual desktop at work. debian stable on around 200 servers.
I rarely have bigger issues in my day to day usage of unstable which includes surfing, gaming and coding. at the moment my bluetooth headset microphone doesn’t work, which i guess is due to some changes to pipewire but only on my desktop. both my work and private notebook seem to not have issues.
this is one of the worst problems i had in the last 8 years. other then that, if you use apt-listbugs to exclude any updates with serious bugs by pinning them until a bugfree version gets released, you wont have any more issues then you get with arch for example.
I assume you mean “why use these instead of file-manipulation commands in bash?”
I use both.
There are a handful of tasks that are easier in dired than bash.
Making small modifications to filenames that aren’t amenable to programmatic changes. You can just toggle the read-only flag on a dired buffer, edit the filenames, and then hit C-c C-c when done.
Marking a set of files to perform an operation on where that set cannot trivially be expressed using tools in bash. Think, oh, “which movies do I like enough to want to keep around”. This is especially handy when moving a number of files to another directory, which I think is why people often like the two-pane approach of orthodox file managers. Dired is not an OFM, but it can act like that if you have two dired windows open, using the other as the default target for the operation.
Dealing with filenames containing obnoxious-to-type characters like weird Unicode stuff. If I want to delete the one file in a directory whose name consists of a bunch of kanji, it’s easier to just manually select it in a list.
Navigating where I usually want to see the contents of each directory. I’ll often navigate around in dired while building up up an emms playlist. Browsing a list of movies to play.
EDIT: It’s also not really a file manager, but I do use ncdu to see what’s taking up space on a disk. I’ll also use du -h|sort -h|less, but ncdu is, like file managers, more convenient when just browsing around the tree and looking at each as one does so, while manually selecting a few items to operate on (deleting).
EDIT2: I’ll also add that virtually all of the people I know in person who love OFMs – I’m in the US – are from Eastern Europe, moved to the US from Russia, Ukraine, Romania, etc. I dunno why that is. Maybe just spreading along language lines. Maybe there are or were issues with switching between Cyrillic and Latin character stuff akin to my above irritation with kanji. But someone from Eastern Europe might have more input to answer your question.
EDIT3: The link I provided above for OFMs has a very long discussion from the author on why he likes OFMs (though not all terminal file managers are OFMs, many, like Midnight Commander, are). Reading it, I’d say that there’s a lot of overlap with how Emacs works with dired+TRAMP+eshell and some other Emacs packages, though they accomplish similar goals in a different way – sort of making integrated functionality that spans network file transfer, file management, text editing, file archive access, console commands, with a common toolset available for all. Would be quicker to learn an OFM than Emacs, though Emacs is gonna provide a considerably-larger set of functionality if you’re willing to spend the time on it.
EDIT4: There are also a number of OFMs in Emacs, like Sunrise Commander, so I guess I shouldn’t really treat it as an either-or matter.
Hi everyone, SpiralLinux creator here. Another thing that motivated the creation of this set of spins is the diversity of hardware, even in my own machines. I personally don’t like having to switch to a completely different distro for a specific computer just because of hardware support issues. Some devices might need a newer kernel for certain components to work, whereas other hardware works better with the older kernel from Debian Stable. So SpiralLinux offers a hybrid approach, Debian Stable base system with the Debian Stable kernel included on the live ISO, but the much newer kernel version from Debian Backports is also available on the ISO. This can make the difference between the image booting or not, or between having internet connectivity or not, and it makes it more likely that SpiralLinux will work across the entire range of a user’s computers.
My bottleneck at boot is my damn Bios… I am so hyped about flashing Heads on my Thinkpad T430.
Even the old legacy Lenovo bioses where very fast at startup. The UEFI (with extremely nice secure-boot settings too) of an AMD Acer starts up in like 2 seconds. My old intel Thinkpad T430 needs like 4 seconds.
And then my Lenovo T495 bullshit UEFI comes. No secure boot configuration at all, I have no idea how to boot from USB sticks, and this thing needs nearly 10 seconds to boot! Linux compared, a full Desktop OS, needs 3 seconds to show SDDM (after the LUKS dialog)
I hate Google but they gave us Go, Kubernetes. I hate Amazon but they gave us AWS. I plainly hate those companies, but adore the brilliant engineers that work there.
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