How can it not be true though? Terminal shines when you chain together more than one operation.
Imagine doing this in a GUI: list the files in a large directory, ignore the ones with underscores in them, find the biggest file, read the last 1000 lines from it and count the number of lines containing a particular string.
Thats a couple of pretty straightforward commands in a terminal, could take 30s for an experienced terminal user. Or the same task could take many minutes of manual effort stuffing round with multiple GUI applications.
I’m certain that I do tasks like that (ad hoc ones, not worth writing dedicated software for) tens of times in a typical work day. And I have no idea how GUI users can be even remotely productive.
How can it? It’s very simple, it takes far less time to click a mouse than it does to type a command.
Imagine doing this in a GUI: list the files in a large directory, ignore the ones with underscores in them, find the biggest file, read the last 1000 lines from it and count the number of lines containing a particular string.
Okay. I’m imagining it, it’s incredibly easy. What else?
Thats a couple of pretty straightforward commands in a terminal, could take 30s for an experienced terminal user. Or the same task could take many minutes of manual effort stuffing round with multiple GUI applications.
My guy, you’ve never used a file explorer?
I have no idea how GUI users can be even remotely productive.
If I need to rename a file, yeah, I can do that by right-clicking it in the file explorer, and selecting ‘rename’ from the menu. Two files? Painful but doable. Three files? Oh hell no, I’m switching to my always-open-in-background terminal window, and write a quick c=1; for f in *.jpeg; do mv “$f” $c.jpeg; c=expr $c + 1 ; done and it takes twice less time than clicking things through with mouse.
And yes, I wrote that shell command off the top of my head on the first try and without edits.
I’m sorry, I’m too old to learn emacs over my perfect knowledge of Midnight Commander.
The point of this topic was to tell why we are using terminal, and emacs is kind of terminal on steroids, there are like 1000 key bindings and the mouse is totally optional, you are proving the point even further.
The Thunar bulk renamer is relatively good, but recently I wanted to name images based on the capture date. Probably very tedious without the right GUI tool, while it’s just one line using exiftool in the terminal. (I don’t know it off the top of my head)
Similarly, I just extracted the audio only from a video using ffmpeg in like 10s. ffmpeg -i video.mkv -c:a copy out.mka
I asked chatGPT what Wayland is since the article contains no explanation
In this context, “Wayland” refers to a protocol and a display server protocol used in Linux operating systems. It’s an alternative to the more established X Window System (X11). The article highlights that Firefox version 121.0 has integrated support for Wayland by default, indicating that the browser can now utilize Wayland’s capabilities directly on modern Linux desktops without relying on XWayland compatibility layer, thereby enhancing performance and compatibility with the native display server protocol.
Most phones have no mainline Linux support, and require something like ubports, which can use an unholy hack to run Linux userspace based on Android drivers and kernel. I think this one can be installed to just about any Android phone (worst case you can use the generic GSI image, which should work but be slow). Personally, I’ve never once bricked a phone by flashing it, and I’ve been doing it since ~2015 (don’t remember the year, but it was a Lenovo S660).
OnePlus 6 is a 5 year old phone with a SoC that has comparatively high development velocity (SDM845), which is why it’s finally getting close to full mainline support for basic features like calls/SMS/camera/sensors (still not fully there, and yes sensors are needed, they make stuff like autorotate and turning touchscreen off when you put your phone to your ear during a call work). If you want to tinker with Linux, I recommend a Pinephone; though Mobian did mention how frustrating its ecosystem is in their blog. Maybe Pinephone Pro or Librem are better, but they’re way way way more expensive. If you want a daily driver, I recommend a OnePlus 6/6T as explained in the article, or some other SDM845 phone, and maybe don’t DIY if you don’t have the basic experience in working with ARM SBCs and Android ROMs like me lol.
postmarketOS is probably the smoothest experience you’ll get on a wide range of devices, and I highly recommend it. Most other mobile Linux distros are often more or less piggy backing off their work (though of course other distros create cool stuff too).
Nothing. My laptop has 8GB and while this is somewhat the limit, it’s enough to browse, do office stuff, a bit of development/programming and even a bit of CAD for my 3D printer, video editing, retro-gaming and all sorts of things. I’d prefer to have 16GB because Firefox likes to eat a lot of RAM, but the laptop is too old for me to upgrade anything at this point.
If you’d like to waste your resources, you could run 4 other operating systems simultaneously in VMs. Or try artificial intelligence chatbots and load one of the large language models. They can easily make use of 32GB of memory and more.
Agreed. I have ageing hardware that I upgraded to its maximum 16GB RAM, and I manage to browse the web and do basic office work with that. The most memory intensive work I do beside browsing is in GIMP, and I simply set some sensible virtual memory for that to work.
Just use a light DE, or even scale back to only a WM. People insisting that KDE or Gnome are lightweight are exactly the same who claim that 32GB RAM is a minimum. Yeah, it is when even your desktop environment is bloated 🙄
If you’re a gamer and can afford the hardware upgrades to stay at the current bleeding edge, go ahead. I keep an old box alive and make it work instead.
Forget the pinephone as a daily driver. It is nice to play around with and having linux on your phone is awesome. But you can’t really use it as a daily driver. You’ll try it and it’s going to end up in the drawer of unfinished projects. Trust me, I own a pinephone and I know other people who do.
There’s nothing wrong with it. Just like 50 mild annoyances with anything you’re trying to do with it and on top it’s super slow, compared to any other smartphone.
As I read, the phone by Purism isn’t much better and it’s really expensive.
Yeah, I think so, too. It doesn’t have to be this way. I mean this is mainly due to the way ARM hardware works, lack of good drivers, maintenance and dedication by the manufacturers of that hardware. And everything is quite fragmented. In theory we could have a hardware platform that has good open-source drivers and is well-supported. The Pinephone was an attempt to establish one platform that people could focus on. But it has quite some limitations and also hardware/design issues.
And Linux isn’t quite there yet. I mean I love Linux and it can run on embedded devices very well. But things like connected standby (for example receiving chat messages while the hardware sleeps and saves power) just isn’t implemented in a desktop environment that was made for computers. And also not in a chat application that was made for computers. So, set aside the hardware and driver issues, we have another issue with Linux software that wasn’t made to run on smartphones.
There is a way around that and that is to add those capabilities to the Linux kernel. And also give applications means to stay connected in the background, adapt to different screen sizes, rotate the screen and evict themselves from RAM. It’s kind of what Android is. It builds upon the Linux kernel and adds lots of stuff that is specifically useful on smartphones.
I hope someday some of those techniques get adopted into the mainline Linux kernel and also the frameworks the desktop software uses.
I hope so too. I wouldn’t be as mad if Android was open and we could put it on different devices, but we can’t. Manufacturers lock their devices in so many ways.
The problem is not Android. It is as open as any other Linux distribution. The problem is that manufacturers make the drivers for their hardware proprietary.
Thank you. I completely agree. We can’t do stuff ourselves, my Pixel 4a is End of Life now and all the proprietary parts of the system won’t be updated anymore, which is a shame because the hardware is still perfectly fine.
And I hate the business decisions Google makes. Android is built upon Linux and the core is supposed to be free software. But then they move more and more stuff into their proprietary Google services packages. Like the proper keyboard with swipe typing, the better calendar app, text to speech, push notifications and all of the payment stuff. I personally replaced everything on the phone with a custom ROM, and did not install the google services. But I had to find alternatives to all of that and some things really don’t work as well. It’s a hassle and some things just don’t work at all. Like some stuff that requires in-app payment. I don’t care too much, because I get most of my Apps from F-Droid anyways and they’re open-source. But I can’t pay with my phone in the supermarket, can’t rent those silly electric scooters and a few other things.
I tend to use my credit card for most of my purchases, online or in-person. In doing so, I haven’t come across the problem of payments you describe, although I’m unaware if the apps I use utilise Google’s API in the back-end to do this (for example, does the Amazon app use some Android API to process my payment using a credit card?).
I think I’d be fine without most Google apps except for Maps, where OpenStreetMap has not served me well so fat (unfortunate, since I would like to use it but it is not as reliable in my experience). I can do my banking in the browser, and consume my video content (YouTube/Peertube/LBRY) in the browser anyway.
I’m going to revisit the Murena mobiles again, and I’ll reiterate how disappointed I am that the FP5 is not available in the US. At this point, I’ll pin my hopes on KernelSU for the next few years (hoping I don’t have to compile my own kernel, I’d like to get a cheap device running the 5.10 kernel or those after it), but consumer devices don’t have hardware killswitches or privacy features or replaceable parts either (and iFixit doesn’t cover every device).
This was a long comment, and I appreciate this discourse with you. Thanks again.
Yeah, paying with credit card also works for me. And I use the browser a lot for stuff like that. Just the added layers in the apps sometimes don’t work. Like when I tried riding one of those electric scooters. I was able to put in my credit card details and they got accepted, and I know my phone is capable of doing NFC, but somehow there is something else in that app that prevents me from doing the actual transaction and rent the scooter. Online-shopping and things like that work fine. I don’t need an App to use Amazon or PayPal… So I wouldn’t know either.
Thx. I’m going to look up the de-googled phones you mentioned. I think I will try to use my Pixel as long as it works, but in theory it isn’t supported anymore and I’m supposed to buy a new one now. At least that’s what Google and GrapheneOS tell me.
I’m holding out hope for KernelSU, in which case I won’t need to care about custom ROMs and things like safetyNET either. A root from kernel-space + a custom launcher and I won’t miss OEM android at all. The only thing I haven’t figured out is patch management, but I’ll leave that to people more intelligent than me
It seems multiple Linux distributions are considering to update their x86-64 baseline architecture. This could improve performance, at the cost of hardware compatibility.
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