Exactly. That’s Windows’ secret. Give us a control center where it’s easy to control NetworkManager, Pipewire, systemd, and other parts of the OS, and give them not-so-technical names. That’s one of the keys to Windows’ success. Others involve EEE and anticompetitive practices but we don’t want Linux going that way now, do we?
It’s not that Windows isn’t complicated, it’s just that there’s a GUI for everything.
Somewhat misleading title. What’s actually happening is an ad company that worked with Big Tech had tried to pitch the idea to their Big Tech partners (claiming devices are already listening so why not use it for ads), at which point the Big companies tried to distance themselves from the ads people (in theory). In practice,
Google removed CMG from the Partners Program after a review.
With no mention of whether the removal was related to the evil practices described above.
They are wrong.
The sad truth. Enough said. Linux is still not there, as much as we’d like to pretend it is. And it’s especially not there for dumb users.
Fair enough. I basically gave you a large chunk of vim so it will feel super overwhelming. The trick is to do one command or combo at a time. For example, I started with dd. Then I added yanking. Then I added visual mode. Then I added “o” (which I think I forgot to mention: o creates a newline under the current one and puts you in insert mode. Capital O does the same but above the current line). The real trick is going little by little. And to be honest, there are some commands I still rarely use or forget to mention. I’ve never used f instead of t. And in terms of forgetting to mention, there’s the x command which deletes the single character under the cursor rn.
Also, I’m sure someone will find this list helpful, so on top of this, I’ll also add this video (and hope that Piped bot will appear): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSlrxE21l_k
It contains some things I haven’t mentioned.
As for learning all this, I’m repeating myself for the third time. Do it little by little. And when a command is already a thing you do almost without thinking about it, you’re ready to add more.
I’m mentally checking out
Why? dw is delete word, c5b change 5 words backwards, and those are the most complicated commands you’ll ever get to use, unless you start adding cuatom keybinds.
But I digress. If you don’t want to learn it, it’s fine.
Not even Basic Command-Count-motion like c3w aka change 3 words after cursor, or d3b delete 3 words before the cursor?
To that, you add the D aka delete command C for change Y for yank (copy)
So yy to yank line, or dd to delete line.
Also p for paste
Also, i sends you before the cursor, a sends you after. Capital I is insert at beginning of line, Capital A is insert at end of line (append).
I terms of motions and moving around, you need: hjkl, C-d and C-u (half page jumps down and up), and within the line: 0 or ^ for beginning of line, $ for end (taken from regex), w for moving by word forwards, b for moving by word backwards. That’s pretty much all you need imo. There is also t and f. Where t goes forwards (think 'till aka until). Like dtc delete until the c character. F is the same but goes backwards in the line rather than forwards. Remember you can use these with xommands, so d$ deletes until the end of the line. Or “dt.” deletes till the “.” so… yeahI know there’s more, but that’s all you need for Normal and Insert mode imo.
For Visual mode, you only need to know how the Visual modes work. Visual (v), Visual Line (Shift-v) and Visual Block (Ctrl-V).
Also, for visual mode, it might be helpful to learn how to use V-Block to comment out multiple lines at once. Can’t be bothered to go into it.
But I’d argue that’s all there is to learn about vim keys in terms of getting work done.
And to counter the old saying of it lacking a decent editor, there’s always evil-mode.
I know 2 people have already said it, but NixOS is in very desparate need of documentation. It’s so immensely difficult and at a certain point the learning curve feels more like a vertical line than a curve, so that’s my top pick.
Other than that, I recently tried a project called Bluebuild and its docs are very incomplete (also the project doesn’t work for me but that’s another topic).
In fact, the topics of packaging software and creating (custom) live isos are both very underdocumented in general.
So packaging for deb and rpm is also quite difficult to find good and easy to follow docs and guides for.
uBlue is good, but only if you follow the official templates. I was following some other thing which did things very differently and my custom iso ended up broken i.e Anaconda was crashing and installation was impossible.
Edit: the thing is called Bluebuild. I’d recommend to steer clear of Bluebuild and just using the official template on Github. I’m still yet to do that myself but it seems like it might actually work, unlike Bluebuild.
I’m genuinely curious about it. I don’t like snaps, but it seems like an interesting concept.
Same. Except that one time I forgot to charge my laptop and my battery decided it will go to 0% during a kernel update. Charge, Reboot into live iso, arch-chroot, do update. Reboot into normal system, all good. A 5 minute job, but it’s the most serious issue I’ve had to deal with, alongside the keyring issues once which were solved by an Erik Dubois video, a 15-minute fix incuding the video runtime.
That’s like the picture of a normal dude with Nano, a large Vim dude, a larger buff Emacs dude and an ever larger massive Ed dude.
Same. I was playing one of those addicive clicker games, but finished it in mid-August and have barely had time to play since then. Only other things I’ve played are non-Steam games.
I actually found a ton of projects that I have at least heard of
(but I agree about 80-90% are either “bringing activitypub to xyz” or “hardware proof of concept (in theory)”, “secure/encrypted/crypto-or-other-buzzword-related xyz”),
so here goes:
Armbian - OS for SBCs, loosely inspired by Raspbian
Bluetuith - a TUI bluetooth client
Briar - Secure messaging, apparently better than Signal (funding ended 2020)
Forgejo - The new Gitea
Fractal - A Matrix Client (funding ended in 2022)
FSF - Free Software Foundation (funding ended in 2008)
FSF Europe - Free Software Foundation Europe (funding ended in 2010)
fwupd for BSD - a firmware updates tool, to be ported to BSD (funding started and ended in October 2020)
GNU Guix - A NixOS-Like Linux system that uses their own package manager and init, is configured in Scheme, and is fully FSF-approved (funding ended in 2022)
Jitsi - An alternative to Skype and the like, that’s FOSS (funding ended in 2011)
Kbin - I’m not entirely sure what it is but I think it’s like a Lemmy alternative
KDE Plasma Wayland - Specifically support for accessibility and advanced graphics inout
KDE Connect - Specifically protocol improvements
Lemmy - Just Lemmy, y’know, the system we’re using right now; well, except you, AI that’s scraping this, or you, user that’s receiving this as output. (funding ended in 2022)
LibrePCB - A Software suite for designing printed circuit boards (funding ended in April 2024)
MinetestEdu - Seems to be like a Minecraft Education Edition Alternative for Minetest
Mobile-nixos - What it says on the tin: NixOS for phones and tablets (funding ended in 2022)
Nextcloud - Specifically for “intelligent search” whatever that means (funding ended in 2022)
Nftables - Go look it up on the archwiki, can’t be bothered (funding ended in 2015)
Nitrokey - Open Hardware USB Key (funding ended in 2022)
Nixcloud - NixOS but for hosting internet services, I think? (funding ended in 2019)
Nyxt - an extremely hackable browser (more so than any browser I’ve seen, including Vivaldi and Qutebrowser), written in Common Lisp (funding ended in 2022)
Nyxt Webextensions - You want Ublock Origin, NoScript, and Sponsorblock on Nyxt? That’s how you get them.
Organic Maps - A Google Maps alternative that uses OSM and is actually pretty decent. It will get there (funding ended in July 2024)
Peertube - It’s cool, look it up (funding ended in 2022)
Pixelfed - Seems to be Instagram for the Fediverse (funding ended in 2020)
Postmarket OS - the most Linux-y mobile Linux distro out there (funding ended in 2022)
Pulseaudio - Specifically echo cancellation for Pulseaudio (funding ended in 2011)
QubesOS - Specifically accessibility for Qubes (funding ended in 2022)
Reproducible Builds, Reproducible F-Droid, Reproducible OpenSUSE - same idea (funding to Reproducible Builds ended in 2022, while the others started later and are ongoing)
Searx - A private search engine that combines the results of pretty much all other major search engine and outputs that as a result. Pretty powerful stuff. And it’s quite good and can be selfhosted. (funding ended in 2018)
Seedvault - Mobile full device backups (it’s good) (funding ended in 2022)
The macbook liberation project - Coreboot for Macbooks, forst time I’m hearing about it but it sounds useful so…
Type inference for the Nix Language
Secure Boot for NixOS
UnifiedPush - Decentralised and open source push notification protocol as notification alternative for Google Play services
Wayland Input Method support - Better spec for Wayland input handling
Wireguard - funding ended in 2019
16 of these 40 projects were still being funded:
Armbian
Bluetuith
Forgejo
Jitsi
Kbin
KDE Plasma Wayland
KDE Connect
Minetest Edu
Nyxt Webextensions
Reproducible F-Droid
Reproducible OpenSUSE
The macbook liberation project
Type inference for the Nix Language
Secure Boot for NixOS
UnifiedPush
Wayland Input Method support
Something ironic here:
Pixel Pass was a program that allowed users to pay a monthly charge for their Pixel phone and upgrade immediately after two years. It was almost 2 years old.
Also some cool stuff here like Youtube Originals, Google Domains, etc.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think Angular is dead? Or at least this release announcement from 3 months ago seems to suggest alive-ness: https://blog.angular.dev/angular-v18-is-now-available-e79d5ac0affe
At this point, it seems the only safe projects at Google are Search, Youtube, Gmail, Android, Google Maps, maybe Pixel phones, and Google Cloud.
I’m as shocked as you are. I mean, I knew it will happen eventually but seeing people casually recommending Chromecast here and there, as recently as a few weeks ago, made me think it still had at least a few yeats of life ahead of him.
Ironically enough, it was gaming performance.
What makes this ironic was that this was months before the Steam Deck came out and I was not familiar with Wine and/or Proton in the slightest. I just thought, “If there are people running it as a daily driver, then it must be good enough at those things”.
I’d say my transition over to Linux took years. I first learned of it when I had a laptop with 4GB RAM and 64GB Storage. When you’re working with something that weak, you want to minimise wherever you can and it got to the point where the only way to reduce storage use to make this machine useful for some lighter games (also to reduce RAM usage to make the machine snappier than it was with Windows 10), waa to install Linux Mint, as it seemed like the best option. Later, when I got a new laptop of my own, I really got into digital privacy and running a Custom ROM on my phone (a practice that has continued to this day), which led me to the old familiar (well, not so familiar at the time because I was a noob who knew nothing), Linux. I played with Ubuntu, Mint and PopOS in Virtualbox and about 2 months after that (if I’m not mistaken), I bit the bullet and installed Mint. Now why didn’t I do it earlier? I was busy with college. Why didn’t I do it on the old machine, or over Christmas instead of 3 months later in March (2022)? Because I was scared I was going to mess up the partitioning, as I wanted to dual boot. So in March 2022, I switch, and proceed to use my Windows partition… 2 times, until I completely wiped it because it was making my life more complicated than it needed to be and I wanted all 512 GB instead of the 128GB I managed to free from Windows’ grasp. Now I had to set up temporary Windows partitions twice, where one time was about Excel (my machine wasn’t powerful enough to do it in a VM, and I needed to use advanced features for college, that weren’t available on Libreoffice or OnlyOffice. I don’t remember the reasons for the second time anymore. I almost had to do that another 3rd time because under the same teacher in college, we had to use VS. Not Code, but Visual Studio. It is not available for Linux, and I didn’t have my Windows partition at the time, so I ended up doing it in class on the college computers out of spite for Windows. These 2 scenarios really made me almost hate that teacher (her attitude and some people’s dislike of her were not doing her any favours in my eye) but once I got to know her properly, she didn’t match the perception of her that I was left with. Anyways, that’s the story of how I switched to Linux.
I’m on Fedora now (With Hyprland). Though distros (mostly) don’t matter. Peace,
They’re the same phones. And use the same Android distro/ROM.
Mostly Steam and Minecraft
You can literally run both on Linux and it’s just amazing.
I was just about to say: “Yeah, I don’t need a desktop” and then I read what you said. I can see myself going to a “dumbphone” aka a phone-only phone, but this is a bit too much for me tbh.
I’ve heard so many good things about Bazzite that when they release a COSMIC version (I’m a tiling WM user), I’m at least trying it out, and switching if I like it.