Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "DistroTube" channel.

  1. Emacs has built-in help to ease this sort of thing. Type CTRL/H, then for example A (“apropos”) to find commands matching a keyword, C to look up the meaning of a keystroke, etc. “?” gives you a list.
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  2. I know a friend of a friend who’s blind. He doesn’t try to use GUI apps on his Linux systems at all; he does everything through the command line.
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  3. Do you read the fine print in EULAs? Then you might rethink your use of the term “insane” ...
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  4. 8:44 If you want a ready-made empty file to demonstrate your point, try /dev/null.
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  5. One command I have used a fair bit is mmv. That does its own recognition of shell-style wildcards, substituting them into the output pattern. E.g. mmv -v '*.TXT' '#1.txt' renames files ending with .TXT to corresponding .txt, telling you what it’s renaming as it goes. It also provides the “-n” option, where it shows you what it would do without doing it.
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  6. The only example I could think of where Pöttering and mates blamed other people’s mistakes was to do with the fstab issue, where some distros would allow booting to continue with missing volumes. There are “noauto” and “nofail” options that you are supposed to use to make these volumes optional, which they were not using. So along comes systemd and enforces the requirement for these long-documented options, and suddenly incorrect configurations that were successfully booting before would now hang. And so systemd got the blame.
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  7. Never do this: 10 PRINT "BOLLOCKS" 20 GOTO 10 Oh wait, wrong platform ...
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  8. It’s actually quite a pain to get a usable desktop out of FreeBSD. From https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/not-actually-linux-distro-review-freebsd-12-1-release/ : With all of that said, let's get back to the hilarious masochism involved in installing a FreeBSD desktop. And it goes downhill from there...
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  9. Emacs well smart! Score: 99.
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  10. 4:15 “...as far as I know, all the normal distributions set things up with swap partitions, not files, because honestly, swapfiles tend to be slower and have various other complexity issues.” -- Linus Torvalds https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/psa-linux-folks-stay-away-from-the-5-12-rc1-kernel/
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  11. 12:54 lolcat: https://github.com/busyloop/lolcat
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  12. 8:07 Just checked the man page, and “+” means “greater than”, not “at least”. Similarly “-” means “less than”, not “at most”. Also k is kibibytes, not kilobytes, and M is mebibytes, not megabytes. And the sizes are rounded to the specified unit. Thus, “-10M” will only match files up to 9 × 1048576 = 9437184 bytes in size, not 10 × 1048576 - 1 = 10485759 bytes as you might have been expecting.
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  13. “Comments are disabled for this video” ... tells you everything you need to know about the content.
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  14.  @mitchelvalentino1569  Gee, I wonder why ...
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  15. Python+Jupyter+NumPy+SciPy+Matplotlib gives you a few more possibilities.
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  16. They went after Google for using open-source Java.
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  17. 7:10 If you want to use regexes to match file names, you can do so with the “find” command. That’s a very useful command, by the way; worth doing an episode on, I think.
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  18. But the only things packaged up in these snaps is major apps already available in distros anyway.
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  19. Or maybe it should be “Bilge E Gates”.
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  20.  @killaken2000  fontfonfig is moving away from that, though.
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  21. Interesting to hear about supposedly “bloated” GNU utilities. Somebody tried to criticize the “true” and “false” commands, which are built from a common source file which mostly consists of a large amount of copyright header and other comments, and very little actual code. They compared this with the BSD version of “true”, for example, which was just an empty shell script (that exited with a success status). Except, the GNU utilities compiled to very small code and ran very quickly, while the BSD version had to launch an entire new shell process, with all the overhead that that entailed.
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  22. The find executable on my 64-bit system is just about 300K in size. What do you not consider “bloated”?
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  23.    So what features would you remove from find, and where else can you find them?
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  24. 13:56 So you needed two separate command runs, one to put quotes at the starts of the lines, the other to put them at the ends, rather than being able to put them into a single keystroke macro. #TheEmacsWay
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  25. That McIlroy quote was only ever a half-truth. Look at any Linux system, and you will see big pieces without which the small ones would never work: the kernel, the X server, bash, even glibc, just to name a few.
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  26. 0:40 On my main machine, running Debian Unstable: ldo@theon:~> dpkg-query -l | grep -c ^ii 6846 Yup, that’s 6846 packages currently installed.
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  27. I worry that several of those “find” examples include complex piping and substitution that will look like black magic to those who are not au fait with shell syntax. Combine that with cavalier use of dangerous commands like “rm”, and I sense an accident or two just waiting to happen. Also, no love for GNU info? ;)
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  28. It is Linux that is assimilating Microsoft. It is Windows that is becoming more like Linux, not the other way round.
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  29. What “strings” do you think they are able to pull?
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  30. Microsoft already tried “extinguish” -- remember their “get the facts” campaign? “Linux is a cancer”? It failed miserably. All they have left is to try to turn Windows into Linux. People may not be installing “Linux”, but it will be Linux -- it’ll just be named “Windows”.
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  31. If software freedom is not an aspect of social justice, what is it?
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  32. So where is there a non-Linux, non-sucky UI? Looking at the complaints every time Microsoft and Apple do something new, it seems like having a platform with a choice of UI is preferable to one where the UI is welded in.
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  33. “UNIX” is officially a trademark, which none of the BSDs and Linuxes are licensed to use.
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  34. Putting “.” at the end doesn’t protect against, say, accidentally invoking a malicious command whose name is a common typo of a real command. That’s why it was considered too dangerous to have it in the $PATH at all.
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  35. “Chance” ... heh-heh. Maybe it’s not a machine you control, so you don’t know who else has been given access. Or you are just one of the administrators of an installation for a large company. Maybe a user account has been compromised. Maybe it’s your job to find out! There is a certain charming naïveté among those who only have experience with Microsoft Windows ...
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  36. All the companies that used to use Windows for serious work are moving to the cloud (largely at Microsoft’s bidding). And the cloud is dominated by Linux.
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  37. It’s not something that ordinary users will notice. It makes a difference to sysadmins and developers of more complex subsystems. sysvinit is basically an old collection of hacks from the early days of Unix. Most people agree that it is past its use-by date. Where they disagree is what to replace it with. systemd is simply the most sophisticated of the replacements.
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  38. Hah ... I thought I could find one you missed: sending a signal, e.g. with the kill(1) command, to PID 1 (the “init” process). The systemd version of init(1) installs a bunch of signal handlers for SIGRTMIN+«n» that you can use to trigger reboot, poweroff and other useful functions.
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  39. Let me offer some of my own utilities: Creating a full font chart of any font, showing the Unicode coverage and any unmapped glyphs: https://github.com/ldo/python_freetype_examples/blob/master/font_chart . For really large fonts, trying outputting the chart as multipage PDF or PostScript files rather than PNG. Generating samples of any number of fonts using the traditional “lorem ipsum” text: https://github.com/ldo/qahirah_examples/blob/master/bulk_font_sample . You can also pass it .zip files (e.g. downloaded from the usual font sites), and it will generate samples of any included font files. Try going through hundreds or thousands of fonts with a GUI, and you will soon appreciate the value of command-line utilities... Collecting information on OpenType font features into an SQLite database, that you can query to see which fonts you have that support which features: https://github.com/ldo/python_fontconfig_examples/blob/master/collect_opentype_fonts . Oh, and for a bonus, here https://www.deviantart.com/default-cube/art/Region-Flags-861126407 is a display of all the national/regional flag symbols in the Noto Color Emoji font.
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  40. The hostname can come from your SSH config, so you can map it to an IP address there if you want. It can also specify a nonstandard port, plus port forwarding etc.
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  41. I put up with vi for many years back in the days of Unix. Now that everything is Linux, I know that Emacs is going to be available.
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  42. “OS” and “kernel” are pretty much synonymous.
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  43. Because rsync is a much more robust tool that can resume interrupted copy operations, and can be used to verify the copy after it completes. Also it works very efficiently over a network.
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  44. The reality, at least in the US, is that the gun is far more likely to hurt you, or someone you care about, than it is to successfully protect you against somebody else. This is why, in civilized countries, we don’t buy that sort of argument.
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  45. Your country, the USA, is the one with more gun crime than us.
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  46. One of the handy things I have done in Emacs is define custom commands to jump to the next or previous line with the same indentation level as the present one. This is handy for Python programming, since as you may know, Python doesn’t have statement brackets that you could target with the standard jump-to-matching-opening/closing bracketing-symbol commands.
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  47. Another case of Microsoft trying to copy a Unix feature and getting it wrong. On Unix/Linux, every directory that is searched has to be explicitly included in in the $PATH list; leave out “.”, and it will not be searched. Microsoft thought it would be extra helpful and hardcoded “.” into the search algorithm, whether it appears in $PATH or not. And so we are left with yet another unfixable Windows security hole.
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  48. 2:13 Ubuntu may be the one with the biggest mindshare. But even that may be questionable, given the popularity of user-friendly alternatives like Linux Mint. Just because it’s got the biggest marketing budget behind it doesn’t mean it’s got the most users.
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  49.  @DistroTube  Because it can be freely redistributed at no extra cost to them.
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  50.  @DistroTube  So you disapprove of Distrowatch basing its popularity ratings on search figures. And all you can offer to counter that is Google’s search figures.
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