Maoo [none/use name]

ext4 for system partitions and zfs for anything dedicated to personal data storage.

I recommend installing a Linux distribution that requires a hands-in approach like Gentoo or Linux from scratch. If you don’t have an extra computer you can do it on a virtual machine on the computer you do have.

The process will require you to use the various incantations and rituals of using the terminal. As you do so, learn what they do by googling them or using their man page.

For more practice, write a shell script or otherwise choose a task you want to do using the terminal like browsing through your files or searching for a file whose name matches a pattern and so on.

Wrong

The girl reading this comment

Gentoo is good for learning. It’s not really a privacy or security-focused distribution per se. It promotes you being comfortable with the command line, configuration files, networking, unix-ie things, and of course compiling programs. If you’re tired of the compiling there is basically no downside to switching to Arch as a “one step up” distribution.

Thank you for your service in banning the removed out of this pedo

User experience with all software is pretty removed and Linux is no exception

Different distros are better for different things. For example, some require give you more control over the OS but are more difficult to learn, or require learning more things at once. Others will be easier to try out but may make choices on your behalf that you don’t like - or distribute software in ways you don’t like.

Linux from Scratch will have a fairly steep learning curve. Nothing wrong with that, but you’d want to prepare yourself to be cool with things breaking or not making sense for a while.

Puppy Linux is minimalist, which is something people usually only want after they’ve tried out something else that’s not minimalist. I would recommend trying out something more general-purpose and try out different desktop environments and applications first.

Surely this other monopoly will save us

Yep! Borgmatic is the most useful cli option in my opinion. You can create a single yaml config and call borgmatic from a cron job.

If it’s a desktop/laptop, I recommend Pika, which is just a nice frontend and scheduler for borg backup. If it’s a server, I recommend borgmatic.

The nice thing about borg is that it does all of the things people usually want from backups but that are kind of frustrating to do with scripts:

• Encryption so they’re private and can be uploaded to cloud storage safely.
• Compression so they aren’t too big.
• Uses snapshots with deduplication so that they don’t take up too much space.
• Snapshots happen on a schedule.
• There’s a retention policy of how many snapshots to keep and at what interval (1 snapshot per year for the last 4 years and 1 per month for 12 months, for example).
• You can browse through old snapshots to retrieve files.
• You can restore from a snapshot.
• Ignore certain files, directories, and patterns.

It is surprisingly difficult to get all of that in one solution, but borg things will do all of the above.

It’s the audio framework behind most modern Linux systems nowadays. It performs much better than previous ones and provides greater consistency and expectations for end users. Basically… if you’ve ever been frustrated by audio configuration on Linux, this project is probably working on fixing it.

Ubuntu is highly commercialized and trademarked so vendors that offer it make deals with canonical. Dell, Lenovo, and System76 have all offered Ubuntu in the past.

One thing that vendors do sometimes is they offer an official image that includes drivers for that particular laptop and they never make it into mainline. I think that’s part of the draw for offering your own weird OS - you basically get to control hardware support and your own release cycle.

Control has other benefits as well. You get to do some branding, which bean counters love, so you get to deliver “the Lenovo experience” or whatever. I think System76 actually cared about this for good reasons and that’s why Pop!OS (terrible name) is actually pretty good. Ubuntu kept screwing up their offering so they just did their own thing instead.

Combine grep -l to find files with the shebang and cp to copy them to your docs folder. You can one-liner pipe or save the grep results to file and iterate. If the directories are nested and some of these files have the same name, they’ll conflict if you don’t include most of the original path in the cp target.

If you need them to be executable I think I’d use find first.

Use tasksel to install, then choose a different desktop on the login screen

You basically have to research the exact model you’re interested in and how it works on specific distributions. Also a good idea to check hardware compatibility in the kernel you’d be using.

Middle click gang has beef

No no it’s this:

1. Decide you’ve gotta use tar.

2. man tar

3. Guess-and-check the flags until it seems to work.

4. Immediately forget the flags.

Using a USB device might work well for this! You can do basically exactly what you want but your whole OS is on a USB drive. You’ll get native performance for everything except disk read/write. If you use a fast device with a fast USB interface you might not even notice.

There are a few that are nice.

QEMU-based options work well. Boxes for GNOME uses this.

My backup option is always virtualbox with guest additions installed.