palordrolap

I seem to remember having little to no trouble with the 5 to 6 transition on my old system, so I’m inclined to believe that.

I just need to get my head - and backups - in order for the day I decide go ahead with 6 to 7, just in case it doesn’t go smoothly.

The SI prefix thing stems from a joke anyway. Allow me to trot out the etymology again:

Once upon a time in the 1980s, there was created a program for reading ELectronic Mail called Elm.

Someone created a rival mail reader called Pine, which followed both the tree pun as well as the fact it was a recursive acronym: “Pine is not Elm”.

Pine had an editor called the Pine Composer or Pico for short. Pico is both a typographical term as well as an SI unit. They may have been going for both. Too perfect a pun to pass up, perhaps.

Due to licensing uncertainty, someone else created a from-scratch clone of Pico called Nano, cementing the continuation of puns, but in the SI direction.

And then apparently someone else has decided to get on the bandwagon with Micro.

At the risk of invoking the ire of two communities, why shouldn’t we think of Micro as Emacs but with Lua instead of Lisp?

Well that’s something to keep an eye on.

That said, I’m on LMDE6 which is firmly stuck on the 6.1 LTS kernel branch, so I might not see any problems until I upgrade to LMDE7 and get 6.12 (or go nuts and install something else entirely).

Whereas Windows is the clap.

Maybe it’s the (default) configuration on my distro, but info bash is the same information as man bash but with no bold text for headings and things. Ironically, I think I’d have to sit down with man info or info info for an hour or two before I could figure out how to get that formatting to show up in info.

FWIW, most if not all bash builtins turn up when searching in man bash for [four spaces]command-name[space], but as someone else points out, the help command also er, helps.

Most of the *fetches (and clones by other names) have an option for showing a different distro’s logo without having to go through any major changes. neofetch, moribund though it is, has --ascii_distro for that purpose (Weird choice of an underscore in an option. Most programs use more hyphens to separate words in long options).

This did get me to install screenfetch (superseded by plain old fetch but realised that too late for this comment), cpufetch (a year old, still in active development) and archey4 (likewise) after I did a bit of research on similar programs though, so maybe the sirens got me one way or the other.

Both you and @[email protected] missed the word “is” in the last sentence.

The hypothetical hater clearly installed the package.

“Just use Flatpak.”

“But that will use 2GB when a system package will use 34MB.”

“Duh, it’s not 2GB total. Flatpaks share dependencies.”

“I don’t have any other Flatpaks on my system.”

“…”

“…”

“OK, so it’ll be 2GB. Your next one will be smaller, though.”

“If I install one and if it shares any dependencies with the first one.”

“Pff. You’re just a hater.”

“Yeah, I hate that something that should be small is using 2GB of space.”

Last week was the first time I think I’ve ever got a random Internet tarball to configure, make and make install. Program even did what it was supposed to too. I was amazed.

UKGOV haven’t started on things like Wikipedia yet. They know kids use it for school and blinded by ideology though they are, even they can see there’d be an enormous backlash if they blocked it any time soon.

If that’s going to happen at all, I doubt it would be before the next election. That’s whether Labour get re-elected or the Tories make an unexpected comeback. You can tell how far Labour have fallen in the eyes of their party faithful when they’ve taken a Tory-drafted policy and made it their own.

Ironically, the up and coming third option fascist party, have said they’re going to repeal the Online Safety Act. They have other fish to fry if they get in, and they’ll want to keep their preferred demographic(s) happy while they do it.

I assume that eventually something like the OSA would come back to “protect the children”. They love the current US President.

None of this is hopeful. Take this as more of a rant.

Obligatory mention that Linux Mint’s dev team have forked some GNOME apps into their own XApps* project. Part of the reason is so that those apps retain the user’s window manager’s look and feel rather than GNOME’s enforced interface design. That might even be the main reason, but they also throw in their own improvements to the apps where they feel they’re necessary.

They’ve not yet forked all GNOME-looking applications in Mint, and I’m not even sure they intend to, but it’s a noble effort.

* Yes, it really is called that. Like I’ve said before, they probably could have chosen a better name, but they chose it before Wayland was a real threat and before Twitter got lobotomised.

Wikipedia seems to agree with you. Dropping the J was probably a good idea considering the people who would have to read it on a regular basis, and how J sounds in English.

So I went down the rabbit hole of the etymology of “Gentoo” and you might say that “too” and “two” are more closely related as words and meanings than either is to the “-too” of “Gentoo”.

The latter is a corruption / evolution of Latin -tivus of which the -tiv- part still exists in modern Latin-derived English words, like “adjective”, “active” and, perhaps importantly here, “genitive”.

Start with the Latin root: genitivus; push it through early (*gen(i)tiū) then colonial Portuguese: gentio; and then confuse the meaning with “ill-born” or “gentile” in colonial British-Indian English to get “Gentoo”. The word was used there to describe the non-Hindu inhabitants of India. Because of course it was.

So, apparently, Gentoo penguins are called that because they’re somehow reminiscent of 19th century Indian Muslims. Oof.

Pausing for a second to let that one pass…

And now…

English “too” evolved from “to” into its own niche (compare how “than” came from “then”). The second-ness / two-ness of “too” is an accident more than anything, even though the pronunciations have converged.

Do not ask about Ubunthree.

bind 'set completion-ignore-case on' might be your friend in Bash. It won’t help in scripts and GUIs though, so you’d still have to deal with that.

There are ways to write functions that pick the right option intelligently, but that’s asking for trouble. One day something will create a better match for your guess and then things will go wrong, e.g. your script intelligently turns downloads into Downloads but then something actually goes and creates downloads. Your script chooses the impostor because it’s a better match. Oops.

And then there’s always ln -s Downloads downloads. That might be enough to confuse that helpful thing that would otherwise create downloads. It’s already there, ready for use. And it works in custom scripts and things too. Until you move your script to a different user or machine, anyway.

I admit that of the things rm could be aliased to do, it is one of the safer ones. It’s still bad practice in my book.

This breaks the advice to never alias a standard command to do something radically different from its regular function.

Sure, go ahead and alias ls to have extra options like --color, but don’t alias rm to do nothing, or even rm -i (-i is interactive and prompts for each file).

Why? Because one day you’ll be logged into a different system that doesn’t have your cushioning alias and whoops, bye-bye files.

Now that you think about it, you thought that ls output looked weird, but that didn’t actually break anything.

As you suggest, yes, look into your OS’s trash option, but leave rm alone.

GNOME-derived systems can use gio trash fileglob (or gvfs-trash on older systems) to put things in the actual desktop trash receptacle.

KDE’s syntax sucks, but it’s kioclientX move fileglob trash:/ where X may or may not be present and is a version number of some kind.

You could set up a shell function or script that fixes that syntax and give it any name you like - as long as it doesn’t collide with a standard one. On that rare foreign system it won’t exist and everything will be fine.

This wouldn’t work.

Well, it kind of would if you did alias downloads="cd Downloads" but then you wouldn’t cd downloads you’d just type downloads on its own.

As other comments here already point out, you can do it with a symlink if you really want it. i.e. ln -s Downloads downloads, then you can cd downloads.

Nowhere near the same as making everything effectively case insensitive, but it works for the odd one that you always mistype.

There are ways to patch command completion and/or write a variant cd that does the job intelligently too, but those are harder work.

Day-late edit that no-one will see: The answer is bind "set completion-ignore-case on". It’s embarrassing how simple this is and how long it took me to find it. I may have been trying to emulate this feature in other ways for a long time.

Surely someone has used the built-in Lisp interpreter to emulate a feature exact nano.