

Canadian software engineer living in Europe.
I have a few interesting ones.
Download a video:
alias yt="yt-dlp -o '%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s' "
Execute the previous command as root:
alias please='sudo $(fc -n -l -1)'
Delete all the Docker things. I do this surprisingly often:
alias docker-nuke="docker system prune --all --volumes --force"
This is a handy one for detecting a hard link
function is-hardlink {
count=$(stat -c %h -- "${1}")
if [ "${count}" -gt 1 ]; then
echo "Yes. There are ${count} links to this file."
else
echo "Nope. This file is unique."
fi
}
I run this one pretty much every day. Regardless of the distro I’m using, it Updates All The Things:
function up {
if [[ $(command -v yay) ]]; then
yay -Syu --noconfirm
yay -Yc --noconfirm
elif [[ $(command -v apt) ]]; then
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt autoremove -y
fi
flatpak update --assumeyes
flatpak remove --unused --assumeyes
}
I maintain an aliases file in GitLab with all the stuff I have in my environment if anyone is curious.
TIL about using lsblk
instead of just reading through the output of journalctl
to find the disk and partitions. Thanks!
Really? All I’ve seen is a Flatpak that’s really just a wrapped web view. Is there now a native version of Teams for Linux?
This is what I get for posting at 1am. Thanks for the clarification. Yeah I just assumed it was the same situation as coreutils.
Granted, sudo isn’t in coreutils, but it’s sufficiently standard that I’d argue that the licence is very relevant to the wider Linux community.
Anyway, I answered this at length the last time this subject came up here, but the TL;DR is that private companies (like Canonical, who owns Ubuntu) love the MIT license because it allows them to take the code and make proprietary versions of it without having to release the source code. Consider the implications of a sudo
binary that’s Built For Ubuntu™ with closed-source proprietary hooks into Canonical’s cloud auth provider. It’s death by a thousand MIT-licensed cuts to our once Free operating system.
Is it GPL though? If this is a case of MIT-licensed stuff weaseling its way into Linux core utils, I’m not interested.
Before wading into the Wine waters, you might want to have a look at the Free and excellent Kdenlive. I’ve no experience with Filmora, but Kdenlive is surprisingly powerful.
The best example I could point to would be BSD. Unlike Linux, the BSD kernel was BSD (essentially MIT) -licensed. This allowed Apple to take their code and build OSX and a multi-billion dollar company on top of it, giving sweet fuck all back the community they stole from.
That’s the moral argument: it enables thievery.
The technical argument is one of practicality. MIT-licensed projects often lead to proprietary projects (see: Apple, Android, Chrome, etc) that use up all the oxygen in an ecosystem and allow one company to dominate where once we had the latitude to use better alternatives.
The GPL is the tool that got us here, and it makes these exploitative techbros furious that they can’t just steal our shit for their personal profit. We gain nothing by helping them, but stand to lose a great deal.
Ubuntu. They’ve managed the worst of both worlds: like Debian, everything is old (though admittedly not as old), but unlike Debian, everything is broken/buggy/flakey. It’s the old-and-busted distro that I’m routinely told is “the only Linux we support”.
I don’t think there’s an official “way”, but here’s mine (which I love):
On start-up I open all the apps I usually use, one per designated workspace:
Workspaces 6-9 are left empty, ready for whatever app I need in the moment, but only ever one app per workspace.
With this setup, I’ve mapped
Ctrl+Fx
to each workspace, soCtrl+F4
takes me to PyCharm where I write the code, andCtrl+F5
followed by another F5 takes me to Firefox and reloads the page.Ctrl+F3
is always the terminal, etc., so you quickly start building these shortcuts to mean Fwhatever is $APP_NAME.I almost never use the mouse, unless what I’m doing is necessarily mouse-driven: browsing or drawing charts etc. Everything else is keyboard-driven.