When it comes right down to it, I am just a casual Linux user. I don’t use it for my job. I do write some small applications, but I am not a big developer. My main purpose is to just use my computer to run a few applications to do basic tasks such as manage my finances, browse the internet, write some articles, etc. So, the actual Linux distribution doesn’t really matter. ...
Thoughts on Switching to Linux Lot’s of articles and videos on the web advise you to switch to Linux from Windows. Here are a few things that are often not clear about the advice. Why Are There So Many Linux Choices? Linux is not a one size fits all operating system. It fills many different quite specific needs. Here are just a few examples: Desktop / Laptop computing: This is what most articles encouraging switching are talking about, getting you to give Linux a try on your local computer. Servers: Linux runs web servers, database servers, file servers, and so on. This accounts for most Linux installations. They reliably run behind the scenes delivering web pages and data. Embedded systems: Many small devices are actually running Linux under the hood. Since the operating system can be pared down to essentials, it can be the perfect lightweight way to run routers, smart devices, and so on. In fact, when I turned on my blue ray player for the first time, it booted up into Linux. Gaming consoles such as the Steam Deck run Linux as their operating system. Specialty systems line scientific computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, security systems and much more utilize Linux. There are distributions that cater to people familiar with Windows or with Mac. If this is your first go, that could influence your decision. Don’t get overwhelmed by the huge number of distributions. Do your research and try out a few that sound interesting. Most are able to boot up from a USB stick. So, you can play around with them without actually installing them. ...
Doing some thinking about personal data and where it is stored, especially since starting my CLI productivity tools exploration. This is the kind of thing companies take very seriously and you should too. It’s important to keep control of your own data and to store it in such a way as to have it still available and viable many years in the future. I have lost data because software vendors change file formats and don’t maintain backward compatibility. I have lost data for unknown reasons when storing files in the cloud. I have not had any catastrophic hard drive failures, but that’s no reason not to have good backups. ...
Linux Mint has the very cool feature of being able to modify your keyboard layout. The specific feature I was wanting to implement was swapping the Caps Lock key with the ESC key. Since I use esc all the time, I’m thinking that is going to be very useful although it might take a little while to become accustomed to the new positions for the keys. Remapping your keyboard is a little bit buried, so here are the steps. ...
Linux Mint has the ability to add little applications to the desktop called “desklets”. The applications are things like a disk space monitor, a fancy clock, a weather app, show your Google calendar, a digital photo frame and so on. Pretty nifty. It’s a fun thing to play around with and see if there are any things you like. Quote of the Day Desklet I was playing around with the desklets the other day and saw one called “Quote of the day” desklet by JessW. Sounded cool, I downloaded and installed it. Added to my desktop and … nothing. So, I went to the Cinnamon Spices: Quote of the day desklet web page to see if there was an easy fix. ...
I upgraded the version of Nextcloud on my server this last week. The new version is: Nextcloud Hub 325.0.3) After upgrading the server, my Nextcloud desktop client hung and just sat there in the system tray with a syncing message. Frustration! First thought was, OK, I’ve upgraded Nextcloud on the server, maybe I need to update the desktop client (running on Linux Mint 21.1). In the effort to get it to work, I uninstalled the client that was available in the Software Manager and downloaded the Nextcloud-3.6.6-x86_64.AppImage file from the Nextcloud website. ...
Had a pleasant surprise this morning. Linux Mint 21.1 (Vera) showed up as available for install. I went through the upgrade process seamlessly and really like the out of the box improvements. What’s New in Mint I really like how Mint has been coming along in the last several releases. It is just a solid desktop experience that lets me get things done. Guess I’ll be exploring all the improvements today.
I have an old laptop and also a virtual machine that are running linux flavors. In addition to playing around with the OS, it’s good to set them up so that they can do some basic stuff. The following tools serve as a basic setup to get me going. Here are a few linux tweaks when setting up a new system to make it feel like home. Font Got to have a good programming font that gets used in text editors and terminals. For this, my go-to font is JetBrainsMono Nerd Font. I configure my text editor and terminal to use this font. ...
The inspiration for this article comes from an email I received from Luke Harrison. He had created an SQL Cheat Sheet that he was rightfully proud of and was wanting to share and promote it. It just so happens that I love cheat sheets. I find them useful for giving a high-level view of an application. And having a cheat sheet handy is great for picking up new shortcuts and becoming more proficient with my favorite tools and applications. ...
I learned DOS first. Back in the day, I knew it pretty well. Occasionally, the need still arises to throw together a batch file to automate some little thing. The mainstay of DOS commands is DIR - the directory command - which lists out files and folders. Now, I’m using Linux Mint. In a terminal window ls is the equivalent of the DOS DIR command. I sometimes get aggravated that I don’t remember the basic command line switches needed for ls. So, here’s goes an article to help me learn ls a little better written from the perspective of someone who knew DOS first. ...