~/bin is the old-school location from before .local became a thing, and some of us have stuck to that ancient habit.

I’ve always just used gio trash (formerly gvfs-trash). KDE-based systems have something similar (but with syntax that’s perfectly logical but completely unsuitable, in my opinion).

The third party trash package works in places the GUI and the aforementioned GUI-related command line tools may not. I can’t tell whether this is a bug in trash or in the system tools, TBH.

For example, /tmp is one such directory where trash works but gio trash refuses.

Either way, the GUI Rubbish Bin won’t keep track if things are deleted from such places by trash.

If I’m about to run an rm with a slash in it, alarm bells go off in my head. I prefer to cd to the parent and then rm whatever without slashes in the name.

That didn’t save me the other day when I accidentally put a space before an asterisk, but thankfully that wasn’t in a place that was overly important.

Gotta retrain myself to look out for extra nothing now.

I dunno, ~/bin is a fairly common thing in my experience, not that it ends up containing many actual binaries. (The system started it, miss, honest. A quarter of the things in my system’s /bin are text based.)

~/etc is seriously weird though. Never seen that before. On Debians, most of the user copies of things in /etc usually end up under ~/.local/ or at ~/.filenamehere

In LMDE4, 5 and 6, I pretty much had to install the OEM NVIDIA driver because the open source Nouveau driver didn’t quite cut it, but for AMD, the stock driver that comes with LMDE7 has worked fine for my purposes so far.

I may change my tune if I try to run a more modern game*, but that will likely put me back in Frankendebian territory which caused me problems under LMDE6. (As you might surmise, I upgraded to new hardware and tried to do things as I’d always done them when LMDE6 was current.)

* Minecraft notwithstanding, because it both is and isn’t modern. That can get above 1000 FPS if I don’t limit it.

I reckon there’s a few of us about on here.

This is true. But then I’m not using the latest version while I still have an active session, and that can lead to weird behaviour or errors after the fact.

Case in point, I once received an Xorg update that I allowed to install, but didn’t restart the computer properly until much, much later.

By then I’d forgotten about the update, so when I restarted and started having graphics problems, I was mystified.

I’ve also forgotten how that all panned out, but in the same situation I’d roll back to a previous Timeshift snapshot and work the system forward again until I find the culprit or things are stable, so I assume that’s what I did back then.

Tangential advice: Many people use YouTube (and formerly Twitch until they nixed it) as a place to store videos. As in the only copy of a video is hosted there.

If your videos are precious to you (or you think they’re going to be), make arrangements for them to be at least stored elsewhere, if not hosted. That’s not going to be cheap what with hardware prices going through the roof, personally or third-party, but it is necessary because no host is both trustworthy and permanent.

Actually not even self-storage is as trustworthy and permanent as we’d like, but it’s still better than any alternative for data retention.

Also, donate to your chosen Fediverse host(s) if you can.

For me, it’s about reducing the amount of time the “update available” icon shows up in the system tray, because its very presence bothers me. Maybe there’s something cool and new. Maybe it fixes a severe security problem. If it’s for programs I’m not using right now, then the update can be applied right now. Otherwise it’s going to have to wait until I’m done. And bother me.

Yes, I could turn updates off and never see it, but that seems like a bad plan in the long run.

An old computer trick / prank / “fun” thing to do was piping random things to /dev/audio, or finding whatever program was available that could take any old file and not complain while translating it to audio by some means or another.

On my distro there are at least three of these programs installed by default: aplay, paplay and pw-play.

Some or all of these will complain if the file or stream they’re given isn’t a recognisable audio file, in which case, there’s a --raw or similar flag where it’ll just shrug and blast whatever through the sound system. If you’re creative, you can set different sample rates and hear it at different speeds.

VLC is just a really fancy way of doing the same thing.

For even more “fun”, try opening a file in Audacity / Tenacity, which will default to raw mode if it can’t tell what a file is, and you get to see the waveform and so on. Just take care not to modify and save over an important file with that.

Yeah, my university had those, but they also had an interface to it accessible from the more modern systems.

I also did a work experience placement with a company that had amber-screen terminals when I was still at school (and the year still started with a 1), so I’m no spring chicken either. They were very early in the process of supplanting them with PCs, which is not something they explicitly told me, but looking back, the evidence was all there.

The “fun” part with those specific terminals was that the admin password for the terminal hardware itself - because they had a rudimentary sort of BIOS on them - was a “fail at the first wrong character” system. With enough tries you could figure it out.

There wasn’t much you could do from there, at least not that I remember, but one of the terminals I used did end up beeping at a slightly different frequency to all the others.

A terminal in the computer sense was originally a screen and keyboard attached to a terminating node on a network. The network didn’t pass through, so it terminated there. This meant the literal, physical hardware. Think old school green- or amber-screen systems attached to a mainframe in the basement somewhere.

A console was a terminal that was serving some kind of purpose and showing some kind of interface for humans to interact with. Without the interface software, a terminal is not a console. Without the hardware, you wouldn’t have either.

It’s easy to see how these things became blurred.

And now it’s worse because we’ve extended the meanings a bit. The program in our fancy GUIs called “Terminal” and which we often just call “a terminal” is actually a terminal emulator.

And to a lesser extent, so is the thing you can access on many distros by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1. This sometimes gets called “the console” because it’s even more like those old terminal interfaces. Full screen. Text only. Largely monochrome. No GUI.

And deeper still, a terminal, console, or terminal emulator doesn’t have to mean “a shell” which is another thing entirely. Shells just happen to be one kind of interface that can run there, and is often the default option in a GUI terminal emulator.

From a console, the default program is generally some flavour of login prompt. And then the system automagically loads whatever is configured as that user’s shell once they log in.

I bought a cheap USB Bluetooth dongle decades ago and while the interface has changed in Mint over the years, I’ve always been able to use it to communicate with my ancient flip-phone to get pictures off it. In fact I was able to use it with some very rough and ready software to pull the texts off it at one point.

It probably also worked on Windows, because I’ve had both since before I switched.

The phone’s camera got water damaged a while back and now all the pictures from it - not that I take many - have a literal watermark on them, but the Bluetooth still works both ways.

Can’t vouch for whether it would work with more heavy duty hardware like a headset or speakers, but I guess it must be luck of the draw with a lot of these things.

I made sl on my computer a bit more literal. It takes the output of ls -l and reverses every line, including any wrapping within the column width, and pads it to the right of the terminal. One day I might get around to fixing it so that it forces, parses and correctly reverses the ANSI colour codes too.

In /usr/bin, I get lots of lines that “start” with spaces and “end” with things like toor toor 1 x-rx-rxwr-

Very much this. I took out a paragraph about it because what should have been a short comment was getting too long.

Much needed with the deprecation of ClamTK.

My only gripe is the choice of GNOME / GTK4 / Adwaita, because I really hate the direction GNOME have gone with all that. Anyway, I look forward to this being a standard package in Debians starting 2030 or so.

US English dialects mainly, though there may be pockets in other Anglophone places.

The basic functionality of sponge can be emulated with an AWK or Perl script, so most people who needed it in the past almost certainly rolled their own.

I get what they’re going for with the arrow coming from the process to STDIN, but I still feel like it should point the other way.

And shout-out to the sponge and tee command-line tools for those situations where the memory buffer won’t cut it.

“I like to rebuild my kit sports car every time I want to take it out for a drive. Anyone who does otherwise is a pleb.”