Linux doesn’t “make you interact with the terminal.” Many linux users interact with the terminal because it’s a better tool for many purposes-- not just niche ones as you suggest. Your argument leans heavily on popularity: what most people are doing, but that’s kind of the point of the original comment. People are taught on software and OSs owned and pushed by private companies. It creates such a dependency that it’s hard for people to imagine how one can succeed without them. Knowing the terminal can help one understand GUIs better, and makes it easier to imagine building new ones or modifying existing ones. It also allows a person to recognise when a GUI is unnecessary and a task can be completed faster by keeping your hands on the keyboard and working in the terminal.

Not the commenter you replied to, but I change my XDG directory names to be lowercase and start with different letters. For example, Desktop, becomes “drop” (as in pick it up and put it somewhere else) and Downloads is a subdirectory dl. A program that would otherwise save to “Downloads” now saves to “~/drop/dl”. When I setup my machines I run a script including the line xdg-user-dirs-update --set DESKTOP "drop" to update the XDG directory and I delete “Desketop”. So og commenter has the option of updating their userdirs to be nested in their username if they wanted to avoid symlinking. Here’s the relevant arch wiki page and xdg freedesktop page.

I’ve heard it referred to as “The worst negates the bad” fallacy.

Also moved to codeberg in the process. Bonus

Yeah, a lot of people outside of linux think you have to use the command line to work on linux, but really it’s just an awesome, additional tool that then takes over a lot of gui stuff. It definitely helps when it’s your daily driver and you spend less time reading man pages and more time writing from memory and running snippets and aliases. [edit: fix grammer]

It’s like neovim if you had amnesia and forgot all the time spent installing plugins and getting your configs just right.

Yes, but only if it’s the editor I use /s

Title got my hopes up for Bezos. Guess this is better than nothing, though the damage is already done.

Surely there’s an outlier. A record-breaking “oldest” dog older than-- Nope

My username comes from “pemptagonist,” the fifth most important character in a play (after protagonist, deuteragonist, etc). I thought it was funny, but maybe there’s something in that because I don’t trust my luck one bit.

Maybe, but if so, I bet it’s negligible. When it comes to discovery, there’s so many places I’d look for FOSS projects before going GH. Except maybe to check awesome-lists, but you don’t have to be on GH to be linked on one (and I’ve seen them popping up on Codeberg). GH’s design in general doesn’t seem to promote stumbling across new projects. Even if I’m wrong, one could always mirror on GH.

As for contributing, if someone is willing to go though the trouble to contribute, I’d hope they’d go through the trouble of signing up on a new platform. Maybe there’s a non-zero number of contributors who would not, and that’s an unacceptable for some projects. There’s also potential for more contributors if they trust a project is living FOSS principles and less at-risk of vender lock-in. The fosstodon thread shows people care about where a project lives. The arguments in favor of staying on GH seemed mostly inertia-based.

You’re right. I don’t mean to minimize the effort required. The effort required is a big part of the argument in favor of moving, or at least aspiring to move to a platform with more open and interoperable values. I can’t imagine MS will make that transition any easier as time goes on despite forgejo and others best efforts. I’ve no problem with an OSS projects using GH but I’d hope they’d take the risk more seriously in a discussion about it.

Edit: I also don’t think the effort is wasted or insurmountable. Regarding broken links, I’ve stumbled across many projects that have changed their GH repo to a mirror and link to their new platform. And RE logistical v philosophical reasons, I consider avoiding vender lock-in to be risk management and part of a project’s long-term logistics.

I agree, and I can forgive OSS projects still using it, but if they’re inviting a discussion about it I’d hope they’d be more sensitive that:

1. github is not static
2. being on a Microsoft platform carries a significant risk (embrace, extend, extinguish).
3. There are plenty of successful OSS hosted elsewhere and each one helps the whole system grow.

They seem to think github’s PR, CI, etc features are head-and-shoulders above the rest, and are hand-waving concerns around vender lock-in. They’re also saying it would be painful to move because of the aforementioned vendor features that have them locked in. Really seems to miss why many go FOSS in the first place.

I use and donate[d] to OrganicMaps. I think they’re great, but I paused donations around the CoMaps split and have been waiting for the dust to settle. Their responses in the fosstodon thread seem so tone def: They’re asking about github on a mastodon instance and responding that it’ll be a worse product if they move. Thinking it’s time I give CoMaps a shot. [edit: add 2nd link for context]

Barefoot, shirtless, through broken glass. Linux is one helluva drug.

“URG? Must be trans ideology…”

- the FBI, probably

I do this, but now I have 10k+ bookmarks, fairly organized, but the bookmark manager is trash. It is slow and getting slower. Also, searching history feels like '90’s web search: hopeless if you don’t remember exact keywords.

Agreed. Week 2, switching browser and search is a couple steps and seems like a good on-ramp to build momentum. Week 1, switching email and calendar is several steps per step and requires some consideration and even paying into a new service.

That’s a big question, but I’ll try my best to answer without getting too deep in the weeds.

I’ll probably sound like a fanatic, but I use my PKMS for notes, logs, journaling, project and task management, snippets, and documentation. They all have their own structure and flow. It’s a Gall’s Law kind of situation where I started simple and it worked, so it was extended and slowly evolved to reach it’s current complexity.

The beauty of PKMS over a notepad is the loose set of basic features (Wiki-links, tags, templates, etc) that be used in a personalized way to quickly capture, organize, and retrieve info that works best for you and no one else.

As a simple, but detailed example, in the context of learning linux, i might make a “linux” note and dump info there. I put everything in my own words unless I use md quotes (> quoted text) and I add useful links that I also bookmarked in my browser. When the “linux” page gets bloated, I migrate clusters of info into new notes, wiki-linked in the “linux” note. For example a “distros,” note which might have some high level comparisons. I favor making new notes over md headers so it’s easier to find and open notes by name (a “quick switcher” hotkey as it’s called in obsidian). When I settle on a distro I might make a note for it to contain wiki-links of default components EG “apt (package manager),” “gnome (desktop environment),” “x (windowing system)” and dump relevant notes there. If I try wayland, I’d make a “wayland” note but also a “windowing system” note that both wiki-links “x (window system)” and “wayland,” and is wiki-linked in each of those notes.

It could get very meticulous, and some folks setup is too much for me, and I’m sure mine is too much for others, but start simple, experiment, find what works, and add to it. In the beginning I had dedicated time just to developing my PKMS. The important thing is quickly recording and retrieving info.

Sometime i do have crazy scrawlings where i just need a notepad to dump info during a deep dive. That would be loosely zettelkasten style with a time-stamped name, sometime with a few extra works for context/search. Sections could be extracted into their own note later. The note itself could be linked to more organized, related notes.

As a more complex, but shorter example, to show how similar tools can be used in a different manner: I’ll make a note for a command line program, for example, cat. I have a CLI template with a Useful Flags (options) section. Kind of like a personalized tldr. I’ll also have specific notes for complex snippets (AKA one-liners. Real note example: “list-and-sum-all-audio-file-durations”) and if it uses cat, i’ll tag it #cmd/cat. The CLI template also has a Snippets section that uses dataview to automatically list, in this case, all notes with the #cmd/cat tag. I also have a “command line programs” note that uses a dataview query to list all notes that used the CLI template. Also, a Snippets note using dataview to list all pages created with the snippets template.

There are tools specifically for snippets and personalized tldr, and I may migrate to those eventually-- especially after I have my install script up and running with linked configs-- but the simple tools in PKMSs are really adaptable and make it easy to customize and integrate. Plus it’s all md files in a folder, so it’s easy to sync and access on multiple machines, including mobile.

I hope that’s not TMI. Starting linux can feel overwhelming and I don’t want to add to that. Quiet the contrary. I started my PKMS right before my last, permanent switch linux and I think it helped it stick, and 3+ years later I still use [my PKMS] all the time. As I said before, the simple tools that turn a notepad into a PKMS can add a personalized structure to the insane scrawings, making it quick and easy to navigate, find, edit, and add info. You just have to start simple and take your time. I hope that helps. Good luck with the switch!