palordrolap

Check system settings for a keyboard entry / applet. I’m on LMDE Cinnamon and have no idea what the equivalents are on Kubuntu, but over here it’s definitely possible to change/remove the default keyboard assignments and set up custom ones instead.

For example, I have Shift+WWW (the multimedia key that starts a web browser by default) set to start the browser with an alternate profile. I could just as easily set plain old WWW to, say, start a terminal instead, or run that custom command.

The hardest part is knowing what custom command to run to get the desired effect.

Deleting snapshots shouldn’t destroy the system as far as I know. It might confuse Timeshift later down the line if that deletion was done outside of Timeshift’s interface, but they’re supposed to be entirely separate.

Timeshift creates a directory called “timeshift” in the root of whatever partition it’s configured to use. It should create at least one copy of every file, but it does then create hard links to save space between snapshots where files would otherwise be identical. Those links shouldn’t be to (or from) live system files though.

Now, if someone was to bypass Timeshift and manually move files of the timeshift directory back into a live system or manually link live system locations into a snapshot, that might lead to the problem you experienced. Not sure if that’s what’s happened.

It’s worth noting that I have Timeshift set to create its directory in a separate partition on a different physical drive, so if it was broken in some way, it would struggle to mess up. Hard links across partition boundaries are a lot harder to achieve if not impossible, so it would stop someone (or something) trying to bypass Timeshift, or at the very least give them pause for thought. And it would provide some protection against Timeshift doing something silly as well.

Another way I suspect this could happen is if Timeshift’s own copy as well as all hard links to it in all snapshots were manually deleted before a restore was attempted. Can’t restore from what doesn’t exist, and so the system would remain broken.

Should have gone for something like “Dennis Richie Advanced Computing University Lab Annex.”

Parses weird, but look at that acronym.

Haven’t seen this in the other comments: Coolness factor. If you’re a successfully popular teacher, i.e. “cool”, then your students will likely want to participate in whatever it is you suggest.

However, if they don’t see you as cool, you might have difficulty, and might even put them off the platform. This is not something that can be fixed easily, and trying to be cool is about as uncool as you can get.

(Making it mandatory will work, of course, but how you go about that could determine whether they choose to stay on the platform once you’re done. This was kind of covered by OP talking about Matrix in another comment here.)

Timeshift has got me out of an uncomfortable situation at least twice at this point, and since I’m running a mostly LMDE frankenDebian right now (drivers tho, amirite?), it’s nice to know that this potentially delicate working state is backed up in some way should it decide to shatter into a thousand tiny pieces.

Do you mean the Aether mod that recently got updated or something else?

Installing mods to Java Minecraft can be a chore regardless of the ecosystem. And usually it’s a third party mod loader that adds a new version to the default launcher config, not something provided by Mojang.

That said, Aether is a Forge mod and I haven’t used Forge in a few years at this point, so maybe things are different now, or I’m only remembering the way that the rival Fabric ecosystem works instead.

It was (and may still be) possible to make an older version of Pocket Edition run on Linux through unofficial shenanigans, but the official launcher says “Not playable on this device”.

minecraft.net also explicitly says: “Minecraft: Java Edition runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux; Minecraft: Bedrock Edition runs on Windows. Deluxe Collection content only runs on Minecraft: Bedrock Edition on Windows.”

Other unofficial shenanigans that may or may not work include but are not limited to: Running under a VM, running under something like Wine.

So, yes, technically it runs, but Microsoft are pretty clear that it’s not supposed to.

I’d suggest “Spicious Linux”, but it’s a 5/10 pun at best, and too similar to “specious” which means “sounds legit but isn’t”; not necessarily a good look.

“Opus” borrows letters and sounds good, but speaking of sounds, it’s the name of a sound codec, so maybe not a good choice.

“Abstruse” has similar problems to “specious”…

“ChameleOS” is the name of a dragon in a game.

I figure if I run through all the bad ideas here, only good ones will be left… but that might well be specious.

I think that can be boiled down to only cd; echo .*/

Maybe throw a ;cd - on the end if the change of directory is unwanted.

Coming back to this with thoughts. What you’re describing sounds a lot like a menu tree.

“Press 1 to do this, 2 to do that, 3 to go to submenu A, 4 for B,” etc. 1

“You have pressed 1. Do you want to turn on option ABC? [Y / n]” Y

“Do you want option QWERTY47? [Y/n]” N

“Are you sure you want to run notthebees --abc --no-qwerty47? [Y/n]” N

“Aborted.”

It sounds like a standards problem waiting to happen because no two menus will be alike, but hey, things like this can and do exist, and setting one up isn’t that hard, only time consuming.

Win7. I use LMDE+Cinnamon now and I have it looking suspiciously like how I had Win7. Old habits and all that.

Though you didn’t ask, Win2K was the probably the best Windows, IMO. Then came the bloat and the ugly UIs. (I’ve kind of got used to bloat these days. Storage is cheaper than it was, and LMDE isn’t exactly the slimmest distro.)

Maybe I would have liked Win10. Similar to how it was with the old Star Trek movies, it seems like every other version of Windows is terrible, and if that remains true, maybe 12 will be better than 11. Probably not going back to find out though.

xbiff was usually watching a file - your mailbox - on the mainframe, which would have been updated by the mail server daemon. Heck, it could be set to watch any file to see when it updated.

Basically, you could still use xbiff if you emulate that setup using your own local mail server as a proxy. (And you’re using a GUI that supports it. No idea if Wayland does.)

Worth mentioning that apt generally asks if you want to continue after listing what it’s going to remove so this ought to be safe to do, because you can always say no.

Caveat: It’s vaguely possible ultra-rare configurations might blast through without asking. If in any doubt, backup or take a Timeshift snapshot, or whatever your system does, before adding or removing software. Overkill? Maybe. It’d only really need to be the first time before you know what your local apt does.

anaemic* (Sorry, that bothered me for some reason.)

As for capture groups, you’ll have to find another way. Perversely, perhaps BusyBox continues to be included on certain systems because they know that the extra space is required for the code that works around BB’s shortcomings. That sounds asinine until you realise that “solving the problem properly” most likely leads to that one XKCD comic about the proliferation of competing standards.

At worst, multiple sizes of BusyBox itself.

You joke, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s at the back of some people’s minds.

There’s also the whole association with Red Hat, and since Red Hat got bought, went corporate and murdered CentOS, Fedora is tainted somehow.

These things aren’t necessarily good reasons to not recommend Fedora, (for those see other comments) but they’re reasons nonetheless.

An analogy:

My Swiss Army knife has a screwdriver on it. It’s nice to have, and I even used it recently.

It juts out perpendicular to the middle of the knife’s body though, making a literal " |- " shape, so for many applications it’s too awkward for the job.

I also have a more traditional screwdriver. As and when I come to build a new PC, I don’t think I’ll be using the one on the knife.

xterm is a terminal emulator, not a shell. Anything that produces a terminal-compatible text stream can be started as the first program.

e.g. xterm -e nano, assuming you have the nano editor installed, has no instance of a traditional shell (e.g. bash, zsh) running between the xterm and the editor, but the editor still works.

You could argue that makes the editor itself a shell of sorts, because it’s interactive and you can do things with it, but it’s still not the xterm that inherits that title.

I always figured that Ksh / POSIX / Bash shell arrays are kept as they are because anyone with a serious need of arrays ought to be using something better than a scripting language.

You might have some files hard-linked across directories, or worse (but less likely), there’s a directory hard-link (not supposed to happen) somewhere.

For the uninitiated, a hard-link is when more than one filename points at the same file data on the disk. This is not the same as a symbolic link. Symbolic links are special files that contain a file or directory name and the OS knows to follow them to that destination. (And they can be used to link to directories safely.)

Some programs are not hard-link aware and will count a hard-linked file as many times as it sees it through its different names. Likewise they will count the entire contents of a hard-linked directory through each name.

Programs tend not to be fooled by symlinks because it’s more obvious what’s going on.

Try running a duplicate file finder. Don’t use it to delete anything, but it might help you determine which directories the files are in and maybe why it’s like that.

Also back up everything important and arrange for a fsck on next boot. If it’s a hard-linked directory fsck might be able to fix it safely, but it might choose the wrong name to be the main one and remove the other, breaking something. Or remove both. Or it’s something else entirely, which by “fixing” will stabilise the system but might cause some other form data loss.

That’s all unlikely, but it’s nice to have that backup just in case.

This whole saga reminds me of the time I somehow ended up with Windows 9x’s “Recent Documents” feature pointed at the root of a drive, so when I pushed the button to “clear recent documents” it dutifully started deleting all the files on the drive.

At the time, the “Recent Documents” feature created shortcuts to, as you might guess, recently opened documents and put them in a user folder specifically for that purpose. Clearing them was only supposed to remove the shortcuts.

Or perhaps more relevantly, that one Steam bash script that could delete things it shouldn’t under some very rare circumstances.