this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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I mean I feel stupid typing it now, but I've been using Windows since I was 5 years old, and Linux for about 30 days. It was not apparent to me that many of my folders were actually shortcuts to stuff in my user directory, and now that I know to look out for them the location of my applications make sooo much more sense.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago

There are some really old introductory unix texts of how the system is structured and why, 99% of this stuff is still true for most linux (except some weird experimental alternatives where people tried to create ms-unix ). The basic terminal commands should also be useful, and help you understand. For example open a terminal and see the command for copy (cp) or (mv) or mkdir rm rmdir and use -h for the help of the options of each (if -h doesn't work then --help does) and then extensive documentation is found by name of command after "man" for manual ex: man chmod

One of the most magical things that happens in unix is mount, where you create a directory (mount point /mnt), take a device like your usb stick volume named sdb1

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt

ls -lah /mnt

say you create /tmp/disks and in it a b c d e and mount 5 disks in a through e and it appears as one subdirectory /tmp/disks

Instead of looking at a file browser and something going cling-clong and appearing as a volume, what dumb people do

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Wait until you learn about hard links

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

Uh I think you meant bind mounts lol

[–] [email protected] 9 points 14 hours ago

Stupid autocorrect!

Err... I mean uhh... No, I mean bird mounts! Don't you like mounting birds in your filesystem?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 15 hours ago

They might have but I certainly don't

[–] [email protected] 10 points 20 hours ago

He said BIRD mounts and he meant it. It is up to us to rise to the level where we too can use bird mounts.

[–] Threeme2189 2 points 1 day ago

OK, what's that?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

came here for this

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Don't feel dumb! This is just normal learning!

Symlinks are possible in Windows (at least in NTFS filesystems) but to my knowledge they aren't used by anything official.

Windows's weird "psuedo folders" thing it does with "Documents" etc is something else entirely.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I think ntfs does some weird shit with translating names of files in different languages too, and maybe they are simlinks

Say desktop is translated to ntesctop in some language, the real file is still desktop but there is a link as ntesctop --> desktop so without changing the system it flips from one language to another. I am not sure, I haven't really spent much time on it, in recent years I did some installations at work but never got to play with it much.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 43 minutes ago

I don't think that does an actual rewite point. A lot of the localisation features were done using file explorer. You can even "localise" folders yourself using custom desktop.ini files. But those changes only showed in file explorer.

Now email! In exchange the standard folders such as inbox are localised, but don't have a fixed alias. So if doing administration you need to know the language of a mailbox to know the name of say the Calendar folder, so you can update permissions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago

I just assumed they were the same as "shortcuts" on Windows, coz to the end user they're not all that different - File that points you to a different file or directory when you open it

[–] ChickenAndRice 13 points 1 day ago

Adding on to Windows: There's no way (in the UI) to add symlinks. In Windows 10, symlinks must be created in an administrative command prompt. It is pretty damn clunky.

[–] ChickenAndRice 24 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That beginners guide says to avoid creating circular symlinks. What if, entirely hypothetically, I already have a circular symlink?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I created a symlink to the directory the symlink is in. If I try and simply 'delete' the symlink in a file browser it tells me that gigs of data will be deleted

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

You'll want to delete it from the CLI, then. Try the unlink command

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

"Overdoing it" doesn't exist when you understand what it can accomplish. Bedrock Linux for example is based on symlink abuse from what I understand

[–] ChickenAndRice 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I'll have to look into that distro later. Anything particularly noteworthy about it, besides the symlink abuse?

Edit: I did some rudimentary searching, apparently it's a meta distro that let's you mix and match stuff from multiple linux distros: https://bedrocklinux.org/

That's actually pretty wild. I might play around with this in the future

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

protip: put bind -s 'set mark-symlinked-directories on' in your ~/.bashrc and also bind -s 'set completion-ignore-case on' because why not :)