A universal update / maintenance script would be great! Things like cleaning unused dependencies and old logs, updating the system, and snaps / flatpak if available. A Steam installer for Debian / Ubuntu / Arch (without the AUR perhaps) could be good for new users, and maybe even a “universal” package manager too.
@@francesay8478 Yes, it is. I was suggesting not using the AUR to install Steam. It usually leads to problems down the road. Flatpak works, and a manual install works as well.
Linux Toolbox? Sounds similar to Linux-Assistant. A software for beginners to administrate any Linux distro. Does this mean, you try to fork Linux-Assistant from Linux Guides DE and add a Terminal interface? 🤔 Cool 😎
A few things I can think of: 1. Improved font rendering configuration. Also probably installation of Microsoft fonts. 2. Setting up and configuring Wine/Proton. 3. Allow setting up swap file, to enable hibernation
@@brainstormsurge154 Because boomers actually worked to the point society is in their debt unlike worthless people (not accusing anyone). We can discuss the pension system if you want us to get more political or ideological.
@@Hardcore_Remixer Was about to state the same - And that there are also individual boomers who “fell off” early, or _failed_ as their peers see them. More to this video, “failing” is a feature, not a bug. Doing so is brave, playful, entertaining, creative and most of all - gives insights, experience and with time, wisdom. That’s what we will need (and share) in a future of very bleak pensions…😊
Better to grow old than the opposite… good start on this project, Chris! I’m sort of looking to do the same with FreeBSD. You can also use Python if Bash fails you. It’ll be much easier for you than Rust, and every distribution is shipping Py3 unless you’re just looking to learn Rust 👍🏻
I have tried to switch to linux from windows a million times and always fail because I'm not terminal literate. However Chris' videos have helped me a lot each time I tried . Ultimately, I would always encounter something I couldn't figure out and go back to my windows overlords. That almost happened with this utility "bash curl command not found" but for some reason I said lets try "sudo apt install curl". Now with this tool box things are much more enjoyable. I think ill stay and try to learn. Thanks Chris for your work.
One thing that gets old in arch...you need to get something working, so you go to the arch wiki. it tells you exactly what commands you need to gather the information for your setup. then it tells you what you need to install, with what flags, using whatever env variables, kernel modules and all this other mess... why the hell isn't all this stuff just included in the package installation? if I always have to add environment variables and kernel modules when installing the nvidia drivers, WHY DOESN'T INSTALLING THE NVIDIA-DKMS PACKAGE AUTOMATICALLY MAKE THESE CHANGES?
DEVICE DRIVERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WEBCAM. MONITORS. PRINTERS. FINGERPRINT READERS. BASIC STUFFFF!!!!! just point the direction for noobs like me to fix and make my hardware work.
Interesting - apart from fingerprint readers (haven't used one) I haven't needed a manual driver for years. And that's with some newer tech... In Windows, though, I was needing to reinstall my Rode microphone drivers every couple of weeks. I'd be curious to know what specific monitors and printers you needed (and what distro you use). Pop!_OS and EndeavourOS have been some of the friendliest distros out of the box for me, followed slightly by Mint (had an issue with an old kernel with Mint, but even that was resolvable via GUI).
I have been hoping you would start helping in Linux. I am getting better at it, and I wish to dump Microsoft as soon as possible! Truly amazing, the things you have done to make Windows bearable. Can't wait to see the things you do!
What's the name Linutil 🙂? May be I can help this time. Windows is not my home, but Linux is since decades. If you open a repo as for Winutil, for sure a lot of people will join,
13:35 Instead of using the distro to determine the package manager, wouldn't it make more sense to just test for the existence of the package manager? Smells kind of like looking at browser user agents instead of doing feature detection. But I don't really do much scripting, might be the wrong way to approach it.
One thing that would be pretty sick is some sort of Samba/NFS mounting shortcut script Client feels more necessary but certainly Server side would be nice too.
My basic problem is the inconsistency in the GUI or (GUI's because you need from experience QT and GTK based applications - so need to remember the difference between the two and which application is using which). A GUI doesn't mean you should be restricted, (rather than what modern times dictates), just that it saves a certain amount of time to do the same result as typing it. It just seems the course of modern interface design is presentation rather than functionality.
The worst thing I absolutely hate about Linux is that $HOME becomes the dumping ground for all dot craps! If you can make them move to a folder or folders that the user specifies WITHOUT having to resort to symlinks (cause let's face it, you're just swapping dot junk with symlink junk if you use symlinks), especially for those apps that just do not respect XDG spec, that would be gold!
This could be as simple as setting the HOME to a different path for such applications. Should be possible to set that in their desktop files and maybe run a script to update those as a post-install hook? For terminal apps, this might be more difficult. But manually running `export HOME=/home/user/app-home` seems to work. Though not sure, what possible side effects this might have for usability... Alternatively, using distrobox with the --home flag pretty much solved this for me.
@@ehtrude yea I suspect as much... ironic isn't it that Linux is about letting the user freedom and yet we have tons of apps that do not respect choice
It is undoubtedly a nuisance, though I have managed to get my $HOME folder completely cleaned up with the exception of the .ssh and .npm directories. The former is unlikely to ever change, last I checked it was decided ~/.ssh will always remain due to "historic reasons", whatever that means. The .npm might be able to be moved, I haven't looked into it, nor even write any JS code, it is simply a dependency of a couple neovim plugins.
i ran linux exclusively for 6 months. in the end, i decided my problem with linux (apart from the poor hardware support) was the root OS itself. i just don't like it. the best linux distro i found is windows running WSL... i get the best of both worlds. a super stable and awesome underlying OS, and linux in a box, in a fully controlled environment.
Compatibility isn't the correct term here. Would it be fair to Windows if Linux/Apple users complain that their native apps don't run on Windows? You can make an argument that these companies don't support Linux, but I am unsure what anyone other than these companies is supposed to do about that. Either way, QEMU passthrough exists if one actually needed to run something native without dual-booting or emulating hardware.
Everyone of my linux installs on 3 different computers fill of my logs with ACPI errors. No matter the distro I get them. One time the log got so big that i filled 2 TB. If you could get a tool for that It would be a god send.
You are a hero, I've been using the winutil since the command lines times, and I love'd it. switched some of my pc's to linux (zorin os) and i'm supper happy to see a project for linux from you. good luck
Python would be cool because it is preinstalled in all major linux distros and it is perfect for scripting and rapid development compared to something like C which is not really safe or Rust which is harder. But BASH is the primary choice i mean im just sayin
What about LUA to code it in simple, lightweight and more popular. I really look forward to using the toolbox and hopefully use it as a tool to learn Linux, Thanks for your efforts in making life easier for everybody Chirs.
Setup/enable TMUX? Perhaps with scripting in .bashrc? Not sure what the typical set up is but I have mine set so that if there are no TMUX sessions it starts a new one. If there are existing sessions it presents a menu. I find myself often copying .bashrc's and .dircolors when setting up a new machine or new user.
I have done this, and in no big way, I have created a lot of tools in windows, that resembles tools in Linux. I even created one I called Tina, which means This is not awk
If you're thinking of doing a Grub theming tool then why not a full settings tool? Things like for resolution fixing, although that's probably more with virtual machines that I've personally had a problem with. And what about other boot theming if possible such as systemd-boot and the newer Limine?
I believe that is a kernel thing. I suffer the same issue on my desktop, and essentially the workaround I have is just don't let the PC sleep/suspend. But I know on a laptop that doesn't work. You will have to either wait for a fix, or report it. That is a fairly recent CPU architecture.
Personally, i don't reinstall often, but if i did, i would probably set up a zsh shell and install powerlevel10k on a fresh install. Then, i get distrobox/podman running, and then install Klassy, my theme of choice on KDE. I use Fedora and i like its default, but enabling RPM fusion repos along with installing NVIDIA drivers and importing the secure boot key is also a pain. Also, speaking a student. I would really appreciate if you had a verbose option in the script where it explains what it is doing/installing. That way i can look into the commands and learn what you cooked up.
An MMC-lite for general linux admin. Users and groups, paths, network locations. Keys. Certificates. Systemd timers and services. But at that point it's probably more of a GTK app than what could be done in BASH.
I'd rather people taking ublue's yafti and ujust, adjust it for their distribution as necessary. yafti is powerful yet simple - I'm not even a programmer but I can automate my setups with it. And ujust is simple but very extensible scripting tool - they've even used it for setting up nix, home-manager, and nixgl with it.
I don't think you can do anything about that but I have a bluetooth device that tends to be difficult, I got it working once but never again :/ Would be amazing to have something that could tweak the system to get it to work without checking a million guides
I've done some python scripting for Windows so that could be considered. Mainly because the powershell scripting just feels really bad to use and that way I can use the scripts on Linux as well. As for a script that would be nice I want a script that will check if Dash is installed and then make it the default for executing scripts while having whatever shell you want to use in a terminal, such as Zsh, still be that. Mainly inspired by Luke Smith talking about Dash making script execution better. And if this toolkit is built on a lot of bash scripting then it probably would be a good idea to use it. I just haven't taken the time to do that and from what I remember Luke Smith talking about he's already done that since he talks about using Zsh for his terminal and Dash for script execution. So I'm sure he has a video on setting it up, or hope he does, and once you know how to do it the manual way you can try to script it. P.S. Regarding using Rust or any other language for the toolkit I think the main list of languages I've seen when it comes to CLI tools are: Rust, Go, C, Python and Lua for configuration, embedding scripts and extending the program in general. There's of course the newer Zig language too.
I kinda gave in (20 y ago?)… Use MacOS for work, windows for games, Linux for… the other 38 of 40 IP addresses in use now. Of course, they’re headless - but four-five old laptops will be fun targets for this tool, they do run distros with desktops. Exciting…!
My problem with Linux is, 1) the UI is ugly. Linux people don't understand anything about UI, they look at the worst UI in the world, and they think it's amazing. 2) I installed Linux 2 times, Ubuntu and Pop OS, both of them were trash. People said Linux will be faster on old devices, I tried Ubuntu years ago, and I didn't see any speed difference. I installed Pop OS recently, and it was slow, the store crashed a few times, it was line 10x worse experience than Windows. 3) What I'm looking for from Linux is, Windows but better. Meaning better performance, better UI and UX. No bugs. I pay games, but if Linux can offer something perfect, I'll be OK with not playing games. The problem with Linux is, it will never be what I want. Linux people were incapable of building a Distro/Desktop that doesn't suck. They are incapable of building good looking UIs. There is no hope.
Check out the subreddit unixporn it has some amazing UI that beats anything out there. Having said that, it takes quite a bit of configuration to achieve most of those results which probably isn't for you. Maybe I'll add an auto rice feature in the future to give these types of desktops with a push of a button.
If a perfect experience is what you want, get a Mac. The problem is not that the people have no idea what they are doing but that they do not have the money to do it. You give Microsoft's Windows as an example and that is a company that makes over 200 billion USD in revenue each year. Compare that to Linux's total of a few million per year and maybe you will understand why they do not have the resources to perfect it the way you want it to. If you dislike how it is so much, why don't you donate? Why don't you contribute? If a bad UI/UX is such a big problem then you should do us all a favor and contribute to make it good.
For any GUI app stores on Linux, my biggest problem is that, when they fail, they do it silently, without showing you what exactly went wrong. They should at least show a popup with an error message which is copypastable. Same with a lot of other Linux apps
The most current Problem with Linux I have, is configuring the samplerate and bit depth settings for my two DACs. GUI has no settings for that and all the "documentation" about pipewire, pulse or whatever just don´t work, or talk about config files that don´t exist anymore... It´s things like these, which I consider to be absolute basics, that keep me from using Linux. I mean, even Windows 3.1 could do that in 1992...
Most of this is actually controlled by a pulse.conf file in your home. Anytime I have audio issues I wipe that out and start over with a fresh config. I'll put it on my list.
@@TitusTechTalk That file I too don´t have. But I figured it out. Correct way is to copy /usr/share/pipewire.conf to /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf and in there configure two adapters as sink with the correct settings. ChatGPT FTW.
@@TitusTechTalk Don't bother... I am already fed up with this. It works ... but ... if I boot the system when any of my DACs is turned off, I have no sound devices at all. Even the Mic is gone. I then have to turn ALL sound devices on and restart the pipewire services. I am going back to windows and just keep fighting Microsofts enshitification. That's less work than this ...
I think many of these programs get updated relatively fast over the years, but the developers don't bother to update their documentation and because the code isn't meant to be understood by the average user, you're pretty much fucked
The number 1 stumbling block for me as a new (like, 2 weeks!) linux user was getting the closed nvidia drivers. The guide from nvidia is insane. Searching reveals a dozen different ways to install them for each distro. I still have no idea what AKMOD is.
Figured would give Debian another shot as I do with Linux every 5 years or so. Spent a day installing things and tweaking it. DisplayPort monitor wasn't working though so followed the official Debian guide to install NVIDIA drivers... Paths written there don't exist, the guide is wrong and now the OS is bricked. For some reason, all screens work for login then all disappear (with secureboot disabled because like most things with linux there is an entire backlog of information and acronyms you need to somehow onboard before you can do even basic config). Disappointing that it's still so jank for such a mainstream release and lacking in documentation on an issue that surely a lot of people would face. I'm technically inclined and the learning curve is still too steep, simply because I can't take that amount of screen-time right now to get through it all to the point where it's intuitive. I did make a snap-shot but probably won't bother to restore it (would still have a monitor that I can't use so it's a deal-breaker). I'll give it one more shot with Nobara, failing that several more years to mature some more... 😤
