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Ah, stealth tracking in the guise of usefulness. Wonderful!
Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitates it, trying to be amusing and informative.
Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.
Is on kbin.social but created this profile on kbin.run during a week-long outage.
Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish
Ah, stealth tracking in the guise of usefulness. Wonderful!
It’s been many, many years at this point. Which one was it that went 64-bit before Firefox proper did (Waterfox maybe)? Pretty sure I used that for a short while at the time, but memory is hazy now.
I occasionally toy with the idea of switching to SeaMonkey because I was a Mozilla Mail & News user for a long time way back when, but I switched to separate FF and Thunderbird when that was discontinued and never had the need to switch “back” to the all-in-one.
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.
There are probably pre-written awk scripts out there that already do what you want, not that I know where they’d be.
That said, you might be better off using one of the bigger but still fairly commonly installed languages. There’s bound to be things on PyPI (for Python) or CPAN (for Perl) that could be bolted together for example.
If you’re really lucky there might even be something that covers your whole use-case, but I haven’t checked.
Duplication of resources mainly. Bloat upon bloat. Worse, a Flatpak can ignore things that it probably should use on the system, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
Don’t get me wrong, there are supposed “bare metal” installs that duplicate all sorts of things too, and I don’t like it when that happens either. Steam, for example, keeps at least one extra copy of itself as well as a bunch of other things.
And there’s that Flatpaks an entirely different ecosystem that require their own set of updates.
I get it. I understand there are benefits. Doesn’t mean I like it.
Listen, I don’t even like Flatpaks, but at least they’re multi-platform and non-proprietary.
But the original poster is probably of the opinion that “pro-consumer” means something that “just works”, and if it’s a walled garden, so what?
“Why is there barbed wire at the top of that wall?” “Don’t worry about it.”
True. Other tools include: Ctrl+Shift+N to bring back a closed window if there’s another window of the same browser instance still open, and when there isn’t, there’s Restore Previous Session which is accessible a couple of ways.
Neither bring back the comment that was being typed in a textbox on the page though. Guess when I usually ^W
^S
for unprompted save is in the default keybinds, not that I could say when it was added. (Pretty sure it wasn’t a pico
thing, but that leaves quite a bit of time unaccounted for.)
Muscle memory for other editors kicked in when I was editing something and did a literal slow realisation and double-take when it worked.
Now if only I could stop pressing ^W
in Firefox to use nano
’s “whereis” to find something that’d be great.
For those unaware, it closes the current tab. Or the whole browser. Ugh.
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.