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] 19 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Wait until you learn about hard links

[–] [email protected] 8 points 14 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

Uh I think you meant bind mounts lol

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 hours ago

Stupid autocorrect!

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

They might have but I certainly don't

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago

came here for this

[–] [email protected] 31 points 21 hours ago (2 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] 1 points 9 minutes 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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 20 hours 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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 23 hours ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 20 hours 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 5 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 20 hours 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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours 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] 10 points 21 hours 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 :)