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@owu

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ᒪᑫᓯᐢ @owu11/12/2023, 2:24 PM

Portability

I tend to change computers / operating systems fairly regularly, so one goal I have is to make sure I can copy my important data easily

Strangely it feels harder than it sounds. I used to use the pass password manager with an Emacs interface, until I realized it wasn't commonly available on Windows.

I hopped around in password managers until saying "screw it all" and just letting Firefox sync my passwords and bookmarks.

As for homedir copying, I'd like to be able to just cp -rv ~/ /mnt/backup-drive, BUT on Linux, Steam installs games to ~/.steam/steamapps/common, and I would rather not have to back up 100GB+ of games that are available on the steam store anyway, so when I copy stuff, I have to explicitly exclude particularly large folders like that.

And my last complaint is that I formatted my backup hard drive to ext4, which Windows cannot read. I can view & copy the files with the DiskInternals Reader, but it's not writable, so I can't continue backing up my Windows computer to a folder on that drive; instead, I had to shrink & create a new partition with a Gparted live USB ;-;

I sometimes feel like I just don't have the right mindset for computing, as everything seems to come back to bite me. Maybe I belong in the woods, fishing with spears, and not typing away in a box, huh

#computers #compsci #linux

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in reply to @owu's post:

(:@kdx11/12/2023, 2:40 PM

historically most of the portability issues i faced are windows related, and this just because windows do what windows do

hopping around different unix-likes has never been an issue for me (linux, *bsd, haiku, etc.), but i always end up needing a WSL2 install on windows because some shit is missing or if it's there it's a pain in the ass to use

if windows wasn't "needed" for some games and proprietary professional software i would never touch it ever again

ᒪᑫᓯᐢ @owu11/12/2023, 2:53 PM

YEAH! This exactly. Windows seems to do things solely for the purpose of being different (the most obvious example of this being the fact that it uses backslashes as directory delimiters)

I'm in the same boat; if certain software I needed wasn't optimized for it, or unrunnable on Unix, I'd never look at it again ;-;

Illiterate Lexicon @notquiteapage11/12/2023, 6:13 PM

Letting Firefox sync everything for me has helped so much with system hopping. I float between like four different physical machines (see: tech hoarding habits) that all need to have the same login credentials and the like. Notably though, none of these systems have Windows on them, because my lucky self doesn't need it for anything (yet...)

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