To be clear, grub itself doesn’t mount your root partition. Grub provides the root partition device path or id to the kernel via kernel command line. Then kernel mounts the root partition early in its boot sequence with a limited set of options (typically read only).

Logically, the root partition should be mountable without fstab because otherwise it would be a chicken and egg problem :)

Usually once the userspace starts, an init script will remount the root partition with its normal options from fstab.

(It’s a bit more complicated if initramfs is involved, but the principle is the same).

Gentoo is better than any other distribution

-z might be pointless since you’re transferring files locally.

https://github.com/shell-pool/shpool ?

In case you decide to look for alternatives, I would probably go with elastic/filebeat/grafana, a fairly standard log monitoring suite. Not saying it’s better or worse than Victoria Logs, which i have no experience with.

I think it depends a lot on what kind of application you’re thinking of. Here are some examples of tools that I particularly remember for having nice CLI interfaces, but they are all slightly different in terms of the number of operations/entities they support.

Single operation, a lot of different types of data: httpie

httpie is a CLI HTTP client. It allows to generate fairly complex requests, choose which diagnostic information you want to see, etc.

Examples:

$ https httpie.io/hello
$ http PUT pie.dev/put X-API-Token:123 name=John
$ http -v pie.dev/get

Several operations, a lot of parameters: Bazel

Bazel is a build system. There are only a handful of operations you typically perform (build, run, test, query), but they all follow the same pattern.

Examples:

$ bazel build //app
$ bazel --quiet build //app -c opt
$ bazel --quiet run //app -c opt -- --port=1234

Multiple entites, multiple operations: LVM

I really liked the interface of Linux Volume Manager tools. They consist of multiple commands that follow the same pattern, and use the same flags for options.

Examples:

# vgcreate -n vg_name
# vgs
# pvcreate /dev/sda
# vgextend vg_name /dev/sda
# lvcreate vg_name -n lv_name -L5G
# lvresize vg_name/lv_name -L+1G
# lvs

Wanted to mention jj too. It follows a fairly standard pattern of ‘<command> <noun> <verb>’, e.g. ‘jj bookmark create’, allows to abbreviate unambiguous commands (e.g. ‘jj b c’), has a lot of QoL features (such as highlighting unique prefixes of change IDs in the output). Really a lot of thought went into CLI design specifically it seems.

Go to Preferences -> Audio -> Replay Gain mode and set it to “Album” (if you’re listening to whole albums) or “Track” (if you’re mixing it up). This will let VLC read the ReplayGain[1] tags in your files and adjust playback volume accordingly. Chances are high that a lot of your collection already has these tags, and you won’t have to do anything else. If some of your files don’t have these tags, just run a tool (https://github.com/complexlogic/rsgain for example) to generate them.

Nice! I used to do something like this, which avoids xargs altogether:

cat urls.txt | while read url; do echo download $url; done

What features do you need? Just render a string with a given font and that’s it? Or something more advanced?

Ah okay, it’s a user unit then. Try the following:

$ systemctl --user enable ydotoold
$ systemctl --user start ydotoold

It looks like you’re missing the ydotool.service unit file in the package. Can you check by running dpkg -L ydotool-custom (the name of the package you chose in step 3.4)?

Unit files are how services are defined in most Linux-based desktop systems, similar to services in Windows.

I just press M-.

fzf is great for quickly finding files e.g. in large code repositories.

tcpdump can help diagnose network issues.

tmux is based

Also if you make a typo you can quickly fix it with ^, e.g.

ls /var/logs/apache

^logs^log

Number one will forever and ever be strace

Not even a good Terminal film.

Yeah, you’re not wrong. What I meant was that polkit is conceptually equivalent to UAC (at least it is supposed to solve the same problem). However it’s not really a fair comparison, as “polkit on Linux” isn’t one concrete thing you can analyse, it’s more of a pile of Lego blocks, which you could assemble any which way. In theory, with Wayland you could build a secure polkit agent that would not allow the malware to interact with it.

In reality this is a moot point, as most privilege elevation is still done via sudo anyway.

UAC on Linux would require an almost fundamental architecture change, in a way contrary to most of how Linux is used now.

I would say the challenge is not in the architecture, but in the general fragmentation of the ecosystem. PolicyKit is basically an equivalent to UAC, but it’s not used universally by everything that needs elevated access.