James'Techblog

For those who want more: Commands Description free -h Shows memory usage in human readable format. df -h Shows disk space usage in human readable format. uptime Shows uptime for user in number of days hrs and minutes. Also shows current load average.

A lot of people assume that Linux is a technical operating system, too technical for average users, however, since the earlier 2000’s it’s safe to say that most modern distributions and desktop environments have improved and are becoming more user friendly. All that said, linux users still should know a bit about the terminal and how much faster it can make certain day to day tasks. In this article, I’ll cover a small fraction of the useful commands that a user might want to use every day to gain system information, find out where in the file system they are located, update their system, manage services, do simple cleaning of cache resources and so on. Linux is not your regular Windows operating system, but with a basic knowledge, most users can find a way to make it work for them. Linux is a Unix like operating system, this means it’s closer related to Mac OS, however, unlike Mac, there are no hidden backdoors. When choosing an operating system, most new linux users o...

For people in 2018 who are looking for a fast, stable, and flexible browser, Vivaldi more than does its share in that department. Vivaldi is a browser built by Norse company Vivaldi AS in Oslo, Norway. Vivaldi hasn’t been around as long, it was only released in 2016, but even at time of release, many users found it to be almost on par with every other long-lived and stable browser on the market. Vivaldi is built on open source software Chromium, with a more proprietary finish on top. They often rely on chromium codecs or codecs found on your system to handle playback, for this reason, Vivaldi might take some tweaking to get fully working on some Arch systems. I recently stated in a previous blog article that Vivaldi didn't significantly make changes to Chromium's underlying code, however I didn't say they didn't make changes, obviously they do make minor ones in order to get their code to work with the changes made in the browser at each update. The founder is ho...

In recent blog posts, it is made quite clear that Ubuntu intends to collect user data. This option will be opt out at installation, but It will be kept fine print because Ubuntu really wants that information. Windows 10, Mac OS and even apple’s own iOS making news with shady privacy and performance hitting stuff lately, this was bound to happen eventually. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, the popular Linux distribution for new users, have proposed to collect hardware and software information from fresh installs of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. With this data, they have agreed to only use it to make Ubuntu better, but when given how much information they will be collecting and considering what other companies have done with our data in the past, is it really a great choice to trust Canonical with our information? Derivatives can potentially say no to this. There are options for developers of other distributions underneath Ubuntu’s umbrella. Linux Mint, Bodhi, etc. These distr...