Due to an interesting bug with fdupes (again, something I should write on) I splatted some of my system. While it's trivial to restore stuff because I do proper regular backups, I decided to install the updated rc1 (Release Candidate 1) of Unity Linux.
The way I have my system set up makes it very easy to install and restore my setup, even between "versions" of Linux. This is made possible in part by Linux's use of /home/username
for user data, but also because I maintain some scripts on the side which I tweak every time I make a system change, so that if reinstall I can reproduce the system changes in an automated way.
Every time I do a re-installation I find some ways to improve my scripts.
For example, I really dislike how each user's home folder is flooded with crap. It's a combination of stuff I hand-tweaked and whatever defaults from whatever random program I used once. I don't really see a way around this without some revisioning or intrusion detection-type software let loose on the home folder, and that sounds like a really terrible idea to me.
I'm thinking of doing the same sort of trick I do with my system but with my user setup. Each time I make a significant change, I back up that change and I modify a script which will intelligently back up or restore the configuration between the backup and the live version. It's something that I've been bouncing around in my head for a while, but I just haven't bothered to do anything about it since it's already so painless to reinstall and there's no real disadvantage to having a messy home folder.
In my youth I would have hand-tagged all the files and then tracked all the changes to see what was going on. These days I'm pretty mellow about such things.
Oh, and about Unity Linux. It's working very well. It's actually quite a bit faster than the beta2 which I had been using earlier.
It does seem that a lot of the goodness which was in beta2 has been removed in rc1. The configurations are floating more towards the defaults, which I personally dislike but I do agree with the philosophy.
NetSurf has been included as the default browser. I personally prefer Midori, but I'll give Netsurf a try. Ok, I actually prefer a hacked Links to add some new features but that's a topic for another day.
Oh, and the reason I was goofing around with my system in the first place was to remove duplicate files. It turns out that I have 1.9 million files on one partition alone. Eek!
Last updated 2023-03-19 at 02:10:39
Actually, it turns out that I can pretty easily leverage some existing programming of mine to create a daemon that watches the home folder for changes and writes a simple log file.
That would help me manually back up changes that I specifically make while ignoring the default files that get created when I'm just trying something new out.
I could also easily remove config files left around after uninstalling programs.
With no 4DOS-style descript.ion to help me write notes, I'm pretty annoyed at how cluttered things get. I need to be able to tag dotfiles as belonging to specific programs in some handy way.
Hmm.. lots of possibilities. Nothing's very high priority though..