this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
156 points (98.8% liked)

technology

23306 readers
242 users here now

On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.

Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020

Rules:

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 

bird-screm-2 STOP TRYING TO INSTALL COPILOT

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] lil_tank@hexbear.net 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

My experience with Bazzite

  • trying to create a .desktop entry
  • folder is write protected
  • spend three hours trying to search a solution on the internet, absolutely nobody's talking about this
  • ends up asking on reddit
  • zero upvote, gets one answer three days later
  • learn there are two folders, one is in the system the other in home
  • wow linux so easy to learn nowdays
[–] KrasMazov@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

I get the frustration when trying to do something that isn't well documented, so let me ask, what exactly were you trying to do?

I ask because learning there is a system and a home folder is basic Linux stuff that is just different from other OSes, and is not something particular to Bazzite, the only particular part being the system folder being read only, which is only true for some system folders, not everything.

[–] lil_tank@hexbear.net 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I was trying to create desktop entries, you know, the .desktop files that are read by DEs. The usr folder is write protected so I looked how to do this specifically in immutable distros.

In fact, I realised waaaay too late that the home folder was "~". Afterwards I realised that yes, the desktop entry documentation did refer to this other folder where desktop entries can be placed, but everytime I saw a folder path starting with ~ I assumed it was some convention, like starting a command with $.

[–] KrasMazov@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I was asking more what program you were trying to make .desktop files of, I should have been clearer, sorry for that.

I thought you were trying to make shortcuts for already installed programs on your desktop. If that were the case, on KDE at least you could just right click a program on the start menu and click to add it to the desktop.

But I totally get your frustration, the two locations for storing configurations should be communicated better for new users of Linux.

As a rule of thumb, most of the time you can always put configurations on your home folder, an example of this is if you need or want to mess with Pipewire configurations (system audio application), where instructions on the internet will tell you to put it somewhere with root access, but in reality you can just put it in a specific place on your home folder too, which is way easier.

And yeah, ~ always points to your user directory, it's another one of those Linux things that are common knowledge, but that new users aren't told about until they stumble upon it and have to search for.

Another way of specifying user directory without using your user name for that occasional application that for some reason doesn't accept ~, is to use /home/$USER/ in case you ever need that.

[–] lil_tank@hexbear.net 1 points 1 minute ago

There are two cases where I needed to manually create a desktop entry, one was Intelliji Idea that starts up by running a bash script, and Godot Engine that has a single executable downloaded directly from the internet.

Thanks you for all the tips that's so cool comrade Mazov!