Hello everyone! I know that Linux GUI advanced in last few years but we still lack some good system configuration tools for advanced users or sysadmins. What utilities you miss on Linux? And is there any normal third party alternatives?

  • algernon@lemmy.ml
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    9 days ago

    I have Emacs, and I have my NixOS configuration. That’s all the GUI system configuration I need.

    • user_naa@lemmy.worldOP
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      9 days ago

      What is your DE? On KDE Plasma Wayland you can just use kscreen-doctor output.HDMI-A-1.scale.2 to set it to 200%

      And it seem like CLI not GUI issue :)

    • Leaflet@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      One of my favorite things about Gnome is that almost anything can be customized via CLI with dconf or gsettings. Which is great until you encounter one of the few things you can’t customize, like displays.

  • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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    9 days ago

    I generally don’t miss anything graphical, once I learn how to do something from the cli I rarely feel the need to do it graphically anymore as it’s usually a lot slower

    The obvious one would be Photoshop and paint.net of course but krita does the trick

    • user_naa@lemmy.worldOP
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      9 days ago

      I maybe need to correct my post. I am talking about system utilities like Device Manager or something else.

      • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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        9 days ago

        Why would I want gui for those things? CLI is often a better interface. Being able to grep lsusb rather than scanning a gui for an entry is much better. It’s easier to pipe to an email as well. Screenshots don’t allow copy/paste…

          • esa@discuss.tchncs.de
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            8 days ago

            The name is constructed from two parts:

            1. ls: list
            2. usb: usb

            It lists usb devices that your machine (/kernel) knows has been connected; they may not necessarily be usable.

            E.g. I have some sound output device connected via USB to one machine. On most of my machines I’ve switched from pulseaudio to pipewire¹, and I figured I’d bring that machine closer to the others so there’s less variance. Unfortunately the sound output device didn’t want to work with pipewire. The problem manifested as no sound and pipewire not listing the device. lsusb helped me know that the machine at the very least recognized the device, but wasn’t currently able to use it. (It did actually also show up as an error in dmesg -H, but reinstating pulseaudio let the device work again as normally. So now I just have to live with a situation where some machines use pipewire because bluetooth and others use pulseaudio because … usb?¹)

            ¹ There’s a memory of ALSA vs OSS I didn’t want to be reminded of

        • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
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          9 days ago

          As a newcomer to CLIs, GUI are great because you don’t need to know what you’re looking for. I can just open the devices window, and they’re all there, with most of the extra hardware stuff that’s not actually a real device already cleaned out.

          To do the same with a CLI would take me 10 minutes of looking up what the hardware commands are, 5 minutes figuring out flags, and 30 minutes researching entries to see if they’re important. Even just a collapsible list would make that last step so much easier. And no, I can’t grep for what I need, because I don’t know what I need, I just know something in there is important with a vague idea of what it might look like.

          Once I figure that all out for one thing, the best I can do is write that to a notes file so I don’t need to search so far next time, but there’s a good chance that I’ll need a different combination of commands next time anyway.

          Not hating on CLIs, just wishing I could figure out how to use them faster.

          • 9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works
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            8 days ago

            apropos - command to list relevant commands tldr [command] - shows the most commonly used flags/options for that program

            apropos comes installed by default (on debian at least), tldr needs to be installed with your package manager

            As someone who cannot even remember tar flags (inser xkcd here), tldr is very helpful

            Your 45 mins becomes 5 mins now. Hope that helps

          • Tekhne@sh.itjust.works
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            7 days ago

            Another really helpful tool is to use the fish shell instead of bash. It has tons of useful features, but my favorite is by far the autocomplete. It parses man pages to provide suggestions for flags, subcommands, even passed arguments, and each item in the results list has a description, and it’s all searchable by hitting shift+tab.

            fish autocomplete subcommands

            fish autocomplete git

            That’s what leveled up my cli game from 0-100. It’s a massive difference in usability and discoverability. And unlike things like nushell, it’s close enough to bash that you won’t feel confused if you have to use bash instead.

  • SolarPunker@slrpnk.net
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    9 days ago

    I would like something to change my monitor output at a system level, for example I could emulate a CRT screen or decide my aspect ratio. Something like RetroArch shaders but in a more high priority level.

  • AliasAKA@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    HWMonitor / cpuID / cpuz. One of the frustrating things is not having good driver level support for certain mbs with system monitoring utilities, so you can’t see fans and some cpu stats (like per ccd temps etc on Ryzen processors). Specifically things like it87 boards

      • AliasAKA@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        I’ll check this out, thanks! I really just need to figure out how to build in the driver level stuff for my chipset. Even this I think just pulls from lm-sensors which needs the low level drivers to populate the appropriate files to read from.

  • arglebargle@lemm.ee
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    9 days ago

    Given that windows administration is powershell these days they kind of are similar.

    Windows is missing so much in their guis abilities (like copy text) that I wonder what there is you are missing.

  • kbal@fedia.io
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    9 days ago

    I’m willing to entertain the possibility that the linux world may be lacking in some things, but I’m pretty sure “configuration tools for sysadmins” is not one of them.

    • dasenboy@lemm.ee
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      8 days ago

      You should try gufw. Great for simple setups! For more complicated ones you could use opensnitch.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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      8 days ago

      I use csf which isn’t GUI, text only, but the configuration is so straightforward and simple that it’s been my default for years now on server and desktop

  • vvvvv@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    IrfanView. Nothing comes even close. I would probably move to Linux if not for that.

    • d-RLY?@lemmy.ml
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      8 days ago

      For real! Every time I spend real periods of time with Linux (and a random year with a MacBook Pro a friend wanted to get rid of). It always hits a point where I need to view images and can’t find anything that matches IrfanView. I have tried XnView and it is way too much with regards to the UI and features I don’t need. The most frustrating thing (and this applies to most others I tried) is handling going through a folder of images that are different resolutions. IrfanView has the option to both scale the program’s window based around the image size, and also be set to scale images if the are larger than my display resolution.

      It is a very weird combination of those two things that drives me nuts. There are settings in XnView that kind of work but break. Like it might adjust the image that is large, but then the program’s UI will not shrink to fit a small image (the window will just stay large and have large black borders). Or it will shrink the window to the width of a large image, but not scale and the height will still require scrolling up and down to see all of it. The funny part is that I don’t even look at my saved images all the time. But shit is like a hard slam on the breaks at high speed.

      I did end up just dealing with the kind of weird clunkyness of running it via WINE while on the Mac as it was my only PC at the time. Which was still better than not having it for my use-case. Just weird how it has been the only image viewer (with mid-level editing options) that has “felt” correct ever since I first tried it out over like 17 years ago.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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      8 days ago

      Irfanview!

      It’s FAST, it’s SMALL, it’s PURE POWERRR

      I never understood why there isn’t anything even remotely close to it in Linux. Kde has Gwenview which is awful slow, bloated yet barely has any features at all.

      There is a way to run it through wine but that is awful. Cane e start a GoFundMe for the dev to make a Linux KDE release with Deb and rpm files? I’ll happily contribute.

  • pathief@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    The only thing I miss from Windows is Voicemeeter. God, I loved that thing. I miss it so much.

    Handling the audio and adding what were once simple things like noise supression has been a really really shit experience.