bleepbloopbop [they/them]

wellllllll

I don’t think I’ve ever had to redo more than 15 mins of work due to this mistake, but it’s a dangerous road lol

what’s really dangerous is if you do a bunch of force quits in a row with :q! and then you start to get muscle memory for that and accidentally lose a whole document you were working on

I never got used to doing wq over a simple :x

I get that you can write and quit separately, and I do it when needed, but 95% of the time, there’s no need

https://github.com/brunonova/nautilus-admin

This is unmaintained, so it may not work with the latest ubuntu, but it is an extension to the default ubuntu file manager that does some of what you want

As for your title question, unfortunately ubuntu/gnome don’t seem to make this easy. On some DEs you can just right click and go find the shortcut properties sorta like on windows. Others have noted some good reasons why GUI apps shouldn’t run as root, but you’re right that sometimes it’s necessary, or simply the easiest/most expedient way to do things.

You can accomplish what you ask using a little shell script though, which you could bind to a keyboard shortcut or something. I may elaborate further but basically:

readlink /proc/"$( xprop _NET_WM_PID | sed 's/_NET_WM_PID(CARDINAL) = //')"/exe

and then clicking on the window you want to ID will attempt to identify the binary it’s running. then you could either display it in a popup using zenity, or write it directly to the clipboard using xclip (or wl-copy I think for wayland distros)

I really like setting up little shortcut scripts like this with zenity for user input, and usually the notification tray or clipboard for output

You’ll run into issues and not many people will be able to help. Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu seem to be the popular distros rn for most people.

Agree with the broader conclusion that a first time linux user should probably avoid gentoo, arch, whatever, but its not because nobody will be able to help you, more just that the expected level of polish is a bit less.

It isn’t considered a huge inconvenience to have to use the CLI or edit a config file by arch users, but for ubuntu especially they are more bent on building something that “just works” for most people (with the tradeoff being it’s a commercially exploited product, and the innards of GNOME and the like tend to be more of a black box and less tweakable than say, a tiling WM)

But if you do want to dive in and learn how more of the internals work and how to configure things at a lower level, you will find a lot of help with issues, and very detailed documentation for a lot more things in Arch, vs Ubuntu. I find the ubuntu community online to be sort of a middle ground between the detailed technical help I’ve gotten from Arch communities, and the “here’s some magic steps that worked for me, no idea why” type of thing that is prevalent on windows support communities.

Which isn’t to say ubuntu people aren’t helpful, but the critical mass of users isn’t the only thing that matters, it also helps if the users are knowledgeable, and friendly (some arch people fail at this, though I’ve lucked out and really not had any bad experiences)

depends on the context, arm isn’t as consistent (or at least consistently supported) of a platform to build for as x86. ARM server? single board computer? (which one?) Apple Silicon? other?

Arch ARM is for some reason forced to be a separate, second class project, and ARM-only pkgbuilds are systematically removed from the AUR. It’s shortsighted and stupid. However I’ve still had decent luck with arch on arm (Danctnix, specifically)