I run Mylar on my Xubuntu server to manage my comic collection. I found out recently that there’s a tool that can convert the embedded .jpgs to .webp to save space, but it only works on cbz files and not cbr (zipped vs rar for those who don’t know). I wanted to convert all of my cbr to cbz so that I could run the tool on all my comics, so I needed to search hundreds of subdirectories for them and move them to the same folder to be processed.
Under Windows, I’d just type *.cbr into the search bar built into Explorer from the root comic directory, hit enter to get a list of files, select them all, and move them to the new folder. On Xubuntu, it’s nothing like as simple.
I found the search option in Thunar which opened Catfish, typed in *.cbr, and got a no files found message. After looking through the very limited options, I started searching for a way to do it. About thirty minutes later I’d found dozens of links telling me to use different, Terminal only, tools, but nothing about how to search subdirectories from the Catfish GUI. Purely by accident, I found a post from 2012 that mentioned the fact that Catfish doesn’t use wildcards, so just search with .cbr, something that’s not mentioned in the official docs.
I tried it, and it searched the subdirectories too, and found my files! Except there was no way to copy or cut and paste, just open, show in file manager, copy location, save as, or delete. No good options for almost 500 files across several dozen locations.
I ended up asking Chat GPT how to do it, and doing it through the Terminal, using this:
‘find . -type f -name “*.cbr” -exec mv {} /path/to/destination ;’
This is pretty basic functionality, and I had to resort to getting help to use the Terminal :(
Anyone expecting to use Linux the same way they are using Windows, without any changes, is going to be disappointed. You cannot reasonably expect to keep the same learned workflows from one system and use them on a completely different system without having to at least tweak some of it.
Learning is part of such switchovers, and loudly complaining that “Thing X is not working like I know it to, this is why people don’t like Linux” is not making anyone more likely to help you nor is it going to solve your problem. I’m glad that you managed to find a way to do what you need in any case, and maybe that command will stick around in the back of your head for when you need something similar sometime in the future :)
Right, but this is fundamentally at odds with the ‘Linux for everyone’, ‘Linux for gaming’, and ‘Linux can replace Windows for most use cases’ rhetoric.
If you enjoy Linux for its own sake and you like fiddling around with it and learning its ins and outs, it’s fantastic. But if you just want the OS to get out of the way so you can get back to what your were doing, it leaves some room for improvement.
We can’t have both, and that’s fine. There’s also an argument to be made for people getting used to dealing with a command line because it’s something of a prerequisite for getting away from increasingly shady corporate overreach. But that doesn’t help me when the solution to getting my extra mouse buttons and precision mode is to create a well documented bug report for Solaar and then wait. I just want my push to talk to work, you know?
That gap is definitely shrinking as time goes on, but it’s still an obstacle and it’ll always be part of the conversation around GNU until it’s no longer a concern for one reason or another.
The problem here is not that things work differently, but that GUI programs are often just dumb, or have the functionality but in a very strange way. And I’m not a new Linux user.
You’re missing my point. It’s not a case of me wanting to do something in the same way that Windows does it, it’s a case of the Linux way is massively over complicated for no good reason.
Yes, the terminal is vastly more powerful, but there’s no reason at all that you should be forced to use the terminal for something as simple as this.
Terminal isn’t over complicated, it’s the most basic interaction with operating systems and was the first mainstream UI to ever exist because it’s a natural extension of what interacting with a computer truly is.
Terminal has very basic, particular syntax: Command [required parameters]
It has some useful additions as well, like
| to pass the output of the precious command to another command
> to write to a file
< to read from a file
This basic structure allows additional tools to be installed and run without having to learn a unique GUI with all the quirks of the GUI designer for each application. You just add new commands and move on with your life, maybe referencing the manual page to check which parameters you need.
Windows has a very particular GUI design that everyone knows because of the way Microsoft captured the market in the early days, before laws prevented them from doing so. Windows is esoteric, it has a variety of GUI philosophies all jumbled together. Explorer/control panel exists next to “Metro” apps, now “Windows apps” and they both do separate things without ever integrating the two properly.
Windows is arcane and understanding it fully is thousands of hours of practice, if you actually try new things. Linux is perfectly usable from command line with just a few dozens of hours of practice.
I say all this as a primarily Windows desktop user who uses Linux when it comes to actually getting things done. If we taught Linux to our children in schools and if businesses provided as much Linux training to workers as they do windows training, the discussion we’d be having would be about how windows is too complicated and just needs a UI similar to the ones available with Linux.
Command [required parameters]
Aren’t the kinds parentheses the other way around?
Probably? I didn’t check on whether angle brackets or square brackets are for optional parameters. It’s an arbitrary thing and my meaning is entirely decipherable in any order.
It’s not complicated though. It’s just different than windows. It’s also not an issue with Linux. Thunar just doesn’t behave the way you want it to. Files in GNOME works fine, but wildcards don’t require a * to search.
I read it more as: "The way to do this (normally simple) thing is incredibly cumbersome, and could be greatly improved.