Several questions as a new user of linux[Solved]

Quick to answer questions about finding your way around Linux Mint as a new user.
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Blankman
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Several questions as a new user of linux[Solved]

Post by Blankman »

Hi everyone, I have been a windows user from 1997 up till now. Only now am i wanting to change to linux. I must say i should have made the move long ago. I have been playing on linux for a few days just to learn what to do and I've tried different types of linux and have settled on mint.

I'm using linuxmint 20 cinnamon-64bit distro.

I google practically everything I want to do on mint but I have a few questions that I hope everyone can answer to help me speed up the learning process.

1. How do i find my ip address? ip -a doesn't show it to me

2. Where do i find task manager on mint? I googled it and I still can't find it.

3. When you look for something in the "software manager" it says size on disk, is this the downloaded size of the file? I'm finding a lot of small programs like zoom, discord and some other apps are showing 3GB on disk but the windows version is barely 100MB. eg. for discord the download in total is 747mb and disk space will be used is 2.5gb. I don't understand how the download size is 747mb

4. Is there a night light like windows 10 has?

5. Please can someone help me understand what a dependency is ? If you try install a program it needs so many dependencies. I was trying to download nvidia drivers on my pc and it downloaded 3gb of dependencies.

I know when people ask me silly questions about windows it drives me mad, so if my silly questions have driven you mad, i'm truly sorry. Thanks in advance to those who will answer my questions.
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spamegg
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Re: Several questions as a new user of linux

Post by spamegg »

1. Here is a detailed article about lots of different ways to find your IP https://phoenixnap.com/kb/how-to-find-ip-address-linux

2. In Cinnamon, it's called System Monitor
sysmon.png
3. You might be looking at Flatpak versions of those programs. Flatpaks come bundled with all of their dependencies (to overcome compatibility issues on various different distros), separate from the library files in the system. That's why they are so large. If you look for the .deb installer files for apps like Discord then they are smaller and easier to install. For example the following is about 75MB: https://discord.com/api/download?platfo ... format=deb You can install these just with a double-click on them like a typical Windows installer.

4. There is a program called Redshift that works with Mint https://itsfoss.com/install-redshift-linux-mint/

5. Dependencies are files needed for some software to work, but they are not written by the developers of that software, they are written by someone else. We can't write all software we need from scratch, so we depend on other software. Windows programs have dependencies too, like DLLs for games for example, or the "Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables" that a lot of video games require to be installed.

Usually Windows programs hide these dependencies from you, they get installed "in the background" when you are running an installer, or the installer downloads the dependencies from the Internet, or bundle them with the installer (so it's like Flatpak). Some installers on Windows are also quite large. Basically, a typical Windows user usually does not confront dependencies directly.

On Linux, these dependencies are made a lot more explicit to the user, so that you know exactly what's going on. The dependencies are separated into thousands of little "packages". These packages are maintained in a Linux distribution's official "package repository" so that developers can easily write new software that depends on other packages they need. When you want to install some software, then the "package manager" calculates all the dependency packages and installs them for you.
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Re: Several questions as a new user of linux

Post by Blankman »

Thank you so much for your graceful answer, this is a huge help. I have much more understanding now about this , thank you.
Moved from windows to linux and enjoying every minute of linux. It's a learning curve but well worth it.
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Re: Several questions as a new user of linux

Post by Petermint »

1. How do i find my ip address? ifconfig
ifconfig works on every Linux I use and provides way more than you need, including the MAC that you might need when configuring a router. You can get the same information with combinations of mousing over, right clicking, and left clicking the network icon in the task bar.

3 & 5. When you look for something in the "software manager" it says size on disk, is this the downloaded size of the file?
No, downloads are compressed. The decompressed size might be 3 ~ 10 times bigger. Then there are the dependencies. A simple example is a small application that uses GTK or KDE for the user interface. GTK is already part of Mint and the 1 MB application uses only 1 MB. If the same application uses KDE instead of GTK, the application has to download about 650 MB of KDE as dependencies. Other tiny programs may download a monster like Mono or Java or download the whole lot.

If you are experimenting with that type of program, removing all the junk afterwards can be brutal. You could make a Timeshift backup before the experiment then use Timeshift to restore back before the experiment. You can also use the Synaptic Package Manager and mark things for a "complete" removal including configuration files. You then run an autoremove command to remove all the dependencies that are no longer used by anything.
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Re: Several questions as a new user of linux

Post by Blankman »

thank you that helps me understand a lot more. I see ifconfig gives quite a lot of info. Ye it would be a good idea for me to learn how to remove the dependencies that aren't used anymore. What is that command to autoremove them?
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Re: Several questions as a new user of linux

Post by Petermint »

All the related commands.

Code: Select all

sudo apt update
Updates the package cache.

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sudo apt upgrade
Applies all the updates and asks yes/no questions.

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sudo apt upgrade -y
Applies all the updates as if you answered yes to yes/no questions.

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sudo apt autoremove --purge -y
Autoremove is used to remove packages that were automatically installed to satisfy dependencies for other packages and are now no longer needed.

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get clean
Clear out the local repository of retrieved package files. Saves disk space on crowded system partitions.
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Re: Several questions as a new user of linux

Post by jsb »

Blankman wrote: Sat Oct 16, 2021 1:47 pm 2. Where do i find task manager on mint? I googled it and I still can't find it.
I could not even remember what Windows task manager was (I have been using various versions of Linux for about a decade). So I googled that and then also googled "linux task manager" and found this: https://itsfoss.com/task-manager-linux/

Then I went looking for it in my menu, but unlike cinnamon there was no "system monitor", so then I went through the menu items under "system" and found something called..."Task Manager" :lol: . I'm using Mint 19.3 XFCE.
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Re: Several questions as a new user of linux

Post by iliketrains »

With xfce DE a 'system load monitor' can be added to the panel (taskbar). It's a beautiful thing. Clicking on it brings up the task manager.
Most likely there's a Cinnamon equivalent for the system monitor.
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Re: Several questions as a new user of linux[Solved]

Post by Blankman »

Thank you to everyone who responded, it was a treasure trove of gold nuggets. Thank you.
Moved from windows to linux and enjoying every minute of linux. It's a learning curve but well worth it.
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Re: Several questions as a new user of linux[Solved]

Post by Larry78723 »

If you have found the solution to your initial post, Please open your original post, click on the pencil, and add (Solved) to the Subject.
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If you have found the solution to your initial post, please open your original post, click on the pencil, and add (Solved) to the Subject, it helps other users looking for help, and keeps the forum clean.
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Re: Several questions as a new user of linux[Solved]

Post by Blankman »

If you had read my post you would have seen i did that before you even posted your response.
Moved from windows to linux and enjoying every minute of linux. It's a learning curve but well worth it.
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