this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024
209 points (96.4% liked)
Linux
48680 readers
358 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Can you please “installing applications and finding files splattered all over the file system”, please kind person?
How does Linux do it better?
Central package management.
When you install a package, it keeps track of all the files so when you uninstall it, it removes them all. There's various ways to scan and remove untracked files, but on a Linux system you can basically be ask it "where does this file comes from?" and it'll just tell you "oh, that's from mpg123, and you have it installed because VLC and Firefox need it to decode some AVIs". And if you really don't want it for some reason, it can also go uninstall everything that needs it too.
It makes it pretty hard to corrupt a system or uninstall important stuff. In the reverse, it also knows what is needed, so if you install VLC, it will also install all the codecs with it, and those are also automatically available to other apps too usually.
While that is true for the files that make up the programs themselves and their dependencies, it's not true for any state files or caches that programs creates at runtime. You need to clean those up manually.
lmao, do a
ls -aR ~
Thanks for the explanation!