Knowledge Base (Posts about history)

10 Years of Linux on the Desktop for me

bgstack15 — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 13:59:00 GMT

I have been using GNU/Linux on the desktop for 10 years now! The Year of Linux on the Desktop (YOLOD) was 2015 for me.

According to my records, I researched and installed Korora Linux, which was a Fedora-based distro that included a nice theme and preconfigured media codecs.

I added Devuan GNU+Linux on auxiliary systems in 2017 and made it my primary desktop OS in 2019 with a new-to-me Thinkpad P50s.

I like SELinux, and the defaults for packaged applications like httpd, from the Enterprise Linux world, but the breadth of packages in the Devuan world which facilitates desktop usage, is hard to beat.

Using Free Software is a good feeling, and everybody should do it. But I suppose because it takes effort, some folks won't want to do it.

Some folks find systemd distasteful, and while I think it has an insane scope creep, it is useful enough as a mere service manager. I wish I could disregard all the other 47 components subsumed by systemd, which is why I use Devuan when I can. Some of my headless systems still run various EL-based distros, such as CentOS 7, AlmaLinux 8, and Rocky Linux 9.

Logo of GNU Logo of Linux

MacOS python shell ctrl-r history

bgstack15 — Mon, 13 May 2024 13:29:05 GMT

When you just want to use Ctrl+R to reverse search history in a python3 shell on MacOS, you need to put this in ~/.editrc:

bind "^r" em-inc-search-prev

References

Directly from https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues/118869#issuecomment-1364566840

Gedit then and now

bgstack15 — Thu, 09 May 2019 12:50:55 GMT

This is a rant post, and not a how-to. Gedit is a simple text editor for the GNOME stack. I remember reading somewhere about the old and new gedit interfaces. The GNOME team has this plan to reduce and hide functionality, and gedit shows some of the changes. Gedit used to have a toolbar, and the regular titlebar and menus. But Gedit after GNOME has changed their thinking has hidden its functions. I don't really use gedit, because my text editing is more console driven, or else I use scite.

Backtracking my activities for the references

Web search gedit then and now which led to Slashdot comment #54946443 on article GNOME's Text Editor gedit 'No Longer Maintained', Needs New Developers which quotes Slashdot comment #48503821 on article Ask Slashdot: Non-Coders, Why Aren't You Contributing To Open Source? which includes links to two images Gedit_3.11.92.png [wikipedia.org] Gedit2261.png [wikipedia.org]

Read Chrome and Firefox history from command line

bgstack15 — Sun, 07 Apr 2019 12:36:38 GMT

Chrome

Shamelessly ripped from How do I access Chrome's history (saved browsing history) file as a readable format without using third-party applications or extensions? - Quora You will need a sqlite3 binary, probably from the package sqlite , to read the Chrome history file. Chrome history in Linux is normally stored as file ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/History.

sqlite3 ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/History "select datetime(last_visit_time/1000000-11644473600,'unixepoch'),url from  urls order by last_visit_time asc" > output.txt

Firefox, Palemoon, Waterfox

This one's in UTC. Find the relevant history sqlite file. For palemoon, it is similar to:

~/".moonchild productions/pale moon/1234abdf.default/places.sqlite"


sqlite3 ~/".moonchild productions/pale moon/1234abdf.default/places.sqlite" "select datetime(h.visit_date/1000000,'unixepoch'),p.url from moz_historyvisits as h, moz_places as p where p.id == h.place_id order by h.visit_date asc;"