Not sure if this will be of any help but here are some apps I find quite useful:

Parabolic: video downloader.
Switcheroo: image exporter.
Curtail: image compressor.
Easy Effects: audio equalizer.
Mousai: music identifier.
Apostrophe: markdown editor.
Portmaster: firewall monitor/manager.

There're more over at gnome's circle website (https://circle.gnome.org/) that you might find useful in case none of the above do it for you (even though not loving Easy Effects or Apostrophe is imposibler!). It's a well curated website that helps with the discovery of apps and who knows, maybe that process might entice you to use Linux more and for different purposes (which always helps with the learning curve I reckon).

As an advice when it comes to distros, I'd suggest sticking with the ones which are best maintained so you can enjoy your Linux journey better and have less friction throughout it (some have mentioned Mint, but Ubuntu, or Fedora are also good options).

Hope this helps. Let us know how it goes!

Actually, at the time, sometimes that is what you had to do. In fact, sometimes the amount you'd place on the disk would be even smaller, like 2MB (still too big for a floppy), simply because there weren't any other good options at that awkward point in time.

I never experienced such a time. Writable CDs never really replaced floppies for me; USB sticks did. If I needed to move a few megabytes anytime in the 90s, I would have split it on multiple floppies. 2000s came with USB sticks.

Burning CDs was largely for copying or hoarding music/games/movies/linux isos, I don't think I ever used them for just shuffling a document or some other one-off file somewhere.

Yeah, this isn't the first time this has happened on these forums.

The worst offenders even believe the OP is responsible for what happens in their thread, and has to respond to people and keep the discussion going and strictly on-topic. If they don't, they've "abandoned" the thread and are trolling.

I've yet to encounter these kind of demands and criteria on other fora, and I'm in plenty.

OP really should chill out. The topic still revolves around Linux, there's almost no bickering, certainly not mean-spirited. Hell, it's not like some other threads where you will get accused of being a racist for no reason...

And yes, let the people talk. It doesn't have to be 100% on-topic with strict requirements not to deviate even a little bit from what the OP asked. Chill out man.

Too small for floppies... But zip files supported multiple disks in it's format. To make it easy the TOC (Table of Contents) was always appended at the end (the final disk). That way also if you deleted files it could just update/append another TOC and it was called good, rather than rebuilding the entire archive.

Also by changing sector size geometry you could get closer to 1.88Mb on a disk, and 2.88 disks were also a thing, though i'd never seen one myself. Course DriveSpace and DoubleSpace/Stacker were also a thing to do transparent compression on a disk allowing more space. Though eventually yeah more than one disk was a thing.


Reminds me... I got my hands on a 3 disk demo of Doom. There was a com file called DeIce, which i looked at the config file and figured out how to split files to transfer larger zips across the same way Doom did. (Wasn't really that hard). As long as you're a little patient, transferring larger files that way still works too before you do a once-burn optical media.

Late 1990s/early 2000s did have the issue; floppies were too small, and USB sticks were not yet mainstream. (There was no guarantee of a USB port, and even if there is one, it might not even be 2.0.)

A wise man once said:

Wow...
OP asks something.
Thread devolves into a back and forth between other users that basically ignores the OP completely and would be darn confusing for someone trying to read it as being in relation to the initial questions.
OP calls it out.
... and gets bashed for it.
Again... wow...

sadly an increasing trend.

Absolutely. Let's lock the thread because someone did not stay on topic to the satisfaction of the OP.

Should prob check the GOG COC.

Like I said I did not know we had to be laser focused. I also said we should absolutely close the thread. Is agreeing with the OP a violation?

Don't interfere with our pissing contest, who knows Linux the best and deepest.

I'm out, I know how to maintain Ubuntu and RHEL/OEL servers at work(*), but I have no idea how to compile Linux kernel from a source and patch it myself, never had to do that even for shits and giggles...

(*) I have a pissing contest of my own at work: currently I am "arguing" or rather disagreeing with another Linux admin at work whether it is possible to expand /dev/sda1 (mounted directly to / without LVM) on an ancient Ubuntu 14 server without any downtime, as there is a /dev/sda2 partition there too, mounted to /mnt/data. The customer wants to know if the root partition can be expanded without any downtime (no LVM used).

The other guy claims it is possible without downtime, I suspect it isn't because wouldn't we have to unmount /mnt/data first and move it to its own disk/partition (/dev/sdb1), before we can expand /dev/sda1 ?

I suspect we just have a different definition of "downtime", he doesn't consider it as one unless we need to reboot the server, ie. unmounting /mnt/data and copying the data over does not constitute as a "downtime" in his eyes. To me it does if there is even a short break to any of the resources on the server. I think we had this disagreement about the definition of a downtime earlier, but I guess it is the customer who decides if that is a downtime. I guess it depends how /mnt/data is used by the customer; if it is used only for e.g. backups or database dumps at nights, then we can move it without causing any interruptions to activities (as long as we do it during the day); if it has an active database or otherwise is constantly accessed, then we can't.

Or then I am wrong and e.g. growpart can grow a partition even if it is not the last partition on the disk, as the manual page claims as a requirement....

Yeah, I've kept asking the others "this server has nightly backups available in case everything goes wrong, right?".
I usually work with LVM and don't fret about it, but this makes me more nervous without LVM. Maybe I will clone the VM and try the operation offline (no network) first, to see whether it works.

I figured that as long as I can move all the data so that /mnt/data would be mounted to /dev/sdb1 instead of /dev/sda2 (probably better to move the data inside first to some temporary directory etc.), then I could delete sda2 and expand sda1. It is that moving of /mnt/data (copying data, unmounting, remounting...) where that short downtime would come...

I don't recall for sure, I think I checked it with df -hT but didn't pay close attention (merely just how much space there is). It is Ubuntu 14, one of those ancient (virtual) servers that some customers just cling to...