do you know that minecraft mod that autosorts your inventory? is there are project that can autosort a messy file system and put all of your files of a similar nature into a well organised, well named order. obviously this would require ai that could do image, language, and audio recognition but is there anything in the works? i can imagine this would speed up distrohopping by 10x. ai powered file management
“Please move all of the media files in my home folder into the /home/me/media folder”
AI: moves the assets from all of your video games into one folder
i can imagine this would speed up distrohopping by 10x
I am confusion. It seems like this wouldn’t help much with distro-hopping at all. At least not the way I learned to reinstall OSes, i.e. keep
/homeand make sure to back up important config files you edited.hi confusion
wait so how do you ‘keep home’, im confused explain your process
Partitions.
Many distros will partition your disk as
/,/home, andswap.If you want to, when installing a different distro, you can manually format and install the system to
/and not format/homebut flag it to be mounted as home.This can cause issues with configuration files if you change to a distro that has older versions of some programs.
Upgrades/downgrades can always cause issues, but more often than not you’re totally fine, especially during upgrades. I tend to declutter my home a little too. E.g. I keep the configurations for Firefox and Thunderbird but delete their cache, for Inkscape I may keep my custom palettes only. For a lot of Gnome tools, I just delete all the configuration, especially for stuff that I only use once a month. However, the major issue during that process for me is that accidents happen occasionally.
Oh it certainly can! I haven’t done it like this in a long time. My hopping days are all but over and the main things I need to backup are music, photos, and books. As long as I have them on some external drive I just wipe it all and start over. Still, though, the option is there.
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Would it be possible just to copy /home to a separate drive and then point a fresh install to that location?
This is actually a great idea but I didn’t separate my home when I installed my current distro
Yes. If you copy
/hometo a completely different drive, do make sure to be intentional about access rights (i.e. in your new install, you want your files to belong to you again and you want scripts to still be executable; sorting this out after the fact is possible but can be time-consuming) and make sure to copy hidden files/directories (i.e..dotfiles, which is where user preferences for your apps are stored; if you want e.g. your Firefox bookmarks and tabs to remain with you, keep these files).
Every single file on my computer is saved under
~/Downloadswhy would I want to sort it somewhere else when I already know exactly where it is?Such AI can be coded in <100 lines shell script. One of simplest implementations:
#!/bin/bash find . -type f -print0 | while IFS= read -d $'\0' f; do type=$(file --mime-type --brief -- "$f") mkdir -p "$type" mv -- "$f" "${type}/" doneMaybe organize-tool would help? You have to set the parameters but I love it for getting my home folders organized.
Lately I’ve been using chatGPT to create a bunch of small custom python programs to do stuff like this (if I can’t easily find an existing program to do what I want).
For example I would tell it something like:
Create a python program that does the following: -asks the user for a directory to process -sorts the files in that folder according to file type, placing them into appropriately named sub-folders, eg all image files into a folder named "images", all music files into "music" and so on. -creates any new sub folders before moving the files -moves the files verbosely -gives the user a notification upon finishingYou can customize it to do exactly what you want, and it takes only seconds for it to give you the code.
I can’t even begin to tell you how much time it’s saved me over the last few weeks, automating simple stuff that would normally take ages.
I think that’s a good start, but the baseline of what AI can do. These scripts are around since filesystems have been invented. And you can do this with one (lengthy) shell command. Or one of the already existing file sorting utils. (something like
this[Edit: see next comment] or Hazel or DropIt) With those you can even configure if it should recusively visit subdirectories and do individual subdirectories for the filetypes or mangle everything together for example in one big unsorted mp3 directory.What I’m waiting for (I’m not OP) is something that looks at the content of the files. Do a directory for all the manuals I downloaded for the household appliances, find out on which event I took a photo and make a correctly named album for that, find the project files for my diverse electronics projects and file them into seperate directories together with related info. And find the mp3 files and TV recordings with a mismatch of metadata and folder structure.
I think what you’re describing is definitely the way things are heading. I would love a teachable, automated AI personal assistant. But I think I’ll wait for an open source, hardware agnostic version that I can self-host.
