I made this post asking this same question, and got some direction, but I don’t know enough about bash commands to follow the responded advice. I would appreciate any help.

The whole point is to see how much data Linux Mint uses to update and compare it to Windows. It’s for someone that has an internet data cap and is looking for an OS that is more efficient with data usage. I’m almost sure that LM is more efficient, but would like to back it up with actual numbers.

In case it matters, I update Linux Mint via the terminal using the following command:

sudo apt-get update | lolcat && sudo apt-get full-upgrade -y | lolcat && sudo flatpak update -y | lolcat && sudo update-pciids | lolcat && sudo apt-get autoremove -y | lolcat && sudo apt-get autoclean | lolcat

  • @gyroMEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    I just read your other thread. It’s like the other user said, if you want to monitor exclusively the data used by udpates, vnstati wouldn’t suffice, you’d have to create a script that parses the log file. You could use any scripting language for that, I’d personally use Python. If you read the python tutorial (up to item 5 is enough) you will have the necessary resources to make it. Of course you could use bash as well.

    to use vnstati:

    1. activate and start the vnstat service with systemctl enable vnstat and systemctl start vnstat
    2. discover the name of your network adapter with ifconfig
    3. wait a month
    4. output the data to a file with vnstati --days --begin yyyy-mm-dd --end yyyy-mm-dd -s -i "name of network adapter" -o ~/file.png.
    • BOMBSOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Thank you!